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 t's
been one of the greatest routs in military history, one more resembling
the knights fleeing the Killer Rabbit in Monty Python and the
Holy Grail than any kind of orderly retreat. Yet Taliban leaders
say that abandoning the cities and taking the fight to the mountains
was always part of their plan. Sure it was. Throwing away weapons
was also part of the plan, right? What better way to deceive us?
Still, it's
important to ask what threat the Taliban may pose as guerrillas.
The answer appears to be: Not much.
To succeed,
guerrillas need two things.
First, they
require support from the population. They don't need everybody's
hearts and minds, but they need a lot of them. Mao Zedong, in his
writings on guerrilla warfare, referred to these people as the "water"
in which the guerrillas would be the fish.
But as each
Afghan village was liberated from the Taliban, the dancing, the
men shaving their beards, and the women throwing off the hated burqa
showed the contempt the Taliban have engendered even among their
own Pashtun tribe. The puddles will be shallow for these fish.
Second, despite
the Hollywood characterization of rebels living entirely off the
land and getting all of their weapons from attacks on government
forces, guerrillas require outside aid. Virtually no guerrilla force
in history has been able to sustain itself for long periods, much
less prevail, without considerable outside help. (Castro's takeover
in Cuba stands out as a glaring exception.)
During the
Vietnam war, China and the Soviet Union poured massive amounts of
weaponry — including tanks and surface-to-air-missile batteries
— into the harbor of Haiphong and down through China, whence
they were brought down the Ho Chi Minh trail into the south. In
the Afghan war against the Soviets, the mujahedeen received
weapons from the U.S., Arab countries, Iran, and Pakistan, smuggled
into the country over the vast borders with Iran and Pakistan.
But nobody
is going to go to the bat for the Taliban or bin Laden.
Pakistan may
have sympathy for the Taliban — though not for al Qaeda, which
is sworn to bring down all moderate Islamic governments. But with
India on one side and an already-hostile Afghan people on the other,
Pakistan desperately needs to encourage good relations with Afghanistan
and support the coalition effort to cut out the cancer of the Taliban
and al Qaeda. This alone is enough to ensure the Taliban won't succeed.
But there's more.
The Viet Cong
(VC) were masters of taking advantage of jungle cover and of building
extensive tunnel systems. Caught in the open, they were slaughtered
just as our planes have slaughtered exposed Taliban. The Taliban
al Qaeda may try to do the same with Afghanistan's extensive cave
system.
But caves aren't
tunnels. The VC built their tunnel systems with tiny multiple openings.
Although some were destroyed from the top by B-52s, deeper ones
presented American troops with the nightmarish task of entering
them individually to root out the enemy. The toughest, meanest soldier
I ever met — a cadre at special-forces school — was one
of the elite "tunnel rats" whose job it was to be the
first to pop down the hole. Unlike tunnels, cave mouths can be widened,
but not narrowed.
How many habitable
cave systems are there in Afghanistan? Estimates vary, but it's
a lot. On the other hand, it's also finite. The best caves are natural
or they were laboriously hallowed out during previous wars, whether
against the Soviets or even the Mongol warriors. You can't just
go and dig and willy-nilly dig a new complex like the VC did.
At that, only
a limited number of these cave complexes are available for enemy
use. We can cross the caves in the entire northern part of the country
off the list, because of tremendous local hostility. Many of the
best of the remaining caves are already known to the CIA, since
they helped set them up during the war against the Soviet Union.
Mujahedeen who fought the Soviets or more recently fought
with the Taliban should be systematically interrogated with bounties
paid for each inhabited or stocked cave they reveal.
Regarding the
rest of the caves, every time anybody enters or exits one, they
expose the opening to satellite cameras, Predator reconnaissance
planes armed with Hellfire
missiles, helicopters, troops on the ground and other forms
of observation. Another idea would be to use native Afghans, who
have probably developed practically a sixth sense for where cave
openings might be. Our night-vision
equipment is incredible, amplifying the light of a few stars
into a view that's practically like daylight. (One legacy of the
Vietnam War is that the U.S. military has become the best night-fighting
force in the world.)
The dreaded
oncoming winter we keep hearing about will be our friend. The colder
it gets, the bigger the infrared heat signatures at cave openings
and ventilation ducts far easier. A fire just big enough to provide
warmth for a few men will look like a neon sign reading: "Bomb
here!"
Finally, every
time a unit goes out to set an ambush or get supplies or even orders
the Afghan version of Domino's pizza, the hideout will be subject
to betrayal by any hostile or reward-seeking villager.
There are lots
of ways to skin this cat.
Caves have
yet another disadvantage in that the hard rock makes them easy prey
for destruction by a single warhead. The literally rock-hard walls
will contain the blast, multiplying the shock wave many times over.
Warheads can dropped through the top with those laser-guided "bunker-buster"
GBU-28 5,000-pound bombs, or they can be fired in horizontally by
F-15s using AGM-130
missiles or various aircraft with AGM-65
missiles. Whatever the weapon, its destructive power will be
vastly disproportionate to its size.
Finally, don't
forget that we gained extensive cave-fighting experience against
Japan in World War II and tunnel-fighting experience in Vietnam.
Those skilled and fanatical cave fighters slowed us up and initially
caused serious casualties, but continually fewer and fewer as we
develop ways of sealing caves up without ever having to deal with
the enemy inside. It would be ludicrous to think that at this stage
of the fighting we'll be able to continue to keep combat casualties
at zero. But rarely will there be a need for soldiers to enter caves
that haven't already been blown out.
Conclusion:
It may be slow and laborious, but each and every cave hideout the
Taliban and al Qaeda try to operate out of can be systematically
destroyed and the process has already begun. If the remaining Taliban
and terrorists in Afghanistan think they have any chance of winning
a guerrilla war, they're wrong. If it's martyrdom they seek, we'll
be happy to oblige.
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