Agence France Presse October 14, 2001
US has done the easy part in Afghanistan
By Jean-Michel Stoullig
After a week of relatively measured airstrikes, the United States has launched the easy part of its campaign in Afghanistan. Now it is evaluating its future military strategy, mulling whether to send in commando teams and deciding what role should be played by the opposition to the ruling Taliban regime.
After the September 11 terror attacks on US soil, the United States gathered an air and sea armada in the Indian Ocean and assembled a coalition of allies before launching air and missile strikes on October 7 with British support.
Since then, with the exception of last Friday's Muslim holiday, B-1, B-52 and B-2 bombers and cruise missiles have pounded training camps believed to be run by suspected terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, as well as the Taliban's military centers. US forces have "achieved the goals of the first phase" of the military campaign in Afghanistan and have "weakened" the military capability of the Taliban regime, US President George W. Bush said Saturday.
"Our men and women in uniform are performing as they always do, with skill and courage," Bush said in his weekly radio message. "And they have achieved the goals of the first phase of our campaign. We have disrupted the terrorist network inside Afghanistan. We have weakened the Taliban's military. And we have crippled the Taliban's air defenses." But Bush also asked Americans to be prepared for a long battle against the global terrorist network that Washington claims is sheltered by the Afghan regime.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, stressing that it never targets civilians, had to admit a serious mistake Saturday: A US guided bomb missed its target, apparently killing four and wounding eight near Kabul airport.
The United States has also used huge penetration bombs against hidden al-Qaeda bunkers. But to date, and for lack of infrastructure comparable to Iraq's or Serbia's, the results of Operation Enduring Freedom were considerably more measured than those of preceding conflicts.
The think tank Globalsecurity.org said US planes flew 90 to 95 sorties in the first four days of the strikes, or 10 times fewer than at the beginning of the war in Kosovo in 1999 and 50 times fewer than during the Gulf War in 1991.
The next stage of the operation promises to be delicate for Washington, London and their allies, according to experts.
Given the possibility that a massive land offensive could be excluded in order to avoid the fate that befell the Soviets, a plan to use Western special forces ferried by helicopters is taking shape, and Vice President Dick Cheney alluded to it for the first time on Friday.
"I mean, you know you're going to have an intelligence piece of it; you know you're going to have a military piece that's probably going to involve air, maybe some special ops, so-called boots on the ground, et cetera," Cheney told public television's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer."
According to Christopher Hellman of the Center for Defense Information, special forces like the British SAS unit and the US Delta Force as well as the US Navy SEALs are probably already collecting intelligence and have likely begun fighting.
British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon noted that land operations were to start either before the onset of winter or in the spring. The Pentagon, which has special forces aboard aircraft carriers, announced that the 2,000 soldiers who form its elite 10th Mountain Division would soon be deployed in Uzbekistan, on the Afghan border.
"When feel we have done a certain amount with respect to those Taliban and al-Qaeda military targets, it may very well be more appropriate for ground forces to be moving in areas where we previously have been bombing," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week.
But Washington, which admits it has not been able to locate bin Laden so far, is steering clear of leaving a leadership void in Kabul or favoring one ethnic group over another in its war on terrorism. "We don't want to be perceived as king makers ... and involved in a civil war," Hellman explained.
"The problem with this 'broader war on terrorism,'" he argued, "is that you may find yourself with people that in normal times you wouldn't want to deal with, like the Syrians, or the Northern Alliance -- who by all accounts were as cruel and brutal as the Taliban."
Copyright 2001 Agence France Presse
