The Long Haul
Buckle down for the winter: It looks like we’re in for the long haul in Afghanistan, at least until the spring.

November 6, 2001 5:00 p.m.

uckle down for the winter: It looks like we're in for the long haul in Afghanistan, at least until the spring.

It's possible that we'll get a lucky break and the Northern Alliance (or the United Front, as it prefers to be called) will roll through Mazar-e Sharif, where it reportedly has made some gains, and Kabul in the next few weeks. But there is nothing to guarantee it.

We are suffering now from one of the downsides of waging a war by proxy. The advantage is that you minimize your own risk. We can do our bit from 15,000 feet or even higher (or even 65,000 feet, in the case of the "Global Hawk" reconnaissance plane). But the price for that relative safety is having limited control over what actually happens on the ground.

Here's Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem on the likelihood of an NA assault in coming days: "I have heard reports that they may be ready to move, but until they do, I think that it's still a bit suppositional on our part."

Now, maybe the U.S. has all this exquisitely wired and just isn't telling us, but all signs are that we are at the mercy of a rebel force:

1) that by its own account is disastrously under-supplied. The NA's impressive spokesman Haron Amin pleads for more arms at every opportunity;

2) that by its own account was rendered an awful blow by the assassination of the charismatic and talented Ahmed Massoud. His replacement, Gen. Fahim, bizarrely didn't salute his troops upon reviewing them yesterday, according to the New York Times (although I'm told he may have just been showing deference to President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was also on the reviewing grounds);

3) that, judging by all the conflicting public statements, can't decide whether it's in a position to roll up the Taliban in a decisive offensive almost immediately, or is struggling just to survive with soldiers who lack boots;

4) that can be a sketchy bunch. We are, for instance, relying on Gen. Dostum to take Mazar-e Sharif. Here is how Ahmed Rashid describes Dostum in his excellent Taliban: "he had, at one time or another, allied himself with everyone... and betrayed everyone with undisguised aplomb. He had also been on every country's payroll receiving funds from Russia, Uzbekistan, Iran, Pakistan, and lately Turkey. In 1995 he managed to be on the payroll of both Iran and Pakistan, then at daggers drawn over the Taliban."

At least the U.S. appears to have gotten its thinking straight. Initially we couldn't decide whether we wanted to bomb the Taliban front lines or not, so we were suffering from a strategic flaw. Now that we have taken that decision, we are having more mundane operational difficulties — namely, bombing the Taliban lines accurately.

Secretary Rumsfeld maintains that lately we are having much better luck at it, now that we have special-operations troops involved in the targeting. More special-ops troops are on the way, and winter notwithstanding, one can only assume that time is not on the Taliban's side.

The only reason it would be is if the international coalition were fraying. But in the places that matter, in the immediate neighborhood, support for the U.S. appears to be shoring up. Tajikistan is going to let us use former Soviet bases, and Pakistani President Musharraf is looking better rather than worse (which makes sense — Musharraf can't back off from his support for the U.S. now, or he'll get the worst of both worlds).

So, in short, if we were starting from scratch maybe we would write a different campaign plan, one that relied on a massive shock-bombing campaign from the beginning, one that made more extensive use of American ground troops. But, given the hand we are playing, there is not much we can do now except to bomb, arm the NA, and wait — perhaps until spring.