This post is one in a series on the lessons of the Afghan War. The posts are indexed in this post of 02/20/06.
The initial phase of the Afghan War went swiftly. Al Qaeda's infamous strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred on 9/11/01. The Bush administration decided relatively quickly to take military action in Afghanistan to remove the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban regime and to attack Al Qaeda directly.
Teams of CIA agents and US Special Forces were sent in quickly to establish relationships with the warlords who comprised the opposition Northern Alliance and to prepare for a wider intervention. Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7, 2001. The strategy focused on using American airpower in conjunction with small numbers of CIA agents and Special Forces who worked closely with the warlords and their men who comprised the opposition Northern Alliance.
It was the Northern Alliance that provided the bulk of the troops for ground fighting. In his 2002 book American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, Andrew Bacevich aptly described the Northern Alliance as "an unsavory lot". But they were actually considered the legal government of Afghanistan at that time by the United Nations and most of the countries of the world, including the US, even though they had been outsted from power in Kabul by the Taliban in 1996. "During it years in power," Bacevich wrote, "the Alliance's philosophy of governance had more closely resembled Al Capone's than Thomas Jefferson's."
The initial military results were impressive. This undated summary of Operation Enduring Freedom - Afghanistan from early 2002 by GlobalSecurity.org summarizes it this way:
By October 20, 2001 US and Coalition forces had destroyed virtually all Taliban air defenses and had conducted a highly successful direct action mission on the residence of Mullah Omar in the middle of the Taliban capital, Qandahar. During this time frame Special Forces detachments linked up with Anti-Taliban leaders and coordinated operational fires and logistics support on multiple fronts. Twenty days later, the provincial capital of Mazar-e Sharif fell. In rapid succession, Herat, Kabul, and Jalalabad followed. By mid- December, US Marines had secured Qandahar Airport and the Taliban capital was in the hands of Anti-Taliban forces. Within weeks the Taliban and Al Qaida were reduced to isolated pockets of fighters. On 22 December Franks traveled to Kabul to attend a ceremony marking the inauguration of the Afghan interim government -- 78 days after the beginning of combat operations.
By mid-March 2002, the Taliban had been removed from power and the Al Qaida network in Afghanistan had been destroyed. The US continued to exploit detainees and sensitive sites for their intelligence value in order to prevent future terrorist attacks and to further US understanding of Al Qaida - their plans, membership, structure, and intentions. The US was investigating each site to confirm or deny the existence of research into, or production of, chemical, biological, or radiological weapons. Coalition forces continued to locate and destroy remaining pockets of Taliban and Al Qaida fighters and to search for surviving leadership.
The GlobalSecurity.org account provides a list of various impressive achievements, including:
In terms of operational fires, Navy, Marine, and Air Force pilots have delivered in excess of 18,000 munitions, of which more than 10,000 were precision guided.
During DESERT STORM the US averaged 10 aircraft per target; in ENDURING FREEDOM the US has averaged 2 targets per aircraft. ...
The extensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles has permitted around- the-clock surveillance of critical sites, facilities, and troop concentrations. ...
The US had also made enormous improvements in its ability to bring firepower to bear rapidly. Through improved technology and training, the Tomahawk targeting cycle had been reduced from 101 minutes during ALLIED FORCE [the Kosovo War of 1999] to 19 minutes during ENDURING FREEDOM, with half of the Tomahawks having been fired from submarines.
This list of accomplishments fits well with the style of warfare that the United States developed during the 1990s, from the disastrous Somalia intervention of 1992-3 to the successful Kosovo War of 1999. With the war still going on now in 2006, it may seem less of a decisive victory than it did at the end of 2001. But Bacevich summarized how the results looked to the war managers at the time:
In gaining that victory, the United States lost a bare handful of American soldiers in enemy action. Sympathetic observers were quick to credit the Bush administration with devising an innovative formula for using U.S. military power. More accurately, as one skeptic noted, Operation Enduring Freedom was "Kosovo Redux." As in Kosovo, the idea was to have "American pilots bombing from 15,000 feet, while our local allies ... do the fighting on the ground" - albeit with U.S. special forces as invaluable intermediaries. It was a war won "not with American blood and guts" but with "the blood and guts of the Northern Alliance, helped by copious quantities of American ordnance and a handful of American advisers."
The task allotted to America's own warriors, explained one U.S. Navy carrier pilot just returned from the war, was "to club 'em like baby seals ... and then come home." (my emphasis)
Don Rumsfeld and his "neoconservatives" supporters were quick to embrace the Afghan War as proof that the US could achieve victory quickly with small numbers of American forces, high-tech surveillance and precision airpower. Skeptics regarded that conclusion as misleading, skeptics like Stephen Biddle in his Nov. 2002 paper Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy (US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute).
Biddle's analysis emphasized how important the ground combat was in that phase of the Afghan War, and how critical US forces were participating in that effort directly. He writes that:
... the actual fighting in Afghanistan involved substantial close combat. Al Qaeda counterattackers closed, unseen, to pointblank range of friendly forces in battles at Highway 4 and Sayed Slim Kalay. Al Qaeda defenders eluded detection or destruction by American air attack and had to be overrun at Bai Beche, Highway 4, and Operation ANACONDA. At Tora Bora, failure to commit properly trained and motivated ground troops to traditional close combat probably allowed the al Qaeda quarry to escape.
In other words, it wasn't a case of high-tech weaponry overwhelming the enemy. The personnel on the ground were a critical part of the fight. And he concludes:
The key to success, whether in 1916 or 2002, is to team heavy, well-directed fires with skilled ground maneuver to exploit their effects and overwhelm the surviving enemy. This kind of skilled maneuver, however, is beyond the reach of many potential indigenous allies. In Afghanistan, U.S. proxies with American air support brushed aside unskilled, ill-motivated Afghan Taliban, but against hard-core al Qaeda opposition, outcomes were often in doubt even with the benefit of 21st century U.S. air power and American commandos to direct it. Where we face opponents with the gumption and training to stand and fight, our allies need the same, even with all the modern firepower we can offer them.
This in turn implies that we should neither restructure the military to wage Afghan-style wars more efficiently, nor reflexively commit conventional U.S. ground forces in every conflict. Where we enjoy local allies with the needed skills and motivation, we can expect the Afghan Model to work, and we should use it. But we will not always be so lucky. In Iraq, for example, the lack of a credible, trained opposition bodes ill for an Afghanistan-style campaign without major American ground forces. Deep cuts in ground capability could thus be very risky in spite of our strengths in air power or special operations forces. More broadly, though, we should be wary of suggestions that precision weapons, with or without special operations forces to direct them, have so revolutionized warfare that traditional ground forces are now superceded. Where our allies are good enough, they may provide the ground troops for us, but what Afghanistan really shows is that the wars of tomorrow - like those of yesterday - will continue to require skilled, motivated forces on the ground, in strength, if we are to exploit our technology’s effects. Precision weapons are making that ground-air combination ever more capable, but against resolute opponents, neither air power nor conventional ground forces will be able to prevail without the other any time soon. (my emphasis)
In an earlier post of 06/13/04, I quoted Biddle's paper at some length on particular incidents. The focus in that post was on when the Pentagon began authorizing torture to be used, and whether Rumsfeld had encouraged US soldiers to look the other way when Northern Alliance forces committed atrocities.
I touched there on one incident that I will look at more closely in sesequent posts, the prison uprising in Qala-e-Gangi, near Mazar-e-Sharif, which is probably known to most Americans (who remember it at all) as the incident which resulted in the discovery of the "American Taliban", John Walker Lindh. It also resulted in the first American death of the Afghan War, that of CIA agent Mike Spann. It was the first incident that raised a major question in my mind about whether the US approach in that war might have some serious deficiciencies.
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