No Free Lunch
The fundamental strategy behind the U.S. air war in Afghanistan may be a failure.

October 26, 2001 3:50 p.m.

he Washington Post reports today that the expected mass defections from the Taliban have failed to materialize, which is a sign that the fundamental strategy behind the U.S. air war in Afghanistan may be a failure.

The U.S. seemed to expect a classic air-war free lunch: The very demonstration of American firepower from the skies would prompt our adversaries to buckle and then collapse.

This is the ultimate in war as signal-sending, the signal being that "we are so much more powerful than you that we don't even need to bother to destroy you to achieve victory."

The Taliban appears to be duly unimpressed.

Besides which, all the factors that have traditionally motivated Afghan fighters seem to be running the wrong way in this case, as an intelligence official explains to the Post: "During the Afghan war we used Islam, Pashtun nationalism, and Afghan history to drive Afghans against foreign invaders. In the present situation, we can't use any of them to trigger an intra-Pashtun coup against the Taliban."

This means destroying the Taliban is the only option, as John McCain argues in a delightfully Jacksonian op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. But this brings us to what may be another strategic miscalculation.

We have been depending on the Northern Alliance — or as it calls itself, the United Front — to destroy the Taliban for us, with some light U.S. air support. But this is beginning to look like delirious wishful thinking.

There are reports today that the Northern Alliance's effort to take Mazar-e Sharif in the northwest has been a debacle, with its troops now pushed 40 miles back from the strategically key city.

This shouldn't be surprising. The Northern Alliance for years was just in survival mode, and then was able to mount something of a resistance to the Taliban. But going on the offensive is an entirely different matter, and short of a major infusion of arms — more than the Russians are promising at the moment — it just won't happen.

In light of this, there are several unavoidable choices for the U.S. The first is the nature of our air campaign. If we really don't want to take Mazar-e Sharif or Kabul quickly we can continue our light bombing and wait until next year, as Brooklyn Dodger fans used to say.

But if we want things to move quickly, the air campaign will have to be stepped up, but then there will be still another choice.

If we want the Northern Alliance to do the work on the ground, we will have to provide them with a fairly large infusion of arms, one that will almost amount to making its army anew. It will be an enormous logistical task, and one that will prompt howls from the Pakistanis.

If we want to avoid all that, the only other choice is to send U.S. troops in on the ground to capture key cities and hold that which we consider strategically essential.

It may just be that the Taliban is on the verge of collapse and we don't know it, in the same way that the Serbs were about to give way amidst all the bitching about the air war in Kosovo.

But if not, there is no avoiding these hard decisions — because there are no free lunches, including in Afghanistan.