Campaign Finds War and Politics Out of Sync

Two weeks ago, U.S. officials predicted that a few days of bombing and a commando raid or two would touch off internal upheaval in Afghanistan. Southern tribes, warriors loyal to the exiled former king, even dissidents within the Taliban would rise to help overthrow the weakened regime, they said.

It hasn’t happened.

Instead, the southern opposition has bogged down in seemingly endless talks. The former king has called for a national council to meet, but no date has been set. The opposition’s sole functioning military force, the Northern Alliance, waits in frustration on the battlefront north of Kabul, the capital. And only a handful of Taliban dissidents has turned up so far.

In short, the two sides of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, military and political, are out of sync. The air war against the extremist Islamic Taliban regime is proceeding at a brutally efficient pace, now augmented by commando raids against critical military targets. But the effort to organize a revolt on the ground is going much more slowly, on Afghan time.

“There’s nothing there,” one U.S. official said. “The Afghans are moving about 10 times faster than they are used to--but it’s nowhere near as fast as we would like.”

As a result, the scenario outlined by Bush administration optimists--airstrikes followed by an uprising on the ground that would help U.S. special operations forces hunt down Osama bin Laden--has been stretched out.

“This is a tough one,” said Robert B. Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Somalia and other hot spots. “It’s going to take a lot of time.”

On the political side, he said, “they’re way behind.” On the military side, “you want to let Afghans do the work. But are we patient enough for that?”

Besides, he noted, the Taliban is a decentralized militia, not a hierarchical government. “How are we going to know when they collapse?” he asked, only partly tongue-in-cheek.

What U.S. officials had hoped to arrange in Afghanistan was a war on four fronts. The United States would handle the air war. Local forces, both the Northern Alliance and the southern tribes, would attack the Taliban on the ground. The exiled former king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, would preside over a national assembly to set up a new government. All that would make it much easier for U.S. special operations teams to pursue Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network, wherever they might hide.

Some parts have worked; others haven’t--at least, not yet.

President Bush succeeded in assembling a global coalition of support for the anti-terrorist campaign, plus military access to neighboring Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Air Force and Navy warplanes quickly succeeded in destroying the Taliban’s air defense system, the Pentagon reports, and are methodically striking at increasingly smaller targets.

Military officials say they essentially have run through their initial bombing targets and are now striking mostly at “targets of opportunity”--Taliban units they happen to spot.

On the ground, U.S. officials wanted to see military action against the Taliban by members of the country’s largest ethnic group, Pushtuns in the south, as well as by the largely non-Pushtun Northern Alliance. The Taliban draws most of its support from Pushtuns.

The CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence service went to work recruiting southern tribal leaders, promising money, guns and support--a strategy one official called “Buy the Pushtun”--but found it hard going.

“It’s very difficult to pull together these factions that have been warring with each other since God was small,” another U.S. official said. “They hate and distrust each other.”

The Northern Alliance had appealed to the United States for airstrikes in support of an offensive against Kabul, but the administration held off, hoping that a broader opposition coalition could be organized first.

The Northern Alliance responded by promising that if it seized Kabul, it would cede control to an authority named by the United Nations. But the U.N. hasn’t worked out its plans either.

The United Nations’ special envoy for Afghanistan, Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, warned that forming a peacekeeping force will be no small task. No country has publicly volunteered for the hazardous mission of pacifying Kabul, although the predominantly Muslim Turkey has agreed to consider the idea.

With the political track moving slowly, the United States took its military campaign to a new level last week, launching a swift commando raid against Taliban positions in the southern stronghold of Kandahar. Military officials suggested that the raid was only the first of many.

U.S. officials also moved to provide direct military support to the Northern Alliance, apparently under an agreement that the northern forces will focus on taking the northern cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz, not Kabul.

But if the alliance succeeds in taking those cities, one U.S. advisor warned, “there can be no excuse for any further delay in going into Kabul.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged that his forces have not yet found an ally in the southern, Pushtun-dominated provinces.

“We do not have the kind of interaction with elements of the south that one would have to have for progress,” he told reporters.

The effort to organize a Pushtun resistance has been slowed by several factors, officials said. Some traditional Pushtun leaders went into exile after the Taliban seized power in 1996 and cannot rally their onetime supporters instantly. Others supported the Taliban and have not yet decided to switch sides. Many distrust the government of Pakistan, which is the U.S. partner in the effort. And Pushtuns are riven by internal disputes.

But it isn’t all the Afghans’ fault. “The United States has been neglecting Afghanistan for years,” Oakley said--an assessment that some officials privately agree with. “These people have been willing to work with us, but we didn’t have time for them.”

The one thing most Pushtuns agree on, officials said, is the role of the exiled king--not as a restored monarch, but as a neutral mediator. But even there, problems have arisen.

Zaher Shah has been working, with U.S. support, to assemble a Supreme Council for National Unity, a kind of interim political authority accepted by both Pushtuns and the Northern Alliance.

The Northern Alliance was supposed to deliver its list of representatives to the king last week. It hasn’t.

The council was supposed to have 120 members: 50 from the Northern Alliance, 50 from the south and 20 named by common accord. The king had hoped to call it into session by the end of the month, aides said.

The Northern Alliance’s envoy to the ex-king, Younis Qanooni, left Rome for northern Afghanistan on Oct. 1 to collect 50 names from among the alliance’s many factions. Almost three weeks later, he hasn’t returned.

Meanwhile, southern factions are putting pressure on the former king and his aides to reduce the Northern Alliance’s representation on the council.

A group from the south met with the king last week and demanded that the council be expanded to 250 members--a proposal that would reduce the Northern Alliance’s representation to one-fifth of the body.

Another potential point of friction is the presence of Taliban defectors on the council. The ex-king is apparently willing to include “moderate Taliban” members, but the Northern Alliance objects to that idea.

Meanwhile, the bombing, the U.S. commando raids and covert actions will continue, U.S. officials say.

Last week’s airstrikes, the second week of U.S. bombing missions, reflected a shift to a new phase of the war, including preparations for American ground operations.

The fixed targets were largely gone. Instead, the bombs and missiles struck troop concentrations, garrisons, trucks and tanks, and artillery pieces.

U.S. forces also began to use the kind of aircraft and bombs that normally would be involved before deployment of special operations forces.

“You’re beginning to see the kinds of planes that do ground support, the AC-130s, the Predator [surveillance drones] that are doing some very close-in reconnaissance,” said retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the former U.S. regional commander for the Middle East. “You could see a very intense air application for a softening-up and preparing for the ground phase.”

Although some U.S. officials had described the bombing’s initial phase as a three- to five-day campaign, experts were skeptical that military planners really believed that they could polish off every worthwhile target in only a few days.

“It was kind of silly to ever have expected that,” said Eliot Cohen, a professor of military strategy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, who conducted a study for the Air Force on the 1991 Persian Gulf War air campaign.

Defense officials also acknowledge privately that the continuation and intensification of the air campaign made sense, given the pressure to do as much damage as possible in Afghanistan before the onset of winter and the arrival of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Though officials have publicly insisted that neither winter nor Ramadan would cause them to stop the assault, some officials acknowledged privately that the winter will impede some operations and that it would be better to limit strikes during the holy month, given Islamic sensitivities.

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McManus and Richter reported from Washington. Boudreaux reported from Rome.