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Action stations...but at what cost?

by Tony Allen-Mills

In the trophy room at MacDill air force base, the Florida headquarters of US central command, Tommy Franks knew he had a problem. The lanky four-star American general leant back in a shiny leather armchair and glanced at a folder on his lap. "The Brits can do it," he said. Half a world away, US troops were scouring treacherous Afghan mountainsides for the last remnants of a fleeing enemy. Pentagon spokesmen were busy declaring Operation Anaconda another American military success. But Franks knew the truth was a lot more complicated.

For almost a week, Franks and other officers at the high-tech Tampa command centre that directs a war almost 8,000 miles away had been watching with growing concern as a seemingly straightforward operation to encircle, then crush a group of Al-Qaeda and other fighters turned into a deadly mountain stand-off.

It was not the outcome that was bothering Franks, as he conferred with senior staff in his inner sanctum, decorated with weapons captured in previous campaigns. American forces had fought back hard after eight men died in a series of early ambushes in the Shah-i-Kot mountains south of Gardez, near the Pakistan border.

That battle was unquestionably won. But the US commander and his aides were in little doubt that there were many more battles ahead. A war that had begun with the headlong rout of the Taliban and the fall of Kabul and Kandahar threatened to dissolve into a scattered mess of hit-and-run guerrilla clashes that might take months to quell.

"It's a big country, there are a lot of bad guys and the war is just getting started," warned John Pike, a Washington defence analyst.

The question was whether American forces should seek an additional shoulder for a punishing military load.

GEOFF HOON, the British defence secretary, was on a trip to Argentina and the Falklands when word arrived that Franks was seeking additional British support. The call was scarcely a surprise to London. Franks has long admired the British military, and deployed the SAS within days of the September 11 attacks. He knew from the Ministry of Defence liaison officer in Tampa, himself a former SAS man, that his request would not be turned down.

Hoon swiftly set up what amounted to a temporary office in the British embassy in Buenos Aires. Using a secure phone in the section where MI6 officers are based, he asked for risk assessments from Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the British chief of defence staff.

In the past, Boyce has expressed doubts about deploying men to Afghanistan without a very clear reason. "It is not a country, as history has told us, for us to linger in," he said last year.

This time Boyce agreed with Hoon that breaking the back of the enemy in a determined allied push would be better than holding off and risking a British deployment to the region that might drag on for years.

Despite inevitable concerns about British casualties, Hoon quickly agreed with Tony Blair that 1,700 troops - a full Royal Marines-led commando battle group - would be dispatched immediately. The operation was mysteriously codenamed Jacana, after an African bird described in one manual as "shy, retiring, easily overlooked".

That did not seem to apply to the Royal Marines, but whatever name they called it, the operation still amounted to the largest combat mission for British troops since the Gulf war in 1991. At stake in the coming months of Anglo-American pursuit and punishment are not only the lives of coalition soldiers but the future of Pakistan's military president, Pervez Musharraf; Blair's relations with sceptical members of his Labour party; and President George W Bush's prospects for extending his global crackdown on terrorism to Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

BAGRAM air base, outside Kabul, was described by one American officer last week as "a bombed-out hellhole". Britain's commando contingent will soon be joining 4,000 US and allied troops in a foul-smelling wasteland of ruined aircraft and loosely signposted minefields.

To avoid any suggestion that the American presence might become permanent, US commanders have limited the creature comforts that traditionally accompany their soldiers. There are no televisions, weight-building machines or pool tables. "We can't even get a pizza," one helicopter gunner sniffed.

Afghan authorities who nominally control the base initially agreed that the British fighting contingent - which will come under Franks's command and be quite separate from the British participants in the peacekeeping force - could occupy several Soviet-era buildings on the edge of the airport. The Afghans then changed their minds, obliging a British advance party to begin clearing mines in order to pitch tents.

Yet doubts about food and lodging were the least of the British force's problems. Behind the expansion of Britain's role in Afghanistan lies a series of military and political dilemmas that raises difficult questions about the long-term conduct of the anti-terrorist campaign.

Last week Major-General Frank Hagenbeck, the US commander of Operation Anaconda, warned that Al-Qaeda operatives in Paktia province, around Gardez, were "going to great lengths to try to regroup" - despite the hammering their comrades endured at Shah-i-Kot.

Other officers forecast small-scale skirmishes against terrorist units for several months to come. "The battles will probably be smaller in scale, but they could be even bloodier in terms of casualties," said Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee.

To prepare for this new stage, Franks could have opted to send more of his own men into battle. The US army's 10th mountain and 101st airborne divisions have both supplied a brigade to the region already, and many of those men saw action in Operation Anaconda. Yet both divisions have two brigades - almost 7,000 men in all - still waiting to be called into action.

The 25th US infantry and 82nd airborne divisions and at least two US marine expeditionary units are reportedly itching to get into battle and might also have been deployed in place of the Royal Marines. But with international criticism of Bush's threats against Baghdad mounting, Washington has appeared increasingly keen to demonstrate the solidarity of the anti-terrorism coalition.

In an interview with The Sunday Times Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, emphasised that there were now more coalition forces than American troops in Afghanistan, if the peacekeeping force is counted.

"The other day I looked at the ships in central command and there were something like 102, and more than half were not from the United States," he said. "The fact of the matter is a lot of countries have been doing a lot of very fine work, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Japan, you name it."

Despite Downing Street's insistence that the decision to deploy the Royal Marines was made purely on "military grounds", the move has as much to do with global politics as US military necessity. US concerns about international isolation, both over the endgame in Afghanistan and any future action in Iraq, seem to have coincided with Blair's desire to preserve an influential role for Britain in America's military campaigns.

The result has been to plunge hundreds of highly trained British soldiers into a guerrilla-style conflict against a strangely elusive enemy who keeps getting pounded by American bombs but somehow survives.

ACROSS the mountains of Paktia province lie the barren badlands of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATAs), known locally as ilaqa ghair, which means the land without laws. In a system drawn up by the British, the Pashtun-speaking tribes of the FATAs were granted significant autonomy. They have since become a formidable hurdle to mopping-up operations in Afghanistan and pose a growing threat to Musharraf's grasp on power.

Afghan officials are convinced that large numbers of Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters continue to slip in and out of the tribal areas with the open connivance of both FATA leaders and sympathetic elements in Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI.

General Niamatullah Jalili, Afghanistan's chief of intelligence, was among those complaining last week that the war against Al-Qaeda was continually being undermined by the ISI's malign influence.

In recent mountain battles at Tora Bora and Shah-i-Kot - both close to the Pakistan border - American claims of military victories appear to have been seriously devalued by reports of fighters who escaped, either by taking to the mountain trails that snake invisibly across the region or by bribing their way to freedom.

"This is what it will be like for months to come," claimed Said Isaaq, the chief of police in Gardez. "The Americans will find a pocket (of resistance), will bomb it, kill a few and claim victory, while the others will escape further into the mountains."

Last week Franks met Mush-araff to discuss tightening up the border and possibly pursuing identified targets from Afganistan into the tribal areas. Any such operations would provoke intense hostility from the local population.

Operation Anaconda has also indicated dangerous flaws in American mountain reconnaissance and intelligence. It has become clear that for all their high-tech surveillance gadgetry, US forces had little idea of the strength and firepower of the enemy they were attempting to ensnare.

After searching one Al-Qaeda bunker near the wreckage of a shot-down American helicopter, US troops last week turned up piles of rocket-propelled grenades, long belts of machinegun ammunition, a powerful 75mm recoilless rifle and a heavy Russian-made DShK machinegun.

They also found night vision devices, two or three satellite global positioning systems and a sophisticated "unidirectional" radio transmitter. Other reports claimed there was evidence of an advanced biological weapons factory.

Not even the Pentagon's much-vaunted Predator surveillance drones were able to pick up evidence of such well-organised mountain resistance.

Abdulrakhman Beheshti, a 21-year-old Afghan who said he was taken hostage by Al-Qaeda before the battle of Shah-i-Kot, provided a chilling description of their hideouts.

"They are dug deep into the base of the mountain, often 50ft deep into the rock," he said. "Each cave is lit with neon lights powered by large solar panels that are placed on a platform outside. The floors are covered with carpets, mattresses and foam cushions. Many caves have wooden doors."

Beheshti saw one cave equipped with a video player where Al-Qaeda fighters watched tapes of the war against the Soviet Union and the Taliban fighting the Northern Alliance.

Most alarmingly for coalition forces, he said the bombing outside had "no effect" on the larger caves. "There is no shaking inside and all I could hear was a distant rumble."

With spring approaching, US officers are concerned that reconnaissance will become even harder as enemy fighters move about under the cover of sprouting foliage.

"The region has thick woods that the Afghans used to stage ambushes on our convoys," recalled Alexander Pikunov, a Russian officer who served in Gardez during the Soviet occupation. "It is not true that it will be easier for the Americans and the Brits to fight there now because they have more modern kit than we did.

"Since 1979 a whole generation there has grown up on war. These people are more aggressive and ruthless. They also have much more experience. In Afghanistan there are now explosives and mine experts who are better and more experienced than western ones."

In Washington, officials are also concerned by the prospect of urban warfare, or assaults against allied bases such as the one near Khost airport last week.

"You're entering into another phase here that actually is more difficult because you're probably looking at smaller units who intend to really operate against you in a classic insurgency format," said George Tenet, the director of the CIA. Vice-Admiral Thomas Wilson, the director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, predicted a "very widespread probability of insurgency-type warfare" both in cities and rural areas.

Pikunov also warned of the danger from snipers. "They are very effective at blocking convoys and units in the mountains.

"One well-placed sniper can take out an entire unit: soldiers getting hit left, right and centre and you have no idea where the shots are being fired from."

With Afghan warlords further complicating the equation with their impenetrable but deadly rivalries, it does not look the most promising battlefield for the Royal Marines of 45 Commando.

Hoon insisted last week that British troops would leave Afghanistan as soon as their mission was over. It is a measure of the task ahead that nobody in London or Washington can be confident about when that might be.

Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd.