USA's AFGHAN OPS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS
by B.Raman
The US-led "war" against international
terrorism in Afghanistan entered its third week on the night of October
21,2001. The main features of the operations during the second week
were:
* The increasing use of helicopters for the air strikes,
including for a mission over Kabul on October 20/21.
* The first hit & run ground operations in the
Kandahar area by US Special Forces on the night of October 19/20.
* The first US and Pakistani casualties.
* The continuing good (though not necessarily high)
morale of the Taliban leadership.
* Growing signs of anxiety in the Pakistani
military-intelligence establishment over the apparently inconclusive
nature of the US operations, the increasing civilian casualties,
particularly amongst the Pashtuns, due to the air strikes and the
defiance of the Taliban leadership, which could aggravate public
alienation against the military junta.
* Pakistan's extraction of a promise from the US of an
important, if not determining, role for itself in any future
dispensation in Kabul so that it could retrieve, at least largely if not
wholly, the ground lost by it as a result of its post-September 11
abrupt withdrawal of support to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
* Pakistan's attempt to extract from the US pledges of
its external debt write-off, at least in respect of the bilateral debt
amounting to US $ 12 billion as against the total external debt of US $
37 billion and of supply of fresh military equipment.
* Lack of progress in the efforts to break the Taliban
and cobble together an anti-Taliban coalition.
Two weeks of air strikes, with low-flying C-130 aircraft
and helicopters being increasingly used, without the loss of any aircraft
or helicopter in Afghan territory, indicates that, at least till now, the
US has had total control of the skies and that likely threats from the
Stinger missiles with the Taliban had been over-stated.
As this writer had been pointing out in the past in the
context of discussions over likely threats from Stinger missiles in Jammu
& Kashmir, during the Afghan War of the 1980s, the CIA and the US
Central Command were liberal in the issue of the missiles to the Afghan
Mujahideen through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but stingy in
the issue of replacement batteries.
While the ISI and the Mujahideen were given a reserve
stock of Stingers, the reserve stocks of the replacement batteries were
kept under the control of the US Central Command, with replacements being
issued only after the expiry of the life of a battery in exchange for the
discarded battery. This precaution was taken to prevent the
possibility of future threats from these missiles to US and other aircraft
once the Afghan war against the USSR was over.
These batteries have a life-period of about two to three
years. The Stingers presently with the Taliban were issued to the
Afghan Mujahideen around 1988 and the life-period of their batteries must have expired in
the early 1990s, at the latest. Unless the Taliban had been able to
extend their life-period or had procured replacement batteries from
elsewhere, which is unlikely, it would not be able to make effective use
of the Stingers.
The greater threat to the US aircraft and helicopters is
from the Soviet missiles issued to the Najibullah Government by
Moscow. The KGB, the intelligence agency of the USSR, and its Armed
Forces did not follow the same precautions as the US and were liberal in
the issue of reserve stocks of replacement batteries. These missiles
and the reserve stocks of batteries were captured by the Mujahideen when
the Najibullah Government collapsed in 1992 and then by the Taliban from
the Mujahideen when it captured Kabul in September,1996.
The life-periods of the Soviet reserve batteries might
have also expired by the late 1990s, but the Taliban should have had no
difficulty in getting latest replacements, either through capture from the
Northern Alliance or from the smugglers' market in the Central Asian
Republics (CARs).
In the first openly admitted ground operation on the
night of October 19/20, over 100 specially equipped personnel, most of
them from the Army's 75th Rangers Regiment, were para-dropped at two
places in Southern Afghanistan from C-130 aircraft, which flew them from
the US Aircraft Carrier Kitty Hawk off the Makran Coast of Balochistan.
After they had been on the ground for a few hours, they
were picked up by MH-60 Blackhawk helicopters. It is not clear
whether these helicopters flew them direct to Kitty Hawk or they were
first taken to Pakistan's Dalbandin Air Force base 20 miles from the
Afghan border and then transported back to the aircraft carrier from there
on C-130 aircraft.
Pakistan continues to assert that it has given to the US
only logistics/emergency facilities and that the hit and run raid was not
mounted from Pakistani territory. The emergency facilities required
by the US consist of emergency landing facilities for crippled
aircraft/helicopters and communications/take-off/landing facilities for
helicopters sent on rescue missions to pick up US personnel shot down in
Afghan territory. Such helicopter-borne rescue missions would also
require fighter aircraft for escort and communications/radar
infrastructure.
The US has, therefore, stationed an unspecified number
of helicopters and fighter planes at the PAF bases at Jacobabad in Sindh
and at Pasni and Dalbandin in Balochistan along with the rescue teams,
medical personnel and back-up logistics personnel, all numbering around
2,000. State of the art communications and radar equipment has also
been flown from the US Central Command and installed at these bases.
This equipment is presently under the control of US personnel, but if and
when the "war" is over, much of it may be handed over to
Pakistan. US personnel have taken over complete responsibility for
the security of these air bases, with the Pakistanis playing only a
peripheral support role.
On the night of the first ground operation,in addition
to copter activity, which was natural, there was also considerable C-130
activity at Pasni and Dalbandin, thereby giving rise to the possibility
that contrary to Pakistani claims, the US Rangers and others were
helicoptered to these air bases from Afghan territory after the
ground operation was over and then flown to their aircraft carrier by
C-130 planes.
There were two mishaps at Dalandin involving an MH-60
Blackhawk copter and a C-130 plane. The copter crashed while coming
in to land and the C-130 veered off the runway after landing from the
aircraft carrier. While the copter crash killed two US personnel on
board , the C-130 incident killed at least two, and possibly five,
Pakistani ground personnel when they were hit by the plane before it was
brought under control by the pilot.
It is not clear whether these two mishaps were separate
or connected. According to some reports, the mishap occurred when
the copter while coming in to land had an impact with the C-130 as it was
moving along the runway.
In almost identical statements, US and Pakistani
authorities have described the copter crash as due to a mishap. The
US authorities have denied the Taliban's claims of the copter having been
crippled by its ground fire. While the US officials have admitted
their two fatal casualties, the Pakistanis have not admitted theirs.
The Taliban's claims of having killed 25 US personnel have not been
corroborated. It is very unlikely that US officials would conceal
from their public the casualties suffered by them.
The targets of the first ground operation were
reportedly the residential complex of Mulla Mohammad Omer, the Amir of the
Taliban, and an airport. It is not clear whether the airport was
that of Kandahar or Jalalabad, where the US has been trying to help the
followers of Abdul Haq, a Pshtoon leader, or Herat, where the US has been
trying to help the men of Ismail Khan, the Shia leader.
The Amir, his family and staff had vacated the
residential complex in the beginning of October. Similarly, the
staff of the offices of the Taliban's Intelligence agency and the
religious police, which were located there, had also vacated at the same
time. The purpose of the raid, therefore, seems to have been to look
for tell-tale documents and equipment, which they might have abandoned
there while making the emergency evacuation. These would be of
intelligence value.
The purpose of the raid into the airport is not clear as
all the airports/airfields in Southern Afghanistan were already
non-functional. The Special Forces do not seem to have rummaged the
residential complex of bin Laden, which was near that of the Amir.
Another major objective of the first ground operation
was psychological to let the Taliban leadership know that the US is now in
a position not only to have a free run of the skies, but also of the
ground and thereby damage its morale further.
However, the Taliban's morale continues to be good till
now. Reports of splits, differences and large-scale desertions from
its ranks have not been corroborated and are apparently part of the Psywar
being waged by the US and the Northern Alliance.
The sustained morale of the Taliban would be evident
from the determined fight being being put up by its militia units against
Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum's Uzbeck militia in the Mazar-e-Sharif area,
despite their rear having been weakened by the US air strikes. In
fact, the Taliban has recovered some of the area which it had lost in this
sector in the days following the beginning of the US air strikes.
It needs to be noted that the Taliban units fighting
against the Northern Alliance in the forward areas to prevent their entry
into Kabul consist largely of Pakistanis, either madrasa students from
Quetta, Peshawar and Binori in Karachi or ex-servicemen. The
Musharraf junta's anxiety that the US should avoid air strikes in the
forward areas in the North was partly due to fears that this could
enable the Northern Alliance to capture Kabul and partly due to concerns
that the deaths of the Pakistanis fighting in the Taliban militia in this
area due to US air strikes might further inflame the populations of Quetta,
Peshawar and Karachi.
Surprisingly---and significantly---- the sustained US
air strikes have not prevented the to and fro movements of Taliban
leaders and officials between Pakistan and Afghanistan. At least three
Taliban personalities---two of them identified as Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil,
its Foreign Minister, and Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, the chief of the
Militia--- have managed to visit Islamabad and return safely. Mullah
Abdul Saleem Zaeef, the Taliban Ambassador in Islamabad, has safely
managed to go home for consultations and come back.
These to and fro visits have strengthened speculation as
to whether the Taliban leadership is still in Afghan territory or is now
operating from Pakistan's Federally-Administered Tribal Areas
(FATA). According to Press reports, Haqqani gave a press interview
from the North Waziristan Agency in the FATA where his family lived.
Qatar's Al Jazeera TV continues to be the main source of
visuals about the damage to the civilians in Afghanistan from the US
strikes. It is believed that these visuals are either being
airlifted or uplinked from Pakistan, which would not be possible without
the complicity of at least some serving officials of Pakistan's
military-intelligence establishment. This would indicate that
Musharraf's support to the US does not enjoy total backing in his
establishment.
The military junta is increasingly concerned over the
civilian casualties and over what appears to be, as of now, the
indeterminate nature of the "war" being waged by the US and the
UK. Independent observes say that civilian casualties are much, much
more than admitted by the US. Continuing flow of such casualties to
hospitals in Pakistan for medical treatment and the visuals of Al Jazeera
could strengthen the agitation of the religious extremist elements.
Even large sections of Pakistan's elite, which originally hailed
Musharraf's support to the US,are now feeling uncomfortable over
Pakistan's perceived role as an ally of the US in crushing Afghanistan. Al
Jazeera has more viewers in Balochistan, the North-West Frontier Province
(NWFP) and the FATA than the CNN and the BBC.
Musharraf has been pressing the US for substantial debt
write-off in addition to the grants and rescheduling already announced.
Similarly, he wants a substantial military aid package, including new F-16
aircraft and US-made tanks. His argument reportedly is that prospects of
economic prosperity would keep the bazaris, the main contributors of funds
to the religious parties, on his side and the pledge of supply of
substantial modern military equipment would keep the senior officers of
the Armed Forces happy and supportive. The US has not yet made a firm
commitment on these two issues, but India should not be surprised if it
ultimately did.
The US-led efforts for a post-Taliban coalition, with
which Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Iran would be comfortable---though not
necessarily India, Russia and Tajikistan---have not made any headway as
yet. The priority given by the US to helping Dostum's Uzbeck militia and
its lack of enthusiam for the Tadjiks is too obvious to be missed.
Before April, 1992, CIA and German intelligence
officials managed to win over Dostum, then a strong ally of
Najibullah, when he had come to New Delhi for medical treatment and
persuade him to desert Najibullah. It was this desertion, which led to the
ultimate collapse of the Najibullah Government.
Since then, the CIA has been maintaining regular
contacts with him either directly or through Turkey. It is going to be
difficult for the US to find an Afghan leader, belonging to any ethnic
group, who would command the confidence of all ethnic groups. Ex-King
Zahir Shah's influence is limited to the Afghan diaspora. He has very
little following inside the country.
The advent of the Afghan winter is just a month away. If
there are no tangible results by then, the "war" could turn into
a mess.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: corde@vsnl.com
)
