The Associated Press December 11, 2001
Afghan rebels bear brunt of fighting, but don't necessarily have same goals as United States
By SALLY BUZBEE
Inside Afghanistan, it is Afghans, not Americans, who are doing much of the actual fighting to achieve America's aims.
The rebels are fighting their way through mortar and machine-gun fire to attack Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in mountain valleys. They are seizing and exploring caves where Osama bin Laden might be. Americans are mostly providing bombing support from the air, giving advice and gathering intelligence. "U.S. troops are playing a role in supporting the Afghans, who are doing most of this work right now," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Monday.
The war by proxy has clear benefits: It avoids large numbers of U.S. casualties and it blunts Afghans' traditional hostility to foreigners in their country.
It also is an arrangement of convenience: Neither the Americans nor the rebels probably could beat the Taliban alone.
But the arrangement also means the United States does not have enough troops on the ground to directly control what happens, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has acknowledged. Instead, America must offer incentives to rebels who have their own agendas.
That became apparent during the fall of Kandahar, when one of the main U.S. goals, the capture of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, clearly was not a top goal of some opposition leaders. After Rumsfeld insisted they must cooperate or lose U.S. aid, several said they would. But Omar remains at large.
Now, with the Taliban largely defeated, the goals of the United States and Afghan opposition leaders may diverge even more, Wolfowitz said.
"Our objectives may not be quite as high a priority for them, and they may start pursuing some local objectives that interfere with us," Wolfowitz said.
It's not unusual for the United States to work through proxies, or seek help from opposition groups, during a war. It did so with ethnic Albanians fighting Serbs in Kosovo, Iraqis opposed to Saddam Hussein and with South Vietnam's army during the Vietnam War.
The benefits are obvious: Local troops often have key knowledge of a country's terrain or an enemy's operations. And, fewer U.S. troops face danger if others do the dirty work of, for example, going cave to cave to hunt for bin Laden. Nine U.S. personnel have died, and the toll among Afghan fighters and civilians is believed much higher.
But the level of U.S. dependence in Afghanistan is high, said John Pike, a defense analyst in Washington.
Asked if he would insist that Omar face a U.S. court, Rumsfeld said the Pentagon doesn't have "enough troops on the ground to control the country." Instead, the U.S. military must rely on rebels when dealing with any fighters who may surrender.
The United States clearly could send more troops if it wished to gain more control, Pike said.
So why doesn't it?
"They probably think that additional U.S. forces would not accelerate the good progress that's being made now," Pike said. "That assessment may change if time passes and we don't start showing visible results (of catching bin Laden or Omar)."
Using proxies has clear risks. Those include the chance that rebels will turn their U.S.-provided weapons on each other, Wolfowitz said. American forces also are vulnerable to rebel mistakes.
"They learned a terrible lesson from that prison riot in Mazar. So did we," Wolfowitz said of the Taliban uprising in Mazar-e-Sharif last month.
For now, the United States reserves its own troops for tasks that Afghans can't do.
U.S. special operations forces working with opposition fighters in the mountains south of Jalalabad, for example, are relaying information about suspected hide-outs to American warplanes above, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace said.
In the south, Marines are patrolling roads to intercept any fleeing fighters.
Elsewhere, other special forces and CIA operatives are gathering information secretly. CIA officer Mike Spann was killed while interrogating prisoners at Mazar-e-Sharif.
About 1,500 Marines and several hundred Army special forces soldiers are in Afghanistan, compared with tens of thousands of rebel fighters. It's unclear how much of the enemy is left.
In the end, opposition forces cooperate with the United States because it benefits them too, said Karl Inderfurth, who was the top State Department official on south Asia in the Clinton administration.
Hamid Karzai, the new interim prime minister, will support the U.S. military remaining in the country until bin Laden and Omar are captured or gone.
"That's doing his work for him," Inderfurth said. "He wants them gone."
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press
