The San Francisco Chronicle October 14, 2001
Veterans see tough job ahead for U.S. special ops;
Afghanistan their 'biggest challenge'
By Keay Davidson
In Hollywood, "special operations" soldiers are macho characters who lead covert nighttime raids on enemy installations and jungle drug lords. Their faces disguised with greasepaint, their shoulders draped with ammunition, their Swiss watches synchronized, they sneak through foggy swamps, machine guns in hand, awaiting the chance to attack . . .
If only it were that simple.
America's special operations troops are likely bound for a place scarier than the fantasy battlefields of the silver screen. It's the religious, ethnic, diplomatic and economic minefield called Afghanistan -- the graveyard of past empires' dreams. No one recognizes the risks of an Afghan campaign better than special operations veterans, especially gray-haired survivors of past U.S. covert campaigns from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s and early 1970s to Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon and Bosnia in the 1980s and 1990s.
In interviews, numerous special operations veterans warned Americans that the ultimate solutions to Islamic terrorism are not military, but rather diplomatic, economic and humanitarian. Most of the veterans were supportive of the Bush administration's military actions to date, although retired Army Col. Bob Rheault attacked the bombing of Afghanistan.
"You don't solve the problem by going out and killing their innocent civilians," said Rheault, a former Green Beret who has been called "Mr. Special Forces" and whose don't-mess-with-me mug as a Vietnam special op soldier made the cover of Life magazine in 1969.
"I know there's tremendous pressure to 'do something, to get those bastards!' " Rheault said. But at this moment, when the global alliance against terrorism is shaky, "the one thing we must not do is to further inflame the Muslim world. In an operation like this, you have to consider the political liabilities of your military operations."
Rheault urged the administration to wait until intelligence teams have identified the precise location of terrorist hideouts, not their abandoned training camps. Then the special operations could move in with swift, devastating force, "like a SWAT team."
Special operations is an umbrella term for all U.S. special ops teams, among them the Army's Rangers, Delta Force, and Green Berets; the Navy SEALs; and Air Force Special Operations. Special ops troops have been called "snake eaters" because they're literally trained to survive in hostile terrain -- for example, by killing and eating snakes.
Some of the special ops' schemes show a malicious ingenuity. Tim Brown of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank near Washington, D.C., says that during the Vietnam War special ops teams sneaked into enemy warehouses and sabotaged weapons. The result: The weapons exploded during use.
Yet history undermines the movie image of special ops as the paragon of "surgical" efficiency, says Louis Wolf, co-founder of Covert Action Quarterly, a publication that sometimes blasts special ops and U.S. military and intelligence activities.
"Many times in many places, special forces have not only created more problems and more failure than the success they can claim, they also have been the cause of a number of so-called 'friendly fire' incidents where some of their own personnel were killed by bad intelligence," Wolf says. "In Grenada (some) special forces drowned before they even got ashore because all they had was Shell road maps."
After the botched hostage rescue mission in Iran in 1980, all special forces units were put under a centralized agency, Special Operations Command. Even so, "it's taken a couple more military screwups to get (special ops) running right," says Jeff Stein, a writer on national security issues who was a military intelligence case officer during the Vietnam War.
Afghanistan "is going be their (special ops') biggest challenge since Vietnam," Stein said. During the Gulf War, "Iraq was relatively easy because it was flat -- you could get around on these dune buggy things. . . . It's harder in (mountainous) Afghanistan, if only because the snows are going to be coming pretty soon."
As proud, generally taciturn men who are often surprisingly intellectual, special ops veterans have bitten their lips for four decades while politicians and war protesters debate special ops' legacy and future.
A key question is: Are U.S. special forces necessary guardians of freedom -- small, elite units able to achieve with minimum bloodshed what huge, lumbering armies cannot? Or are they what many leftists regard them as -- micro-Hitlers like Col. Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) in "Apocalypse Now," or inept "nation builders" in the "Lawrence of Arabia" mold? Men who mouth slogans about freedom and democracy, yet cozy up to tyrants, torturers and death squads?
One of the most controversial episodes in the history of special ops involved Col. Rheault. During the Vietnam War, the Army charged him and his men with complicity in the killing of a Vietnamese double agent. The killing was part of the CIA-special forces Phoenix Program that assassinated tens of thousands of Vietnamese. Eventually the charges were dropped.
Contrast that episode with special forces' successes, special ops veterans say. Retired Army Col. Hy Rothstein served with the Green Berets in El Salvador. He says they helped encourage the local government to move toward more humane and democratic practices.
Likewise, in Afghanistan, special ops forces must also convey moral and political values to whatever government replaces the Taliban, says Rothstein. "Hopefully, at some point they'll become a democratically elected government -- and we can help shape that (democracy) if we're sophisticated about this," Rothstein says.
But do Americans have the patience for slow reform, as opposed to bang-and-boom military assaults? Some special ops veterans have their doubts. Americans upset foreigners partly because we have a "very, very bad history" of "using people for a short-term objective and then saying, 'Thanks a lot, see you later,' " says Karl Polifka, who served with special operations in Laos in the 1960s.
Polifka thinks he knows how the Afghan war must end, if the United States is to avoid alienating the Islamic world. "If you find bin Laden in a cave," Polifka says, "the guy who shoots him damn better be an Afghan."
Copyright 2001 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
