Blended Tactics Paved Way for Sudden Collapse

Amid the tumult of war, the scorched shell of a pickup truck in a downtown intersection attracted only passing attention. Yet the truck, and the grisly remains of its occupants, suggest part of the answer to tantalizing questions:

How, after weeks of seemingly limited progress, did U.S. forces and the opposition Northern Alliance achieve a shattering breakthrough that almost overnight rewrote the military map of this troubled land?

Was the Taliban regime a paper tiger all along, or has the United States developed highly effective new tactics to fight so-called low-intensity conflicts in places such as Afghanistan?

And if so, what do the triumphs this week portend for the remainder of the U.S. war against terrorism?

The pickup truck in Kabul had been demolished by a “smart bomb.” The torn military garb and mangled weapons of its riders left no doubt it had been carrying Taliban fighters. But how had an American pilot, flying high above the city, been able to distinguish this truck from scores of identical vehicles used by civilians?

The answer, as best as it can be reconstructed, appears to be that the pilot had help--friendly eyes on the ground, most likely a special forces infiltrator who spotted the passing soldiers and guided the ordnance to its target.

That, according to analysts inside and outside the U.S. military, represents in microcosm how the breakthrough was achieved: a textbook application of combined operations that highlights the Pentagon’s ability to fuse air and ground operations.

Air power, special forces, covert operations, intelligence and local allies were blended using a formula developed during conflicts in the Persian Gulf, Kosovo and elsewhere. Though it starts slowly and progress is hard to measure from the outside, the approach offers the possibility of hollowing out an enemy force, leaving a front-line shell that cannot be reinforced or sustained once a ground offensive begins.

Specifically, heavier-than-ever use of smart bombs and missiles, guided by special forces units able to infiltrate even a Taliban stronghold such as Kabul and to supply precise, real-time target information, made air power a devastating weapon.

Equally important: When it came time for the ground offensive, U.S. military advisors, benefiting from lessons learned as far back as Vietnam, had cajoled fractious members of the Northern Alliance into cooperating.

And the precise blend of tactics was tailored to the particular vulnerabilities of this foe, and the unique characteristics that have distinguished warfare in Afghanistan for decades, if not centuries--especially the tradition of local warlords shifting their loyalties to the winner of the moment.

“The hallmark of air power is no longer Vietnam. It’s the Gulf War and Kosovo,” said military analyst William M. Arkin. “The only way to look at air power now is as a very precise and coercive instrument.

“It may not work on its own, and it may not be able to give us everything we want,” he added. “But the dominating factor in those wars and in this war has been air power.”

What remains to be seen, Arkin and others hasten to add, is whether this week’s triumph leaves the U.S. in a better or worse position to pursue its ultimate goal: eradicating Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.

“When you’ve got two players, not always can you expect things to go the way one side wants them to go. The other guy gets to play too,” one military analyst said Wednesday, requesting anonymity because of his ties to the Defense Department.

Whatever the future brings, events of the past few days suggest that skeptics may have underestimated what the U.S. military can do, given the right circumstances.

Less than a week ago, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, was greeted with something close to derision at a news conference when he expressed satisfaction with how the war was progressing.

One questioner baldly suggested that Franks had failed to make his case with the American people and compared him unfavorably with the commander of Desert Storm.

“What you hear,” the questioner declared, “is, ‘Tommy Franks is no Norman Schwarzkopf.’ ”

That early criticism was shared by some Afghans on both sides of the conflict.

On a night of particularly heavy attacks on Kabul early in the air war, residents of the Lowaye Babajan district in the city’s west end counted at least 35 explosions in the neighborhood. Alas, they said, the vaunted American bombs hit only wreckage--a handful of previously destroyed tanks and piles of rusting military junk.

The early assessments of Northern Alliance commanders were equally negative: The Americans were wasting time striking and restriking targets far from the front lines.

Moreover, when the focus shifted to the Taliban forces around the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and other strategic points, alliance commanders lectured visitors on the shortcomings of U.S. tactics.

The Americans should take lessons from the Russians of the 1980s, some suggested. The Russian bombers then had come in low, obliterating whole villages at a time. U.S. warplanes, by contrast, flew high above their targets, unleashing small numbers of bombs and missiles in pinprick strikes that would surely prove futile.

Only gradually did the alliance commanders around Mazar-i-Sharif and other Taliban strong points begin to change their minds: Those seeming pinpricks were systematically destroying the individual tanks, trucks and other equipment on which the Taliban depended.

And when the major ground assault finally came and Taliban fighters emerged from their shelters, intelligence analysts discovered their numbers were notably smaller than expected: The air assault had not only destroyed vital equipment, it apparently had inflicted substantial casualties on troops as well.

“Desert Storm showed that you can use air power against deployed, dug-in forces if you are going to follow up on the ground with fast-paced attacks,” said Mark Clodfelter of the National War College in Washington.

As viewed by the Northern Alliance, what air power achieved was welcome, but it had been needlessly delayed by politics. Washington had kept the bombers away for weeks, in this view, out of reluctance to give the alliance more than token support until a balanced political coalition had been put together to govern the ethnically divided country after the Taliban had been toppled.

Some U.S. officials acknowledge that in the first weeks of the campaign they held back on front-line strikes in part because they did not want the military campaign to jump ahead of the effort to organize a post-Taliban government.

But the overriding reason for the delay in attacking front-line positions at Mazar-i-Sharif and elsewhere was military, officials say. It was the pounding of assets far from the front that made the eventual breakthrough possible.

The aerial bombardment began by the book, with attacks on the Taliban’s air defenses. The aim: to render the skies safe for U.S. aircraft anywhere, any time.

Next came telephone exchanges and other communications infrastructure, as well as targets grouped under the loose heading of “command and control.”

During the U.S.-led conflict against Yugoslavia in 1999, the goal of hitting telephone, microwave, television and other communications facilities had been to bring the disruptions of war home to a civilian society accustomed to modern conveniences.

In Afghanistan, the goal was to deny the facilities to the Taliban and Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorists, making their communications harder and forcing them to rely on other methods--including short-range electronic communications--that might seem safe but were open to American eavesdroppers.

The importance of the third step was clearer inside the Pentagon than outside it. “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics,” the old saying goes, and from the start, Defense Department officials insisted that crimping the enemy’s ability to resupply and reinforce its troops was crucial.

By the third week of the air campaign they were talking about how the Taliban was unable to resupply the troops in the north and how that would have an effect.

What looked like floundering from the outside was a systematic hollowing out of the Taliban’s ability to sustain its far-flung forces, Pentagon officials insist.

One more factor proved crucial but hard to see from a distance. For reasons peculiar to Afghanistan’s history, the Taliban had a fearsome reputation, but a soft outer shell: the various local commanders who had come over to its side when the Taliban first swept to power.

The hard-core Taliban--sometimes called “foreign Taliban”--was concentrated in the central cities. The “local Taliban,” whose members were responsible for controlling vast areas of the country outside the major cities, were more often than not warlords who had joined the winning side when the Taliban was strong.

When the balance began to tip in recent weeks, these local Taliban fighters had no qualms about defecting. That was the Afghan way.

In addition, the regime in Kabul proved to be so repressive, and so dependent on supporters in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, that many Afghans had come to see it as an occupying force.

And U.S. air power was an effective spur to those battlefield conversions. In particular, the arrival of the B-52s marked the start of a far more harsh and truly relentless phase in the air war that would steadily undermine the Taliban.

After four weeks of air attacks, Lt. Gen. Charles F. Wald, commander of combined air forces in Afghanistan, declared early this month: “They’re basically at this point militarily defeated for all practical purposes.

“Quite frankly, I don’t think the Taliban really realize how bad off they have it,” he added.

Neither did many Americans.

*

Times staff writers John Hendren and Paul Richter in Washington and Maura Reynolds in Termez, Uzbekistan contributed to this report.