The Kansas City Star February 16, 2002
Lessons of Afghanistan won't carry over into a fight against Iraq
By Scott Canon
The art of war, declared Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, is simple enough.
"Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on."
It helped in Afghanistan that locals worked with American commandos to find the enemy. What's more, 21st century communications got planes at him sooner than ever. Best of all, easy control of the skies let bombers strike the enemy hard and often before moving safely on their way. The resulting lesson was that timing was everything. The U.S.-led coalition made the most of its firepower by hitting targets nearly as soon as they were spotted _ not hours or days later when the enemy moved on.
Just one problem. Afghanistan was almost too easy.
If the United States' war on terrorism turns next to tearing down Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the lessons of war in Afghanistan won't necessarily apply.
In Iraq, for instance, American planes would likely win the skies easily enough. But whether Eisenhower-era B-52s could fly lazy eights in the sky, as they did over Afghanistan, without drawing anti-aircraft fire is another thing.
Likewise, in tangling with the crazy-quilt power structure in Somalia or fighting through the triple canopy of jungle in the Philippines, blueprints of battle doctrine drafted in Afghanistan will quickly seem out of place.
"Afghanistan is not (necessarily) the future," said Jim Quinlivan, a military analyst for the RAND think tank.
What's more, he said, critiques of how American and British forces performed in Afghanistan _ including what worked best _ still need time to ripen.
"A lot of those people who actually adapted in complicated ways haven't had a chance to put together and explain how they did it," Quinlivan said.
Still, Quinlivan and others say the conflict in Afghanistan offers clues of potential success in the evolving art of war. With word leaking from the White House this week that President Bush is ordering plans for ousting Hussein, Iraq could be the next place the Afghan war lessons meet a test.
By several measures, the American military scored a striking victory in Afghanistan. Breakthrough success came when planners _ adjusting on the fly _ fed tips from American commandos and anti-Taliban Afghans on the ground to U.S. pilots hunting down moving targets.
The result was a stunning collapse of the Taliban regime. That came with barely a handful of American casualties by a U.S. military that found itself winning a fight that just months earlier it hadn't even contemplated.
Satellite-guided, night-vision-capable, manned and unmanned devices gave the U.S.-led coalition a decided edge over its far more primitive prey. Two decades before, the Soviets had an edge in firepower, but the technology gap over the Afghans was not so great.
Still, those gadgets marked no quantum leap in war technology deployed by Americans in recent years.
Rather, the bombs just fell a bit smarter than in the Persian Gulf War or during America's Kosovo campaign. Reconnaissance drones were jury-rigged with missiles. Mujaheddin dialed in help by satellite phone.
At first the going was slow. Bombers taking off from carriers in the Arabian Sea, from land bases on temporary loan in nearby countries and even from Missouri picked off the easier fixed targets without forcing the opposition to fold.
But as special operations troops worked ever closer with anti-Taliban forces, and as those ground units grew more skilled at calling in air strikes, the enemy sprinted in retreat.
The Americans had no air defenses to worry about. That meant stealthy B-2 bombers could sit out most of the war while lumbering B-52s and other easy-to-spot planes dumped a mostly smarter class of bombs than used in previous conflicts.
During the Kosovo conflict in 1999, barely a third of the bombs dropped were so-called precision-guided. In the first two months of American bombing in Afghanistan, more than half were steered toward targets by satellite.
"People have really signed on to the idea of a 'time critical strike' _ where you find something and strike in minutes," said Owen Cote, a security studies expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Before Afghanistan, the Air Force had always felt there were more productive things to do than hang in the air and look for some dinky little target that a ground guy pointed out to them," he said. "That changed."
As overwhelming as the victory seems, it has yet to produce everything America wanted. Two important symbols in the war, al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, remain fugitives.
More concretely, when America ventured into the Afghan war, the Taliban's armed forces stood at an estimated 30,000 men. Yet Taliban casualties are generally guessed at 5,000, with another 5,000 captured. That leaves 20,000 on the loose. Of the two dozen most-wanted leaders of al-Qaida, fewer than one in four have been found.
"Where are all the rest? They're at large," said Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies and a retired British infantry officer.
His point, shared by many analysts, is that the West paid a price in using Northern Alliance and other Afghan surrogates instead of sending in sizable American ground forces. Fewer of the enemy would have disappeared into the Afghan countryside, the argument goes, if large numbers of U.S. troops had marched across the country.
"The lesson of this whole thing is that if you don't have enough of your own troops on the ground, then you can't count on the outcome you want," Heyman said. "You leave the details to others."
Experts also warn that misreading the experience of Afghanistan could lead to the belief that air power is all-powerful, that it is so sophisticated it can triumph with a few savvy spotters on the ground.
Rather, said Robert Pape, author of "Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War," bombs succeeded because they fell in concert with a sizable army. Pape, who has studied every American bombing campaign back to World War I, calls it a hammer-and-anvil strategy.
"Since it was American air power and American special forces, they've gotten the credit," he said. "But it was the Northern Alliance that was key."
The bombs are the hammer. The army is the anvil. Having an army on the ground compels the enemy to clump its defenses together. Without ground troops acting as an anvil, the enemy can scatter to avoid the air attack and the hammer of a bombing campaign has nothing to strike against.
Apply that to Iraq.
In past strikes on Baghdad, Pape said the bombing had appeared to first try to knock out Hussein personally _ and failed, much like the efforts against the Taliban mullahs who ruled Afghanistan.
"You're teaching a good hunk of the world that it's fair game to kill national leaders," he said. "It might be a good idea if it worked. But given that we're doing it and failing, we're getting the worst of both worlds."
As for the hammer and anvil, the United States would lack an anvil in Iraq unless Washington and its allies deployed several divisions or brigades against the Iraqi line as they did in 1991. Unlike in Afghanistan, no ready-made army is in place fighting the Iraqi army and Republican Guard that keep Hussein in power.
America won't easily find Iraqis to lead the charge against Hussein.
In 1991, President George Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up, but American forces stopped short of completing a government overthrow.
"We basically walked away from them," said Tim Brown, a military analyst at Globalsecurity.org. "There might be a question mark in the minds of people there about whether we can be counted on."
And while Iraq poses the threat of forces that are better armed, better disciplined and better organized than what the Taliban had cobbled together, a country such as Somalia offers an opposite problem.
"There isn't an organized defense there," said Heyman. "It will be dirty and messy. Since you don't have an obvious enemy, you end up having to treat anyone with a gun as the enemy."
In his recently published paper, "The Lessons of Afghanistan," Anthony Cordesman finds plenty to learn from the fighting in Central Asia.
He concluded that the war gave new evidence to the value of well-wired battlefield communications, unmanned planes to spot and fire at the enemy, kits that convert dumb bombs to satellite-guided precision weapons.
Yet the analysis by Cordesman, who works for the Center for Strategic & International Studies, is full of caveats.
It is too early, he cautions, to gauge the effectiveness of a range of tactics or even how badly al-Qaida has been hurt. Cordesman notes the many weaknesses of the Taliban as a government _ making the point that Iraq is far stronger on a number of scores.
"The Taliban and al-Qaida had many unique limitations," he wrote. "It is far from clear that Afghanistan provides lessons that can easily be applied to other states."
(c) 2001, The Kansas City Star.
