What Kind of War?

Part 2: The Afghanistan Syndrome

The United States had barely begun to threaten the Taliban regime in Afghanistan when various senior Russian military men began offering their advice, which generally consisted of: stay the hell out of there. Memories of the heavy Russian losses in 1979-89 still run deep. Other analysts remembered the three Afghan Wars that Britain fought in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the mythos surrounding the destruction of the British column retreating from Kabul in 1842. References like that in the Kipling verse above are a reminder that for 19th Century Britain and the 20th Century Soviet Union, Afghanistan was a scene of defeat and military disaster. If the United States in the 1970s and 1980s was paralyzed by a "Vietnam Syndrome", then an "Afghanistan Syndrome" clearly exists as well.

The United States appears to be on the verge of a military engagement in Afghanistan, and military planners are, certainly, aware of the defeats inflicted on past invaders of the country. But the "Afghanistan Syndrome" can be overstated. The British won most of their set-piece battles in Afghanistan; they simply could not find a way to hold the country. The Russians killed perhaps a million and a half Afghans during their decade there, and devastated the countryside, but they, too, could not hold the country. No one (except perhaps a few of the Taliban) believes that the United States wants to occupy and hold Afghanistan. Britain and the Soviets also failed dismally in their various attempts to impose their choice of Afghan leader on the Afghan people. While the United States clearly wants to see the Taliban removed, it has so far wisely kept its distance from endorsing or pushing a single alternative, rather seeking to encourage the indigenous Loya Jirga (Grand Assembly) process for finding national consensus.

The exact nature of the campaign the US will conduct was not clear as this was written, but it seems clear that it will not be a classic war of massed armies moving to secure territory. This second Dossier in our series "What Kind of War?" looks at the "Afghanistan Syndrome" and the related question of how an outside power does fight in Afghanistan.

Doctor William Brydon was an unknown assistant surgeon with the British East India Company in 1842, when he suddenly became one of the most famous figures of the early Victorian era and the subject of a much-reproduced painting. In January of 1842 a British and Indian force, following a two-month siege in Kabul and the killing of the British representative, began a withdrawal towards the Khyber Pass and Peshawar in British India. On January 6, 1842, some 16,500 British and Indian Sepoy troops, civilians, wives and children, and camp followers left Kabul. On January 13, Dr. Brydon rode, alone, up to the gates of Jalalabad.

Doctor Brydon's Ride: Lady Butler's Remnant of an Army

The legend notwithstanding, Brydon was not actually the sole survivor of the 16,500, but he was the only European to make it all the way from Kabul to Jalalabad (about 90 miles through snow-covered passes and through hostile tribesmen). Other Indians and friendly Afghans also straggled through, and over 100 British officers, enlisted men, wives and children were taken captive or hostage and later released or exchanged. But the image of Brydon riding alone into Jalalabad, sole remnant of a column of 16,500, burned itself into Victorian memory, aided by a dramatic painting by the Victorian military artist Lady Butler (above), called "Remnant of an Army".

Despite the image of Doctor Brydon at Jalalabad, Britain fought a second Afghan War in 1878-80, which ended in failure though less disastrously than the first, and a third Afghan War in 1919, a month-long affair initiated by the Afghan side.

Britain's interest in Afghanistan was driven, of course, by the so-called "Great Game", the rivalry between Russia and British India over dominance in Central and Southwest Asia.

The other player in the Great Game, Russia or, for much of the 20th Century, the Soviet Union, had its own longstanding interests in Afghanistan, and its direct intervention in support of a Communist government there in 1979 (changing leaders of the local party as it did so) brought it its experience with war in Afghanistan. Although Russia had, at most periods, about 100,000 troops in the country, it never was able to fully control areas under mujahedin control. The Soviet Army's dependence on heavy armored and mechanized infantry units, and a requirement that its infantry never fight far from their vehicles, made it a bound Prometheus in the terrain of Afghanistan, unable to respond effectively to the hit-and-run raiding of its enemy.

The Nature of Afghanistan
Afghanistan, like the Middle East, lies in a geographic zone where several major regions come together, and like the Middle East, it has long been a bone of contention. But instead of the open plains, deserts, and river valleys of the Middle East, which have proved to be classic tank country, Afghanistan is a mix of rugged mountains (in its northeast, tending up to the high Pamirs), deep gorges, and arid deserts. Its mountaineer inhabitants have a history of warfare, against outsiders and among themselves. It is classic guerrilla country.

Afghanistan is also an ethnic and religious hodgepodge. Although the Pashtun peoples have always been the largest ethnic group, Persian (Dari) speakers also significant, and there are speakers of Tajik (another Persian dialect), Uzbek and Turkmen. The Hazaras, ethnically Central Asian descendants of Mongol and other conquerors, and by religion Shi‘ite Muslim, are another major minority. Besides the Hazara, there are a number of Dari-speaking Shi‘a with historical roots in Iran. Though most of the rest of the county is Sunni, there have always been a smattering of Isma‘ilis, as well as Jewish and Hindu minorities.

All of that has made for a volatile mix, and "Afghanistan" has sometimes seemed to be more of a geographical expression than a national unit.

It is not true that Afghanistan cannot be conquered: plenty of conquerors have done it, from Alexander and the Mongols and Tamerlane onward. Few of them could really control and hold the country under their sway, however. And since the coming of Islam, attempts by non-Muslim outsiders — British and Russian, mainly — have often been resisted fiercely by the Sunni religious leadership, who have also resisted the periodic attempts by Iran to control what is now western Afghanistan around Herat.

The Estimate began publication in 1989, when the final Soviet departure from Afghanistan saw a turn in the war, though a Communist regime survived in Kabul until 1992. Over the years, Estimate readers have followed the evolution of the war against the Soviets into, first, a civil war among the winners, and then, since 1995-96, a war between the Taliban and the remnants of the old mujahedin warlords.

The fighting since the withdrawal of the Soviets has tended to deepen the ethnic and religious divisions within the country, particularly since the Taliban emerged to unite the Pashtun regions of the country but to virulently oppose the Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks and others who now constitute the core of what the West usually calls the "Northern Alliance". (Officially, the Northern Alliance calls its state the Islamic State of Afghanistan — in contrast to the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan — and its fighting force is the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan.)

That ethnic identity is, in fact, one of the problems the US faces if it becomes too closely identified with the Northern Alliance. Although Russia and Iran have chosen to put all their money on the alliance, the latter do not in fact include significant Pashtun supporters, and the Pashtuns are the largest ethinc group in the country. And while the Northern Alliance includes some highly respectable people, it also includes some fairly unsavory warlords; during the years 1992-96 Kabul was wracked by a civil war among the factions of the former mujahedin and ethnic killings were widespread. In addition, it needs to be remembered that Usama bin Ladin, when he left Sudan in 1996, did not go immediately to the Taliban, who then were still limited to southern Afghanistan: rather he went to the area around Jalalabad, which was controlled by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a Pashtun and mujahedin leader who was part of the fractious government.

Because over 20 years of war have exacerbated ethnic tensions which were already present, there is even more reason to avoid dependance on an ethnically-based opposition. At the moment, many in the US and elsewhere seem to be hoping that the former Afghan King (Profile, this issue) and the convening of a traditional "Grand Assembly" or Loya Jirga, may be the route to finding a new leadership aceptable to both Pashtuns and the Northern Alliance. Most importantly, though, the US seems to recognize that it must not seem to be endorsing any one faction or one alternative government, because that could drive Afghan nationalists into the opposite camp. Afghans want a government, but not one imposed by Washington.

What Kind of Campaign?
The United States seems determined to avoid the mistake of attempting to invade Afghanistan with conventional ground forces. But exactly how to attack the Bin Ladin network and its Taliban support base (or perhaps vice versa: see the lead article) is less clear.

Afghanistan is a very target-poor country for airstrikes. One can assume that the US would seek to remove the remaining air forces of the Taliban — old MiG-21s and -23s in varying condition and with little dependable source of spares — and what limited air defenses there are. The Taliban have mostly depended on shoulder-launched SAMs, either US Stingers left over from the war against the Soviets or SA-7s and their successor SA-14s; there are probably some useable old SA-2s and -3s, 1960s technology, along with considerable anti-aircraft artillery. But taking out the Afghan air defense system, while it would presumably be a necessary prelude to other air operations, does little to eradicate the Bin Ladin network.

The training camps are obvious targets. But they are also difficult ones, either assemblages of tents which can be quickly abandoned or hardened sites based on caves and tunnels dug deep into Afghan gorges, some built, ironically, with US funds during the war against the Soviets. Air strikes alone will have little effect, as the 1998 strikes near Khost suggest. It seems clear enough that the United States intends to use special forces and commando operations against the camps, presumably by securing a perimeter and then destroying what infrastructure may be there. But the main camps will surely have been evacuated of most of their trainees during the buildup.

The "search-and-destroy" operations of the Vietnam War were actually more successful than many realize at destroying supplies, tunnels, buildings and other infrastructure; the problem was that they usually did not succeed in destroying key enemy formations. Operation Cedar Falls in 1967 saw several US divisions surround and occupy the "Iron Triangle" north of Saigon, with vast quantities of supplies captured and tunnels and other structures destroyed, but the Viet Cong formations had slipped away undetected. Something similar happened in the operations in the Cambodian "Fishhook" in 1970: vast quantities of supplies were captured, but the North Vietnamese command center which was the target of the operation had relocated elsewhere.

Certainly a destruction of the training camps themselves may prove a useful part of any operation, but it is unlikely that Bin Ladin, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Muhammad ‘Atef, or other key figures in the network are going to be sitting in the camps waiting for the Airborne to drop in.

Tracking and targeting individuals is notoriously difficult: witness the inability of Delta Force and other units to find Mohammad Aideed in Somalia in 1993, or the fact that Manuel Noriega evaded capture for several days in Panama even though the US military knew the country thoroughly. Israel tried many times to hit Yasir ‘Arafat during the Lebanese invasion of 1982 and never succeeded.

But if some combination of factors, including exploitation of the internal weaknesses of the Taliban themselves (See Page One) and neturalization of some of the Taliban's military power can be brought to bear, it may be possible to create a situation in which the protective mechanisms become ineffective. If the Taliban were to fragment, the odds of one disillusioned warlord among them trying to claim the reward on Bin Ladin might increase. But even if Bin Ladin and other key individuals might survive in remote Afghan gorges where they could never be found or captured, they might be deprived of their satellite phones and access to their bank accounts. Some of the Afghan mujahedin have long been accustomed to living in the rough, but Bin Ladin and his aides, while they certainly have done so as well, are used to having access to their followers abroad.

The problem for the US, however, is that which is intrinsic to the "Afghanistan Syndrome" generally: to avoid being drawn into an open-ended, long-term commitment of ground troops in a most inhospitable place, to avoid letting the enemy define the battlefield.

Fighting Guerrilla Wars
The decision, if such it is, to use special operations forces and commando raids as the primary operational instrument means the US will essentially be fighting more of a guerrilla than a conventional war. For many Americans, that awakens memories of Vietnam. But Vietnam was an unusual kind of guerrilla war, since in the end the decision was reached through the use of main-force North Vietnamese regular divisions, not the guerrilla Viet Cong. While it is true that the "counterinsurgency" enthusiasms of some in the US military in the early 1960s were not successful, the mythology of the indomitable guerrilla is also easily dispelled. And the problem of untouchable sancutaries, which frustrated US commanders in Vietnam, will not exist in any guerrilla conflict in Afghanistan.

Indeed, there are some guerrilla wars which have been won by Western forces or their regional allies, and which are not entirely different from Afghanistan. The Omani campaign against the Dhofar rebels in the 1970s is a case in point: guerrillas operating from remote desert and mountain outposts were indeed defeated and destroyed, through a combination of special operations (by the British SAS) and regular forces (Omani, Iranian and Jordanian). But the goal there was more ambitious in fact: to recover and control territory, which is not a goal in Afghanistan. British counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya in the 1950s and Borneo in the 1960s are also examples of forgotten successes.

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