Military

DATE=03/20/02

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=STEPHEN BIDDLE/AFGHANISTAN

NUMBER=3-

BYLINE=PAT BODNER

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=

/// Editors: This interview is available in Dalet under SOD/English News Now Interviews in the folder for today or yesterday ///

Host: Wednesday's al-Qaida and Taleban attack on coalition troops based in eastern Khost province, in eastern Afghanistan, illustrate that the fighting may be far from over. NewsNow's Pat Bodnar spoke to Stephen Biddle, a researcher at the U.S. Army War college in Carlisle Pennsylvania, about the progress of the war.

Mr. Biddle says Afghanistan has presents a model of conflict that is new to Americans.

MR. BIDDLE: There are a lot of parties within Afghanistan whose interests diverge from ours and whose interests diverge from one another. It is going to take a while for all that to sort itself out, and it's probably going to take a while for the violent sorting out of those things to come to an end.

And in that context, it is useful to think back to the Soviet experience in their war with Afghanistan. The part of the conflict that we have already done successfully~--~removing the extant government and installing a new one -- was something that the Soviets did actually in a couple of days. The great majority of the actual time spent in the Soviet war in Afghanistan was in the phase after they installed the government they wanted, after they obtained relative control of the country, and once smaller, initially dispersed, bands of resistance then waged a low-intensity guerrilla conflict against them. Depending on how things sort out, we at the moment could be looking at just the early first step of what might very well be a considerably longer conflict in Afghanistan.

MS. BODNAR: Indeed, this may be a question being raised by many -- how does the U.S. keep from falling into some of the traps the Russians experienced in Afghanistan?

MR. BIDDLE: The administration's policy for trying to avoid the traps that the Soviets fell into has been to limit our footprint in the theater to the greatest degree possible and to keep as few American troops as possible in Afghanistan, concentrate them spatially in just a couple of locations, keep those locations away from general population centers. In general, make it as clear as possible that we are not interested in conquering Afghanistan, we are not an occupying power, and thereby to forestall, to the degree possible, the chances of a long guerrilla war by not spurring nationalist reaction against us on the part of Afghans that may or may not be particularly sympathetic to al-Qaida that are just resistant to foreign invaders. We aren't a foreign invaders in the sense that the Soviets were. The administration's military policy in Afghanistan has been designed to make that as clear as possible.

Now, of course, there are certain disadvantages to that strategy. It may have the advantage of perhaps not stimulating nationalist resistance in Afghanistan, but it also means that the troop strength in the theater isn't necessarily large enough to prevent surviving al-Qaida elements from concentrating elsewhere in the country, waging military operations against us, and retaining something of a force in being for potentially a long time.

We also make it harder to control the internal politics of warlord-versus-warlord interaction and establish real security within the country for the general population in Afghanistan itself.

Host: Stephen Biddle is a researcher at the U.S. Army War college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He spoke with NewsNow's Pat Bodnar.

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