GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Wall Street Journal
September 25, 2001
Pg. 1

By Carla Anne Robbins, Gerald F. Seib and Steve Levine, Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. battle against terrorism is shaping up as an entirely new kind of warfare.

The struggle began not with an attack against a military target, but against civilians. America will reply with a military strike, but one directed against an individual, Osama bin Laden, and a Taliban regime in Afghanistan that isn't even recognized as the nation's legitimate government.

The battles you don't see -- clandestine military engagements, as well as diplomatic ones -- may be more important than the ones that fill television news screens. U.S. bombs and missiles may rain down, perhaps in intense nighttime strikes. But the idea, for now, is to focus blame on the Saudi-born accused terror mastermind and his followers and supporters.

The high-profile targets are most likely to be the headquarters, airfields and military units of the Taliban, and the terror camps that Mr. bin Laden has been accused of setting up and running in northern and eastern parts of Afghanistan.

But the most significant military action may well be secret, as U.S. special-operations units try to track down and capture or kill Mr. bin Laden and his inner circle. Those strikes could be launched from neighboring Pakistan or Uzbekistan, or possibly from an airfield captured from the Taliban inside Afghanistan. Through it all, this opening phase of the war could well unfold without a shot being fired against a recognized government.

One purpose of such a calibrated opening salvo would be to convince recognized nation-states -- Iran, Syria and Sudan -- to get the message, and make their own moves to shut down terrorist operations. Mr. Bush has deliberately left unanswered the question of what may happen to states, particularly Iraq, that fail to heed the call.

Meanwhile, an international offensive to dry up terrorists' money networks, which began Monday with a new executive order from President Bush, will intensify. The new order allows the U.S. to freeze the assets of groups or corporations "associated with" designated terrorist groups, and administration aides say it is intended to serve as a model for what the U.S. expects other nations to do.

There also will be stepped-up efforts to pool intelligence about terrorism. Just Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a surprisingly wide-reaching offer of support in the fight against terrorism, pledged more intelligence sharing, and said he would allow his country to help in search-and-rescue missions inside Afghanistan. Finally, the U.S. will try to make sure that no nation emerges as the new haven for terrorists, assuming the role that Libya and Iran played in the 1980s and Afghanistan in the 1990s.

U.S. officials say that this nonmilitary front may be even more important than battles on the ground in Afghanistan. All told, Mr. Bush said Monday, he wants Americans to "understand we are waging a different kind of war. It is a war that is going to take a while. It is a war that will have many fronts."

The broader lesson is that the world is moving away from the traditional concept of war, where the norm is nation-states massing forces for a giant collision with each other. Speaking before his retirement last year, Marine Corps Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the former head of U.S. forces in the Middle East, warned that the Persian Gulf War, with its enormous collision of hundreds of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces, was an "aberration" for the modern world. "The only reason Desert Storm worked was because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough to confront us symmetrically."

Gen. Zinni warned that the real dangers today are "a wiser Saddam Hussein and a still-elusive Osama bin Laden" who now know better than to confront the U.S. military head-on. Thus, some traditional concerns about warfare -- whether, for example, fighting one would require drafting young people into the military -- don't apply in this particular version of war.

The concept of war has, in fact, taken on many forms over the course of history. Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military thinker, defined war as "nothing but a duel on an extensive scale."

The form of the duel changes over time. The idea of fighting wars in the style of the 18th century, when armies marched upon each other across open fields, gave way as new weapons and tactics evolved. The tank battles of World War II gave way to the guerrilla warfare of Vietnam.

War in the 21st century figures to change again, if only because the look of the globe has changed. The last phase of the Cold War era and the years since have been marked by an increasing number of groups that aren't nations at all, but have amassed enough power, money and cunning to shape world events.

And while these groups transcend states, they can be harbored, helped or sponsored by nation-states. That is why the Bush administration argues that terrorist acts have to be considered acts of war rather than simple crimes.

Understandably, U.S. officials won't discuss their war-fighting scenarios. But it is possible to construct a plausible look at what kinds of events might unfold, based on President Bush's own statements, comments from aides, and an analysis of the military units and equipment being deployed.

Most important, U.S. officials say that after days of internal debate, Mr. Bush has decided initially to narrowly target military action against Osama bin Laden, his al Qaeda network and their Afghan protectors. Strikes on Afghanistan likely would begin at night, with bombing raids on the capital Kabul and a second city, Kandahar, where the ruling Taliban has headquarters buildings.

These raids could be the most visible and dramatic face of the war, beamed back to the U.S. if the Taliban allows reporters to broadcast. But they still will be far less spectacular than the Gulf War bombing raids on Baghdad, or even the more limited strikes on Belgrade during the Kosovo campaign. After two decades of war in Afghanistan, "there aren't that many targets to hit," says Gen. Zinni. "There aren't power plants and factories."

John Pike, who runs GlobalSecurity.org, an independent defense-analysis think tank, says that U.S. heavy bombers and carrier-based fighter jets also can be expected to target the dozen or so airfields that the Taliban is believed to have scattered across the country, destroying landing strips and the Taliban's "several dozen" combat aircraft, which are mainly a mix of aged helicopters, transport planes and Soviet MiG fighters.

U.S. warplanes also are likely to move quickly to bomb Taliban training camps, including one large camp immediately outside Kabul, as well as militia headquarters and large outposts throughout the country that have troops, trucks, supplies and ammunition. Most of these outposts can be "knocked down easily and rebuilt almost as easily," says Mr. Pike. But the aim would be to disrupt the Taliban's ability to fight as a coordinated force, scattering small units across the countryside.

Beyond punishing the Taliban for its refusal to turn over Mr. bin Laden, the U.S. effort to disrupt its operations would be intended to make it easier for U.S. commando raids to go after Mr. bin Laden without worrying so much about the ability of the Taliban or Mr. bin Laden to strike back.

To resist such moves, the Taliban can muster only a modest force, but one tested in the country's long civil war. The Taliban could field a contingent of about 50,000 men, including a foreign complement of a few thousand Arabs, Pakistanis and others. The Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, said Monday that he is calling up an additional 300,000 men, but it is unlikely he will get such a response. In recent years, Afghan villages have been less and less ready to give up their boys for fighting, and the Taliban has instead been buttressed by foreign fighters.

The Taliban forces are armed with an aging collection of plundered, mainly Soviet equipment. That includes 1960s-era MiG-21 fighters, SU-22 ground-attack aircraft, transport and attack helicopters, plus some number of armored vehicles. As for small arms, the Taliban has Kalashnikov rifles, plus grenades and rocket launchers. When U.S. planes fly overhead, the Taliban has batteries of 23mm and 100mm antiaircraft cannons that, if they are concentrated and lucky, could possibly bring down helicopters but are unlikely to threaten high-flying jets.

A key question is whether the Taliban has Stinger or other antiaircraft missiles capable of bringing down American helicopters. The U.S. itself brought Stingers to Afghanistan in the 1980s to arm rebels trying to expel an occupying Soviet army. Former Pakistani intelligence chief Hammid Gul said that the Taliban paraded four of the heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles through Kabul on National Day last month. Mr. Gul estimated that the Taliban has about 200 Stingers, but that is impossible to verify. In any case, it isn't clear how many Stingers still work.

Much of the Taliban capability is deployed on two fronts: north of Kabul and in the country's northeast. It is likely the Taliban would seek to defend the cities of Kandahar and Jalalabad, plus Kabul. In its 1996 advance on Kabul and subsequent offensives, the Taliban has at times displayed the martial skill of a regularly trained army.

The assault directly against Mr. bin Laden and his troops is harder to predict. U.S. bombers will almost certainly target the bin Laden training camps. Those too will almost certainly be deserted, but the bombing runs could destroy ammunition and supplies and make it harder for his fighters to regroup. The job of going after Mr. bin Laden and his top aides figures to fall to U.S. special operators, small, lightly armed units that specialize in clandestine operations.

U.S. officials are pressing Pakistan, which shares a long border with Afghanistan, to provide bases from which the helicopter-borne U.S. special-operations units could launch raids against bin Laden camps in eastern and southern Afghanistan. The U.S. could also use former Soviet bases in Uzbekistan to go after what are believed to be a smaller number of bin Laden camps in northern Afghanistan.

Fighter jets, gunships and armed helicopters, flying out of bases ringing Afghanistan, could provide protective cover for special-operations units in case they encounter a large, well-armed foe.

In one other scenario, the U.S. could try to set up a base camp inside Afghanistan. To do that, the Army's 82nd Airborne, which has yet to be mobilized, could seize one of the Taliban's airstrips, giving the special-operations forces a base even closer to their targets.

Finding Mr. bin Laden could be the biggest challenge of all. He may have slipped across Afghanistan's porous borders. U.S. high-tech monitoring, aided by satellites, won't be of use if he and his small group have foresworn radios and cellphones. Indeed, the best hope may be intelligence gleaned from anti-Taliban guerrillas in the Northern Alliance, the Taliban's most-organized foe in the country's civil war.

If Mr. bin Laden is located, there are numerous options. If there is enough time, tactical fighters could be called in to bomb a moving convoy or a hiding place. Any attack on a moving target would require spotters on the ground. Using laser-pointers, special-operations units would have to guide the missiles into the middle of small caravans of suspected terrorists as they scrambled from one hideout to the next.

As they try to track Mr. bin Laden, operations planners may also decide that they want to take prisoners, in hopes of being able to extract information from them. The Army's Delta Force, which specializes in antiterrorist and hostage-rescue operations designed to minimize casualties, could be deployed for those operations.

The biggest unanswered question is whether the U.S. intends to drive the Taliban from power. Even if Mr. bin Laden and his aides are captured or killed, Afghanistan will remain a "free zone" for training and organizing terrorist attacks if the Taliban is allowed to remain.

The options there aren't great. The U.S. could try to fundamentally shift the military balance inside Afghanistan with months of sustained bombing and assaults aimed at unraveling the Taliban militia. At the same time, the U.S. could provide training and equipment to the Taliban's foes in the Northern Alliance, and a collection of smaller guerrilla groups operating in the south. But there is no love between the northern and southern groups, and once the Taliban is on the run, any temporary alliance could unravel.

Whatever the course of events in Afghanistan, the U.S. will begin moving to enlist the support of even old nemeses in a wider political, police and economic campaign against bin Laden cells across the Middle East and South Asia. Monday's move to freeze assets of groups associated with terrorists is a key first step in that effort. (President Bush's order also allows the U.S. to freeze the American assets of banks that refuse to cooperate in freezing terrorist assets abroad.)

The U.S. also is beginning to look hard for more intelligence from friends and would-be friends on terrorist operations. Pakistan can provide the most important help now, and Jordan and Egypt have provided valuable information on Middle East terror groups in the past. Most intriguingly, Russia has a chance to win American gratitude by sharing its own intelligence about a region where it has been enmeshed for decades.

In its search for allies, the administration seems willing to overlook past sins in countries such as Iran, Cuba and even Sudan, where the U.S. bombed a pharmaceutical plant in 1998 for its links to Mr. bin Laden and possible involvement in chemical weapons production. "We're willing to judge countries from how they behave from this moment on," says one official.

U.S. officials say that decision is one of pragmatism. If it has any hopes of shutting down terrorist cells scattered through dozens of countries, it will need the cooperation of governments, to close down safe houses and sources of funding, and either arrest terrorists or oust them from their borders.

Mr. Bush has also left uncertain what the U.S. will do if countries don't cooperate. Many Islamic governments, including key allies such as Saudi Arabia, have chosen to look the other way when it comes to terrorist fund-raising on their territory, in a devil's bargain intended to win them safety from attack. The line the U.S. now must walk is persuading such governments that there are more benefits than liabilities in cooperating in a U.S. antiterrorist alliance.

As the U.S. does that, Mr. Bush is also wrestling with a philosophical split among his top advisers on how wide a war to fight. At the Pentagon in particular, some officials continue to argue for military strikes against terrorist bases outside Afghanistan, possibly in Lebanon's Bekaa valley. But the real target, in this view, would be Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whom many see as still the most dangerous terrorist of all in the Middle East. Indeed, the Iraqi dictator's pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the past makes him arguably a far more dangerous threat to the U.S. than even Mr. bin Laden.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has argued forcefully that if the U.S. has any hopes of enlisting the region in a wider campaign against terrorism, the military effort needs to deliberately focused on Mr. bin Laden and his Afghan protectors. And for now, that appears to be what Mr. Bush has in mind. But U.S. officials say that that decision will also be constantly under review.