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apparent success of coalition air strikes against Taliban military
targets is gratifying and reflects the effectiveness of our high-tech
airborne weapon systems. At the same time, it is enlightening to
consider the circumspect comments of Secretary Rumsfeld when describing
these operations. As he carefully explains, coalition-limited air
strikes against Taliban military targets are designed not as victories
in themselves, but only as tools to achieving more difficult objectives.
While it is premature to predict the eventual outcome of a conflict
at this early stage, Rumsfeld correctly recognizes the possibility
that, after all the "high value" targets are destroyed,
the enemy soldiers who remain will constitute a highly formidable
force indeed. Taliban and al Qaeda will be little changed, because
their very strengths are manifest in what we are unable to destroy
from the air.
Air power will
allow us to begin operations for the ultimate destruction of the
terrorist network in Afghanistan, but will not achieve this goal
by itself. The Soviets learned during ten years of war in Afghanistan
that air supremacy does not ensure victory.
The strengths
of the military forces we are trying to vanquish are certainly not
in the quality of their heavy and sophisticated hardware. Their
aircraft, heavy artillery, communications systems, air-defense systems,
armor, and heavy vehicles are all decrepit and obsolete. By destroying
them, we are cleaning out the Taliban garage of junk — old
equipment of limited usefulness anyway against a sophisticated foe.
Thus we send them into the mountains where they will rely on their
tried and true strengths. If they had little materiel of any great
value to begin with, then after we destroy what there is, they have
lost little.
These hardcore
fighters will melt into their caves with those infantry weapons
they can carry on their backs, on light vehicles, and on beasts
of burden. They have done this for centuries against numerous invaders.
They will hole up in places where modern jet aircraft simply cannot
find them or reach them. Even with the very latest hi-tech weapons
and equipment, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to
find and destroy from the air a determined foe well concealed in
mountainous terrain, a situation exacerbated by our lack of recent
human intelligence from inside Afghanistan.
They will continue
to fight using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, harassing our ground
forces with maddening consistency. They will control their own people
through terror and extortion, despite what humanitarian aid reaches
them. They will move quietly and covertly through vast inhospitable
terrain with which they are intimately familiar and comfortable,
stopping to resupply from caches of ammunition their rifles, machine
guns, mortars, and grenade launchers. They will not allow total
air supremacy by the coalition, for they will occasionally down
our helicopters and low-flying planes with man portable SAMs and
small arms.
They are not
afraid to die. On the contrary, as we so grimly discovered on September
11, they are happy to make the ultimate sacrifice against the nonbelievers.
They are not cowards. Many have lived in these mountains all their
lives. It is their home. They will defend it fiercely. They are
accustomed to subsisting on very short rations and under Spartan
conditions.
Destroying
this guerilla force will be different from the campaign against
the "kill boxes" of the Gulf War, where the enemy, exposed
in the flat, open desert of Iraq and Kuwait, devoid of air defense,
were easy targets. It will require determined, high-quality ground
forces to ferret them out, mountain-by-mountain, cave-to-cave. The
effort may be more reminiscent of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It will
be difficult, messy, sometimes costly fighting that will probably
take a long time, and will surely test our capabilities.
If the coalition
determines that it must completely destroy this Afghan guerrilla
force to achieve its objectives in the war on terrorism, then it
must be done with the full recognition of all the ramifications.
That is why Secretary Rumsfeld is taking this slowly and carefully,
for the test will be not only for our military forces in theater,
but for the patience and resolve of the people back home and their
leadership.
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