Chicago Tribune March 18, 2002
Anaconda 'success' is difficult to define; A key question is how many enemy fighters got away
By John Diamond
As the military offensive named for a jungle snake that strangles its prey winds down in Afghanistan, military officials express satisfaction and declare success. What they cannot do with ease is define precisely what success means.
With a glance back to the Vietnam era, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refuses to discuss body counts, the kind of statistic that decades ago lulled a domestic audience into believing that victory in Southeast Asia was at hand. Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace was a rifle platoon commander in Vietnam and recalls how orders to come back to base with numbers of enemy killed put soldiers' lives in danger.
The problem with Operation Anaconda has less to do with how many of the enemy were killed than it does with how many lived and got away.
On that score, top defense and intelligence officials disagree. Some say only handfuls could have slipped through the cordon that U.S. and Afghan forces threw around a cluster of Taliban and Al Qaeda strongholds in eastern Afghanistan. Others estimate that hundreds might have escaped into Pakistan, where sympathizers may be helping them prepare to recross the border to fight anew.
Pace described success in traditional battlefield terms, a matter of seizing territory and clearing the enemy from the field. At the same time, he acknowledged that information on the real target of the fight, members of the militant Al Qaeda group and of the ousted Taliban, is sketchy.
"Some have been killed. Some have escaped. We don't know the exact numbers," Pace said. "But I think from a standpoint of the military operation, the intent to go in and to take this area in Afghanistan and to clear it of Taliban and Al Qaeda--that has been highly successful to date."
That opinion is echoed on the front line at Shah-e-Kot, where on Sunday at Bagram air base military a spokesman, Maj. Bryan Hilferty, said that "so far we have destroyed their command and control. We have destroyed caches. We have killed hundreds of Taliban-Al Qaeda terrorists. This has been a great success."
Results on objective uncertain
As the name Anaconda suggests, and as military officials have been saying since the operation began earlier this month, the objective was to capture or kill as many Al Qaeda fighters as possible, not seize turf. After two weeks of some of the most intense fighting seen in the Afghan campaign, a battle that involved some 2,000 U.S., Afghan and allied fighters engaged over a 65- to 75-square-mile area, the results are uncertain.
"It's like declaring victory over the tide," said Kenneth Allard, who teaches at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.
Allard likened the role of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to the "constabulatory military" of the 19th Century American West, a small, elite force that had to respond to suddenly emerging threats over a vast, open, inhospitable territory.
Citing a maxim of guerrilla warfare, Allard said success would be defined not by large numbers killed but by diminishing numbers, numbers suggesting that enemy fighters have quit the field and gone back to doing whatever they did before they became guerrillas.
In the case of Al Qaeda, it may not be so simple. These are not insurgents trying to topple a local regime in a civil war, but foreigners--Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis--who joined Al Qaeda as fanatical believers in a pan-Islamic cause.
Ivo Daalder, a military expert with the Brookings Institution and a member of President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff, said the Pentagon can declare at the end of Operation Anaconda: "That's one sanctuary down."
He also says the military can take pride in the ability of U.S. forces to engage a determined enemy in some of the most difficult high-altitude, harsh-weather fighting imaginable.
There is a corollary that goes with that pride.
"The lesson we ought to have learned is that you cannot rely on other people to do the job," Daalder said.
He was referring to the opening of the battle, when Afghan forces fighting alongside American counterparts encountered much greater enemy strength than anticipated and had to pull back and regroup. From that point on, U.S. troops carried the weight of the battle.
This "cock-up," as Daalder called it, was not the fault of inadequate Afghan fighters but of poor U.S. intelligence about enemy strength.
John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank, said the U.S. military appeared to have no clear idea of how many "bad guys" it was facing.
'Exploitation phase'
Rumsfeld said Anaconda "is winding down."
U.S. field commanders have shrunk the force to about 1,000, roughly divided between Americans and Afghans. They were in what Rumsfeld called "an exploitation phase," combing through caves and bunkers, destroying weapons and ammunition, and gathering documents and anything else that might provide useful information.
Rumsfeld defined the goals of the Afghan campaign as driving the Taliban from power, ending the use of Afghanistan as a haven for terrorist training, providing humanitarian aid to ordinary Afghans and helping the interim government establish order.
By all those measures, the Bush administration can objectively claim success so far.
The Taliban is out of power, the big Al Qaeda training camps are bomb-cratered and vacant, a predicted famine in Afghanistan was averted and, for now at least, Rumsfeld said "there is not a serious security problem generally in the country."
But the location of the alleged masterminds of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. remains a mystery. U.S. intelligence says Al Qaeda cells continue to pose a threat to strike U.S. and allied interests virtually anywhere, anytime.
Copyright 2002 Chicago Tribune
