How al-Qaida regrouped to fight again Failure to destroy hard core at Tora Bora leads to biggest battle yet
The Guardian
Tuesday March 5, 2002
Julian Borger in Washington
The heaviest fighting and casualties that US troops have faced in Afghanistan are paradoxically occurring months after most Americans had assumed that the war was over.
The Bush administration's warnings that the fighting could last for a very long time were generally shrugged off as excess caution. But the Pentagon knew better. It was aware that it had failed to account for al-Qaida's military core, much of which had slipped through its fingers at Tora Bora in December and had been making efforts to regroup ever since.
In preparation for a drawn-out cat-and-mouse campaign, the US marines were replaced late last year by regular army units, the 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne, which are better equipped for sustained missions. A permanent airbase was also established at Manas in Kyrgyzstan, so that strike aircraft would be available for raids at short notice and to relieve the navy's aircraft carriers, which had provided the principal launching pads in the early months of the war.
The ferocity of the current battle in Paktia province, south of Gardez, demonstrates that al-Qaida is still well armed and organised. It is not only fighting from the mouths of caves, it is hitting back with pre-emptive attacks and ambushes.
On the plus side, from the Pentagon's point of view, the battle at least indicates that not all of Osama bin Laden's followers managed to slip out of the country during the failed Tora Bora offensive. At the outset of that operation, US military officials were portraying it optimistically as al-Qaida's last stand, in which its leadership might be caught or killed. But when US special forces and marines finally reached the network of caves where their quarry was believed to be hiding, they found them empty.
The Pentagon, it appears, relied too heavily on Afghan militias to do much of the fighting at Tora Bora. The various Afghan warlords had fought enthusiastically alongside US special forces to capture the main towns and cities, but in that campaign, their agendas had coincided.
The warlords had an interest in seizing the seats of power in each province, but their men had little incentive to trudge up into the snow to hunt through booby-trapped caves for an adversary they believed posed little threat, and for whom some may have had sympathies as fellow Muslims. Most importantly, al-Qaida members were able to pay local tribesmen more to let them go than the Americans had offered to kill them. Very few were caught or found dead.
In Tora Bora, the US military relied mostly on a local leader, Hazret Ali, who is reported to have sub-contracted the job of blocking the escape routes to Pakistan to a lieutenant, Ilyas Khel.
According to a detailed report in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor, Mr Khel was made a higher offer from al-Qaida Arabs to guide them through the ravines of the White Mountains into the tribal areas of western Pakistan. Others may have escaped to other areas of Afghanistan, including Paktia to the south-west. Afghan fighters have expressed astonishment at the lack of a US military presence there to seal it off.
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday refused to accept that tactical mistakes had been made. Tora Bora, he said, "was a very different situation, different terrain, and a different time in the conflict".
Nevertheless, the continuing campaign in Paktia province shows that the lessons of Tora Bora have been learned. At least 1,000 regular army troops have been deployed, alongside multinational units and hired Afghans, to ring the area.
Most of the regular soldiers are Americans, though there are token contingents from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway. Until now, Britain has been the only non-Afghan US ally to play a significant role in combat. The multinational factor in Paktia reflects an effort to make other states feel they have a stake and a role in the war against terrorism.
The two main reasons for avoiding a large-scale use of US troops until now have been a concern that the campaign not be perceived by Afghans as an American invasion, and a wish to minimise Washington's casualties. But those two constraints are no longer seen as binding. A credible interim government has been installed in Kabul, and after Tora Bora the Pentagon has realised that higher casualties are an inevitable price to pay to meet its objectives.
That denotes a huge shift in US military thinking, based in turn upon a sea-change in the American public mood. Anxiety about the country's reaction to heavy casualties - the so-called "body-bag syndrome" that has haunted the US since Vietnam - is no longer seen as an unbreakable political constraint. The administration believes that the searing experience of September 11 has tempered public opinion, preparing it to accept casualties as the price that has to be paid in the fight against terrorism.
Public opinion polls suggest that George Bush's team may be right and that Americans still believe that the war in Afghanistan, and the global war on terror in general, is in their vital interests.
Mr Rumsfeld hammered the point home yesterday. "This will not be the last such operation in Afghanistan," he told journalists. "The global war on terrorism must be just that: it must be global to be effective. As we drive them from Afghanistan, we must not allow them safe haven elsewhere."
All the signs suggest that there is broad public support for that campaign. The real test of America's stomach for war will come when the Pentagon turns its attention to George Bush's "axis of evil", and in particular, Iraq.
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