Invasion of Afghanistan
Even before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11th 2001, Afghanistan was probably the most isolated country in the world. Only three other states recognised its rulers, who in the mid-1990s had swept across the country to impose a very strict and distinctive form of Islamic law upon the Afghan people, ending nearly 20 years of civil war in the 90% or so of the country which they control. Osama Bin Laden, an exiled Saudi Arabian who is the USA’s prime suspect for the World Trade Centre atrocity and other terrorist attacks in the 1990s, had based his Al-Qa’ida organisation in Afghanistan since 1996. The Taliban said that Bin Laden was a “guest of the Afghan people” and refused to give him up, prompting calls for military action to be taken against the regime.
Sunday September 16, 2001
President George Bush’s declaration of war against the fanatics of Osama bin Laden, and the Afghan Taliban sheltering them, is a military planner’s nightmare. It is not just that the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan- and the ferocious fighters who inhabit it- have seen off armies, British and Russian, for over a century and a half.
The problem facing strategists in the Pentagon today will be how to hit an enemy that lacks a capital and state, an exchequer, an industry or even any citizens. It lacks an army in ...
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Sunday September 16, 2001
President George Bush’s declaration of war against the fanatics of Osama bin Laden, and the Afghan Taliban sheltering them, is a military planner’s nightmare. It is not just that the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan- and the ferocious fighters who inhabit it- have seen off armies, British and Russian, for over a century and a half.
The problem facing strategists in the Pentagon today will be how to hit an enemy that lacks a capital and state, an exchequer, an industry or even any citizens. It lacks an army in the conventional sense. Its leader is almost a ghost figure: a man who lacks a palace, a parliament or a presidency.
It is host, the Afghan Taliban, are not much more promising as a conventional target for a modern high-tech war. They represent in the jargon of the intelligence world a “virtual state” wrecked by 20 years of war in a state abandoned by the trappings of the modern era.
It is a problem underlined by the CIA last week and local sources on the ground, who both said that the training camps of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa’ida group were empty of their fighters in anticipation of an American attack. Sources on the ground on the north West Frontier confirmed yesterday that all foreign ‘Arabs’ had apparently disappeared from their bases in and around Kandahar. Put simple, the enemy has gone.
For their part, the Taliban are calling for a holy war against neighbouring states (for that, read Pakistan) that help American in the attack.
Money, at least, will not be a problem. On Friday, Congress approved the funding for this war, some $20 billion. It also approved the use of ‘all necessary means’ to punish the perpetrators with all of the US’s military might.
What will be the issue is how America will prosecute the campaign. Present George Bush met his National Security team yesterday to consider the military options. The manpower is quickly being manoeuvred into place: 35,000 reservists will be called up for a home defence force. Thousands more are expected to be called up for service in the upcoming campaign for what Thomas Friedman, one of the US’s most astute columnists, has already described as ‘World War III.
That it will be a different kind of war was articulated by President Bush yesterday – a war without beachheads or frontlines. It would be war, he intimated, as much about closing down the supply lines and sources of funding of the terrorists as about killing the extremists.
It would, some analysts understood, be a war of spooks and dirty tricks and covert killings and arrests, as much as a war of missile and helicopter assaults.
Officials are believed to be working on up to 10 different options, including the use of land, sea and air forces over a lengthy period. ‘Everything is on the table’ one official said. Already the US Navy has two aircraft-carrier battle groups, each with 74 warplanes aboard, in the vicinity of the Arabian Sea. That is twice the usual number for that part of the world. The USS Enterprise, due to return home after being relieved earlier this month by another carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, has been ordered to remain in the area indefinitely.
The US Government has also put out tenders for tankers to take marine and aviation fuel to bases in Europe and the Indian Ocean to support a prolonged bombing campaign.
But what exactly is the US going to do? For the time being, the wiser counsels in Bush’s administration – advising, like Prime Minister Tony Blair, patience and caution – are holding the day. The so-called ‘nuke’ ‘em’ brigade of hawks led by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are being overruled by Vice-President Dick Cheney – himself a former Defence Secretary – who has been put in charge of the war planning. Though hawkish himself, he is regarded as pragmatic in his approach.
The problems the administration will face won’t be a shortage of options when it comes to taking military action. ‘It is just that they’ll all be bade ones,’ says Anatol Lieven, an analyst at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment. ‘There are no guarantees of success, and every possibility of making the problem worse.’
Indeed, the biggest worry is that, far from decapitating Islamic terrorism, any US campaign could fatally undermine states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, turning them into breeding grounds for a new generation of terrorists.
One of the options under consideration is thought to be a template modelled on the experience of the Gulf War and Kosovo. It envisages a staggered approach. A short, intense diplomatic period to establish consensus and put pressure on the Taliban to hand over bin Laden would be followed by a ratcheted military response, beginning with rolling air strikes launched from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and US bases in Europe, culminating as a last option in a full ground invasion.
That is an option that bush wants to avoid. The experience of armies invading Afghanistan, from the East India Company’s expedition to that of the Soviet forces, has been one of unmitigated disaster.
Another option, say sources, is to split the military operation into two phases: a punishment raid against targets in Afghanistan that would assuage US public opinion that something must be done followed by a long-term campaign against terrorism.
By Saturday it appeared that Pakistan had acquiesced to US pressure to hand over intelligence on bin Laden, open up its airspace to US bombers and tighten the border against the smuggling of fuel into Afghanistan. A massive ground invasion, most experts believe, would result in a rerun of the Soviet invasion and turn into a military disaster. Instead, a more creditable option is believed to be the use of helpicopter-borne Special Forces in a bid to capture bin Laden, or carry out hit-and-run raids from across the border, and destroy what modest facilities he may have.
Defence insiders in the Us also believe that American opinion, for long opposed to US casualties in the service of foreign adventures, would have much less difficulty with US military dead in pursuit of the country’s own security.
One risk is that any snatch squad might not find bin Laden. It is worth noting that, more than six years after the end of the war in Bosnia, Nato has been unable to root out the former Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, wanted by the Hague war crimes tribunal.
As Lieven points out, the Taliban have no infrastructure worth bombing. Already ravaged by more than two decades of continuous war, unlike Serbia, it has ‘no factories, or television stations or even convention organised troops. You’d run out of targets very soon, and end up generating more terrorists.’ So, he believes, ‘a raid is probably the only option. The mood of fury is going to compel action.’
In tandem with this policy is the so-called ‘Munich Option’. Following the murder of 11 athletes of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, Mossad, the Israeli secret service, set about hunting down and killing every Palestinian involved with the Black September group that carried out the action.
Already pressure is mounting to repeal a policy forbidding assassinations abroad, introduced by President Gerald Ford in 1976, following revelations that the CIA had tried to kill Fidel Castro.
Among those who believe the prohibition is outdated is Senator Richard Shelby, senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence committee. ‘It is not what we need in today’s environment, dealing with these terrorist groups,’ he said last week. ‘This is a different type of war. They are going to assassinate people and blow up our buildings unless we eradicate them first.’
John Hulsman of the Heritage Foundation points out this would send out a chilling message to anyone connected with those who carried out Tuesday’s attacks. ‘We will hunt you down to the ends of the earth,’ he says. ‘Maybe we won’t get you today or tomorrow or even the next day but, rest assured, we will get you.’
Still, even the ‘Munich Option’ has risks. Golda Meir, the Israeli premier at the time, gave the go-ahead to the operation because she wanted to ‘cut off the head of the terrorist hydro.’ Thirty years later it has more heads than ever.
Welcome to a long and dirty war.
