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Order of battle

By Linda Diebel

First will come the fireworks of '30 seconds over Kabul' ... but what will the U.S. do after that in what is expected to be down-and-dirty little war?

'This is going to be a war unlike anything you have ever seen. All the rules are off. There are no ground rules, and it is going to be very difficult for the media to have any idea what is going on. That terrible secrecy is ominous'

- Col. Laird Anderson, retired U.S. Special Forces officer

'WANTED - DEAD or alive," U.S. President George W. Bush said last week, referring to the terrorist Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the slaughter of more than 6,000 in last week's New York and Washington attacks.

Although administration officials are careful to say the war they have declared is against global terrorism, it's clear the first target is bin Laden and members of his Al Qaeda organization. They are being sheltered by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban leaders, who refuse to give them up. That presents the first problem for Bush and his team as they map out plans for what the president has called "the first war of the 21st century."

It's the locale.

Afghanistan is a cruel place. Soldiers who have fought there call it the "death zone." British and Indian troops died by the thousands in the mid-1800s.

The Soviet Union failed to defeat Afghan Mujahideen fighters in the 1980s. Troops of the so-called great empire died in the mountains, ambushed in high passes or betrayed to snipers by the glint of their metal rations cans.

"Can it be that America is nostalgic for the times it was getting daily deliveries of zinc coffins from Vietnam?"Andre Logunov, chairman of the Moscow Afghan Veterans Association, asked a U.S. journalist last week. "This time it will be even worse."

Wrote Tom Carew, former elite British SAS member, in the British newspaper The Guardian: "If it comes to a ground war, I believe the Western forces will have a very slim chance of victory. The last army to win in Afghanistan was that of Alexander the Great.

"Everyone else has got mauled and pulled out."

It is harsh, inhospitable and unforgiving terrain. It is brutally cold in winter and bogged down by winter snows up to a man's neck. Mountain snows in Afghanistan are worse even than the Russian snows that defeated the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler.

Still, Bush has made it clear there will be a military campaign of retaliation for the terror attacks, and it likely will be against Afghanistan. Last week, he told American forces, "Be ready .... The hour is coming when America will act."

What then are some of the most likely scenarios?

It will not be a conventional war, say military experts, but there will be at least one conventional military attack. A big one.

"There has to be '30 seconds over Kabul,'" says John Pike, a military and intelligence analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, referring to the Afghan capital where the Taliban is headquartered. "We just saw 6,000 Americans killed. That's more than at Pearl Harbour and there must be a response. American history requires those 30 seconds over Kabul, even if it is just to bounce the boulders.

"They will use satellite photography and go in there under the assumption that any pickup truck is fair game," he said, noting that Taliban forces use pickup trucks. "While we may sympathize with the plight of the Afghani people, it won't be a top priority when the military is hunting down armed groups."

The U.S. strike force is almost in place. A massive military juggernaut has been moving to the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and to bases in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other nations within striking distance of Afghanistan.

Within the next few days, the Pentagon expects to have more than 500 aircraft in place, including heavy B-1 and B-2 bombers that carried the bulk of the bombing load during the Persian Gulf War fought by president George Bush Sr. in 1991.

So far, four aircraft carriers and their battle groups are involved. The U.S. arsenal includes F-14 and F-15 strike aircraft, F-16 and F-18 fighter bombers, as well as Tomahawk cruise missiles that rained down on Iraq during the Gulf War, rockets, and conventional and guided bombs of 2,000 and 5,000 pounds, among other weaponry.

On the first day of a hot war, the skies over Kabul will likely be lit up by cruise missile blasts, just as they were over Baghdad and other Iraqi cities during the war against Saddam Hussein.

Targets could include states that harbour terrorists - "you're either with us or against us," Bush said last week. Pentagon sources refuse to say even where U.S. strike forces will be based, but speculation has it that Iraq, Lebanon and Libya are possible targets.

But, after the initial blitz, what happens?

The biggest problem, according to military strategists, is the lack of clear objectives (other than a war against terrorism) and exit strategy. How, even, do you know when or if you've won?

White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer has rather nebulously defined it as when "the world will be able to breathe a sigh of relief and say the war against terrorism has been won."

"This is going to be a war unlike anything you have ever seen," says Col. Laird Anderson, retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer and former journalism professor. "All the rules are off. There are no ground rules, and it is going to be very difficult for the media to have any idea what is going on. That terrible secrecy is ominous."

Operations, which most agree will last months and years rather than days and weeks, will be carried out by small groups of elite forces, a couple dozen or fewer at a time. They could be dropped into Afghanistan to carry out stealth attacks or try to establish links with Afghan rebels who are fighting the Taliban, particularly the Northern Alliance.

For this secret war, there will be secret forces. Bush, among others, has stressed that even the victories might remain secret.

These operations - "covert ops" - will depend on special forces directed by U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) out of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Called snake-eaters and nightstalkers, these elite forces include Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Green Berets, Rangers and special helicopter commandos.

The administration moved quickly in the first days after the attacks to build up an international coalition of support. That support, say intelligence experts, likely includes co-operation with some of the world's most elite military forces, including Britain's SAS, COS from France and KSK from Germany.

The KSK guiding principle is: "Nobody sees them coming. Nobody knows they're there. And when their mission is complete, they leave no proof that they were ever there."

Anderson says that the first elite global strike force is likely emerging out of these terrorist attacks.

"These guys are tough. Whatever they are asked to do, they can do," he says, describing training that includes demolitions, weapons and intelligence.

U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has described the operations as "draining the swamp where they live."

Military observer Pike believes the U.S. will try to set up bases for small, elite strike forces in neighbouring Uzbekistan or Tajikistan or even establish a small base just within Afghanistan "and shoot anything that comes within 15 miles."

Others disagree, saying it would be folly to try to operate from within such a hostile country.

"It will be a long campaign, a campaign of knives at night, rather than cruise missiles during the day," says Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, retired Canadian commander of U.N. forces in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

"It surprised me to see bin Laden named so early as the centre of evil because if you personalize him, and you don't get him, then you haven't won," he says.

"I think it was a mistake, when faced with an unbelievable event, to jump in quite quickly and name him. It makes him a bigger-than-life character."

MacKenzie sees bin Laden as "a character probably parked in a cave somewhere with a cell phone who has told his people to go off and kill the infidel. And they have taken it from there. I think that is the extent of his involvement."

However great or small bin Laden's power, he presents several problems that go beyond the terrain. Among them:

What weaponry does he have?

Bin Laden used to be supported by the United States as an ally in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. He was one of many Mujahideen fighters who were armed by gunrunners and it's believed he might have up to 20 Soviet-era MiG 21 fighters, decrepit as they are, as well as helicopters and Stinger shoulder-launched air defence missiles. The Stingers were exceedingly effective against the Soviets, bringing down helicopters until Moscow finally shifted to night-fighting.

Where is he, exactly, and how do you get close to him?

That is a question of intelligence, and U.S. intelligence in the region has been allowed to moulder, according to many experts.

"I would argue that America's counter-terrorism program in the Middle East and its environs is a myth," wrote former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht recently in Atlantic Monthly.

He said bin Laden's people have been moving in and out of the northwestern Pakistani border city of Peshawar.

"I couldn't see how the CIA as it is today had any chance of running a successful counter-terrorist operation against bin Laden in Peshawar, the Dodge City of Central Asia," he wrote.

"No case officer stationed in Pakistan can penetrate either the Afghan communities in Peshawar or the northwest frontier's numerous religious schools, which feed manpower and ideas to bin Laden and the Taliban, and seriously expect to gather useful information about radical Islamic terrorism - let alone recruit foreign agents."

Gerecht tells a story about botched intelligence, particularly poignant in hindsight. He quotes a former CIA colleague as saying:

"The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan.

"For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing."

Adds another case officer: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."

Now, the U.S. is actively and desperately recruiting Farsi and Arabic speakers, as well as anyone proficient in the Afghan Persian languages of Pashtu and Dari.

Who are the allies within Afghanistan?

There have been signs the U.S. and its allies are scrambling to make contact with anti-Taliban fighters from the Northern Alliance within Afghanistan. But their leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, was assassinated in the days before the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S., and the aftermath is unclear.

In the Atlantic Monthly, Gerecht tells of Robert Baer, the first CIA operative proficient in an Afghan language, who collected intelligence on the Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad during the 1980s. During the 1990s, he urged the CIA to focus on "assets" in Afghanistan.

"If we are going to defeat Osama bin Laden, we need to openly side with (Massood), who still has a decent chance of fracturing the tribal coalition behind Taliban power," he wrote.

"That, more effectively than any clandestine counter-terrorist program in the Middle East, might eventually force (him) to flee Afghanistan, where U.S. and allied intelligence and military forces can't reach him."

The CIA's answer was no.

Uncharted Uncharted terrain for U.S. military'

It will be a long campaign, a campaign of knives at night, rather than cruise missiles during the day'

- Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie