Now, A Shift From Air To Ground "/toolbar/yellowline2.gif" WIDTH="550" HEIGHT="3" align="bottom">

Below find a Philadelphia Inquirer article on the next stage in the Afghanistan military campaign, with expert interviews including CDI Senior Analyst Christopher Hellman.

By Drew Brown and Jonathan S. Landay
Inquirer Washington Bureau
Wednesday, October 10, 2001; Page 1

Instead of a large invasion, military planners likely will rely on quick raids. The idea is to wear down Taliban forces.

WASHINGTON - Allied forces say they now control the skies over Afghanistan, which means the military will move to a new phase of the fighting, including the use of ground forces. But unlike the large ground invasion used to liberate Kuwait in 1991, U.S. and British special forces are likely to use surprise and speed to attack Taliban forces and disappear. The strategy is intended to wear down Osama bin Laden's forces and their protectors without a full-scale foreign invasion that could unify the Afghan people behind the Taliban.

Ground operations are likely to be coupled with air strikes in a military and psychological campaign designed to divide and weaken Taliban resistance while flushing out bin Laden. The strategy is not to defeat the Taliban militarily, but to unhinge it and encourage other Afghan leaders to form a new coalition that either would hand over bin Laden or stand aside while the United States and its allies destroyed his terror network, senior officials said.

Options available to military planners include: launching raids from Uzbekistan, where the Army's 10th Mountain Division and other unspecified U.S. forces are now massing; launching attacks from the carrier Kitty Hawk, now in the Indian Ocean; and even seizing an Afghan airfield, which would allow U.S. forces to operate more freely.

Air strikes will continue, but the focus is changing from eliminating fixed targets to hitting Taliban troops or bin Laden's militia, vehicles or large weapons as they are spotted. "With the success of the previous [air] raids, we believe we are now able to carry out strikes more or less around the clock," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday as U.S. planes struck Taliban and bin Laden targets for the third day in a row.

"Essentially, we have air supremacy over Afghanistan," said Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He acknowledged that remaining antiaircraft fire still could be a problem, but said "the tactics that we'll utilize will keep us out of their range."

Soon, low-flying helicopters could start bringing in special-operations forces once most of the ground threats are eliminated. But those forces are still being sent to the region.

So far, two officials said, ground activities are confined to Army Special Forces working in northern Afghanistan as part of a CIA operation to aid the United Front.

Such assistance can be crucial in gathering basic intelligence, said retired Maj. Gen. David L. Grange, a former Army Ranger, Green Beret and operator in the Army's secretive Delta Force.

The United States has about 46,000 special-operations forces and support personnel, including the Army's Delta Force, Green Berets and Rangers, plus Navy SEALs, Air Force special-operations units and Marine Force Reconnaissance units. There have also been reports that British Special Air Services, or SAS troops, the most experienced Western troops in Central Asia, have been active in the region.

But even when troops are poised, logistical constraints and political considerations in the region limit their use to a handful of scenarios.

Delta Force and Rangers, for instance, can swoop down out of Uzbekistan on raids aboard the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment's MH-60 Blackhawk or CH-47 Chinook helicopters to conduct quick raids against suspected hideouts of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Delta operators and Rangers have worked closely together in past operations, such as the failed 1979 Iranian hostage-rescue mission and the unsuccessful 1993 effort to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Adid.

Or these troops could fly in on Navy CH-53 helicopters off the Kitty Hawk, which some senior officials have suggested will be used as a floating base for special-operations forces. The carrier left Japan last week without its usual complement of attack aircraft.

Twelve-man Special Forces, or Green Beret, teams specialize in teaching local forces tactics and how to use weapons. In Afghanistan, they likely will be used in this role with the United Front, or Northern Alliance, that opposes the Taliban and to help coordinate air strikes in support of those forces, Grange said.

Once the Kitty Hawk arrives off the coast of Pakistan, the United States also would be in position to seize an Afghan airfield, which could serve as a base for operations inside the country. An airfield could also serve as a safe haven at which defecting Afghans could be fed and housed as winter arrives, suggested one official who, like others interviewed, asked not to be identified.

In previous operations such as Panama in 1989 and Grenada in 1983, Army Rangers have spearheaded these airborne assaults, with a brigade of 82d Airborne troopers dropping in soon after as reinforcements.

Several airfields in the southern part of Afghanistan lie in flat desert plains where it would be relatively easy for troops to establish a defensive perimeter and for the Air Force to fly combat air patrols that could spot and pick off attackers.

Chris Hellman, a senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information, said an airfield seizure would carry several advantages.

"One, you're closer," Hellman said. "Two, you eliminate some of the political fallout related to conducting combat operations in Afghanistan from any of its neighboring countries." But establishing that sort of presence on the ground also carries certain dangers.

"We don't want to give the same appearance the Soviets did," Grange said, referring to the 1979-1989 occupation that ultimately ended in Soviet withdrawal and humiliation.

The frequency of further air strikes likely will become more unpredictable and irregular, senior defense officials said. Now that most of the fixed targets have been eliminated, "we're poised to hit a lot of moving targets," said one defense official.

Tactics in the new phase have several major objectives. One would be to step up pressure on the Taliban and foment internal splits between disaffected commanders unwilling to sacrifice themselves for bin Laden and the Taliban's spiritual chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar, who has protected bin Laden and hosted his al-Qaeda terrorist network since 1996.

Coupled with airdrops of humanitarian aid, leaflets and radio broadcasts from specially equipped aircraft, these efforts are meant to send a message to the Afghan people that the Taliban is no longer in control, senior officials said.

A second objective would be to aid the United Front, a loose coalition of opposition groups that mostly is made up of ethnic minorities. The Taliban, in contrast, consists mainly of the dominant ethnic group, Pashtuns.

The rebels control pockets of territory in about 20 percent of Afghanistan. Its estimated 15,000 fighters are vastly outnumbered by the Taliban, which has an estimated 45,000 fighters. The anti-Taliban fighters are not as well armed, although they have begun receiving Russian weapons paid for by the United States.

The U.S. objective, as described by two senior officials, is not to help secure a military victory for the United Front, which is dominated by ethnic Uzbek and Tajik leaders, who are anathema to America's Pakistani allies, but to prompt as many Taliban supporters as possible to switch sides and create a coalition made up largely of the majority Pashtun ethnic group.

In the north, around Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif, where opposition forces are facing the Taliban, and perhaps also around Herat, where there are Iranian-backed opposition fighters, air power will be used to "pin down, isolate, disarm and demoralize" any organized Taliban forces and degrade their ability to fight, one of the senior officials said. The prime targets will be armor, artillery and any facilities that haven't already been blasted.

Opposition leaders have complained that they have received only a trickle of new Russian weapons and remain in poor shape to mount any sustained offensives. Around Mazar-e Sharif, the 700 or so troops of Gen. Rashid Dostom, an Uzbek, lack food, winter clothing and even shoes, and a line of old Soviet T-55 tanks is still sitting across the border in Uzbekistan waiting to be delivered, a U.S. intelligence official conceded.