Dropping 15,000 Pounds of Frustration

Originally developed to clear jungle vegetation and create helicopter landing zones in Vietnam, the 15,000-pound “daisy cutter” bomb is not easy to build or use. Each contains more than six tons of aluminum powder slurry. Technicians need six weeks to pour and cure each of the gigantic munitions, which have a shelf life of one year.

With only half a dozen daisy cutters in the entire U.S. arsenal, you know that when one is dropped, it’s for good reason--or a sign of frustration.

In Afghanistan, it’s frustration, born of the U.S. decision to wage war by proxy.

On Sunday night, the fourth daisy cutter of Operation Enduring Freedom exploded near Tora Bora, the mountain hide-out where Osama bin Laden may be holed up, obliterating everything within a 150-foot radius. The use of so many of the scarce and enormous bombs is just one symptom of the apprehension that has spread to the highest levels of the Defense Department.

Amid a flurry of reports from the front suggesting that Bin Laden’s capture may be imminent, administration and defense officials have their fingers crossed, but many are prepared for bad news. They are increasingly pessimistic about the situation on the ground.

Why? Because the war on terrorism has bumped up against a painful fact: The policy decision--made weeks ago--to let Afghans fighters carry the ground war to Al Qaeda instead of having U.S. troops do it has raised the odds of Bin Laden and his closest associates escaping.

At week’s end, anti-Taliban commanders and others in the Tora Bora area were claiming that Bin Laden was finally trapped. That may yet prove true, but U.S. officials were not quick to embrace such optimism. They had heard it before.

At a news briefing late in the week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pointedly noted that Tora Bora wasn’t the only cave complex under attack.

The United States has been fighting in Afghanistan for 10 weeks and prosecuting what has been called the “leadership interdiction” phase of Enduring Freedom for nearly three weeks.

Now, senior officials admit that as much as they were surprised by the ease with which the Taliban regime fell, they have been equally taken aback by “how difficult it is to trap the rats running out of the ship,” as one high-level Defense Department advisor put it.

“We don’t have a clue” where Bin Laden is, a senior Pentagon official said in an interview this week.

The uncertainty stems from two factors:

First is the difficulty of finding one person, or even a handful of fugitives, under any circumstances. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, former Panamanian President Manuel A. Noriega and the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar all proved how difficult it can be for armed forces to track down a lone fugitive. In Afghanistan, there are “literally thousands” of caves to hide in, and Al Qaeda forces know these places well, Rumsfeld said.

U.S. Strategy Leaves Fighting to Afghans

Despite bombing, special and covert operations, alliance troops and the presence of Pakistani battalions on the border between the two countries, “they can escape,” he warned, and “there’s just simply no way you can put a perfect cork in the bottle.”

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said, “The American people have to be prepared for the fact that we may be hunting Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan months from now.”

The second factor springs from the decision to use U.S. ground troops sparingly.

Visiting Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., last week, Wolfowitz said, “The smaller our footprints are, the less we intrude on the Afghans themselves, the most successful we’ll be.”

An officer in the headquarters was less diplomatic in a recent interview: The secret of Operation Enduring Freedom, he said, “was getting Afghan to fight Afghan.”

That has profound consequences.

Those consequences were at least faintly discernible in the early phases of the war, but the experience at Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold whose surrender was negotiated by local tribal leaders, threw them into bold relief: Keeping all but a relative handful of special operations personnel away from the front lines put responsibility for the basic U.S. mission in the hands of Afghan leaders who don’t always share American priorities.

Rumsfeld has been explicit about the basic military mission: “to capture or kill all the Al Qaeda and prevent them from escaping--[and] to capture or kill the senior Taliban leadership,” he said Tuesday.

Yet events in Afghanistan have refused to stay on message, especially when local allies were involved.

From the Bagram air base north of Kabul, where the Army’s 10th Mountain Division deployed quietly on the ground Thanksgiving morning, to the desert airstrip with no name southwest of Kandahar, where the Marines arrived in Afghanistan days after their Army brethren, events have moved more quickly than anticipated.

Plans have had to be scrapped. And while the policy of leaving the fighting to anti-Taliban forces has kept U.S. casualties low, it may have proved a blessing to Al Qaeda’s hard-core adherents.

Looking for Meaning in Marines’ Deployment

Since the Marines arrived, there has been much speculation as to the purpose of their boots on the ground. Cynics said it was merely to give the fourth service a piece of the action. More accurately, it reflected a broad consensus among policymakers not to repeat what is seen as the cardinal sin in Kosovo--having no troops on the ground.

There was also a feeling that U.S. influence over the future Afghanistan government would be enhanced by holding some territory, even if it was borrowed. And creating a forward air base would be valuable.

The Marines also had a tactical mission, according to Rumsfeld: blocking reinforcements to the Taliban or Al Qaeda from the north and west, and keeping the enemy from moving toward the Iranian border or from fleeing the country.

Unfortunately, the Marines were largely ineffective in carrying out those tactical missions.

First of all, the Marines’ Camp Rhino is about 100 miles away from the city.

Second, no serious Taliban reinforcement of Kandahar was attempted. The city fell more quickly than anticipated. And many Taliban fighters escaped. So did Mullah Mohammed Omar, the top Taliban leader, who ranks just below Bin Laden on the U.S. “wanted” list.

The noose tightened, but it turned out to have no neck inside it.

The Marines never had a directive to take on the Taliban, nor to conduct house-to-house fighting in Kandahar.

What’s more, they never controlled the area north of Kandahar. Trying to bottle up Omar and company in Kandahar from Forward Operations Base Rhino was the geographical equivalent of trying to trap fugitives in downtown Los Angeles by stationing troops in San Diego.

The fighters actually in position to seal off the city belonged not to the Pentagon but to Pushtun tribal warlords who never had as close a relationship with the United States as the Northern Alliance did.

Afghan Commanders Look at Big Picture

Moreover, U.S. military analysts say many of these local commanders--steeped in centuries of local power struggles--expect the Taliban to resurface as a force to be reckoned with after the United States moves on; playing the part of “collaborator” by helping bring Bin Laden or Omar before a U.S. tribunal may not be good politics in the long run.

Much the same dynamic exists around Tora Bora. And the Pakistani army units supposedly cutting off Bin Laden’s escape routes to the north and east may not be much more reliable in U.S. terms.

Then there is the winter.

Military professionals love to opine that wars are won and lost not on tactics, but on logistics, terrain and weather.

Each day the war continues, planners fret about the bad flying weather it brings to that desolate region near the top of the world. Cloud cover grows over targets. A vicious jet stream puts added strain on aircraft and aerial tankers flying west as they return to the Persian Gulf from their 1,400-mile Afghanistan missions.

For ground troops, it is even worse. When the 10th Mountain Division and Marines hit the ground in November, a piercing wind was already blowing in from the snowcapped mountains. Temperatures south of Kandahar now drop below freezing at night, and it is even colder in the wind. Higher in the mountains, where the fighting is now concentrated, true winter is fast approaching.

This is forbidding territory even for mountain troops from upstate New York, but the plan has never been for them to assault the crags of the White Mountains. That task is still assigned to local fighters and their U.S. special operations companions.

This past week, tribal forces undertook the “final” battle against Al Qaeda defenders of Tora Bora. U.S. bombers unloaded strings of “dumb” and cluster bombs. AC-130 gunships pounded observation posts and bunkers.

And the daisy cutter floated down.

When the smoke cleared, scouts found trees reduced to ashes and the ground littered with shrapnel and unexploded bomblets. Outposts and shelters were destroyed.

“We’ve been on the ground,” says Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “and it had the desired effect: to kill Al Qaeda.”

Al Qaeda foot soldiers, that is.

U.S. forces may deny the Taliban and Al Qaeda a sanctuary from which to conduct global terrorism, but in the Pentagon and at Central Command in Florida, there is a growing recognition that this is not the same thing as catching Bin Laden.

U.S. military power is awesome, but the mountains of Afghanistan are vast when measured against one man.

And when the United States leaves the fighting to surrogates, it may have to settle for their priorities instead of its own.

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William M. Arkin is an adjunct professor at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, a consultant to nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, and the author of several books on military affairs.