Taliban Will Unravel if Key Players Gone, Experts Say

To get their hands on Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, U.S.-led forces likely would have to first deal with his hosts, Afghanistan’s Taliban fighters. And as military planners probe for weak spots, they would find several to exploit.

Compared with the modern armies the United States and its allies defeated in Iraq and Yugoslavia over the last decade, experts here say, the Taliban’s weapons, training and organization are almost as poor as the country that the fundamentalist Islamic movement controls.

Though the Afghans are tough opponents in combat, as British and Soviet occupiers have discovered, the U.S. and allied forces could knock the Taliban government off balance by going after its key leaders rather than launching heavy airstrikes. Then the Afghan people might well finish the job by rising up against the unpopular regime, Afghan and Pakistani experts say.

“In the Taliban, you have a force which is a ragtag army of the defeated late-19th century type,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political science professor at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University, who has studied Afghanistan’s wars for 20 years.

“Frankly speaking, they literally are in a hopeless situation,” said Rais, who is convinced that the Taliban’s days are numbered even if the regime turns over Bin Laden, who is viewed by U.S. officials as the prime suspect in last week’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon. “In no way are they going to save their power. It’s too late for that after this mischief.”

If U.S. forces were careful to focus on the Taliban leadership and avoided civilian casualties, the Taliban’s worst enemy could be its own unpopularity among Afghans, said Abdul Hai Warshan, an Afghan journalist based in Peshawar.

“The weak point of the Taliban is itself,” said Warshan, who spends a total of about three months a year with the two sides in Afghanistan’s civil war as a reporter for the Voice of America’s Dari-language service. “They have lost their credibility in their own society. People are fed up with the Taliban.”

The Taliban emerged in the mid-1990s during the lawlessness that followed the 1989 withdrawal of the Soviets from the country. At first the U.S. and others saw the fundamentalists as a stabilizing force, but their strict interpretation of Islamic law and protection of Bin Laden turned American officials away.

The Bush administration faces risks of its own. The U.S. was badly stung before by underestimating its enemies, most recently during a 1993 debacle in Somalia, when the death of 18 American soldiers in a street fight brought criticism at home and forced the withdrawal of U.S. peacekeepers.

But a lot changed on Sept. 11.

If the suspected death toll in last week’s attacks is confirmed, the hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed in just two hours an estimated 6,000 people--about one-tenth the number of Americans lost during more than a decade of war in Vietnam.

For now, President Bush would appear to have widespread U.S. public support for military action. The protests Washington has to worry about are in Pakistan, where supporters of the Taliban and of Bin Laden are calling for widespread strikes and demonstrations Friday.

The Taliban’s biggest military advantage is Afghanistan’s rugged terrain. The barren mountains and dusty flatlands have been a graveyard for foreign invaders for centuries.

But the Taliban’s home ground advantage could be overcome if, as the Pentagon has indicated, the U.S. strategy relies on small Special Forces units that move in and out of Afghanistan.

This “smaller-is-better” style of war plays to the American advantage of stealth, mobility and overwhelming technological superiority, Rais said.

It is almost the exact opposite of the overwhelming force that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, enshrined in the “Powell doctrine” during the 1991 Persian Gulf War as the U.S. and a coalition of allies drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

In effect, the U.S. would be sending in guerrillas to fight guerrillas. And as Bush tries to build a military coalition against Bin Laden and his Taliban hosts, Rais suggested, the Americans should also try to bring Afghan refugees and Taliban opponents in as allied soldiers.

“There are so many hungry Afghans who want handsome salaries, I think that raising a national army where everyone has some experience in killing someone is not very difficult,” he said. “There are many Afghan generals [exiled in Pakistan] looking for a job.”

In addition, the U.S. could find common cause with the Northern Alliance militia run by Burhanuddin Rabbani, who is recognized by the United Nations as Afghanistan’s ruler even though his weak coalition controls only about 5% of the country.

The Northern Alliance has been backed into a small sliver of northern Afghanistan and lost its top general, Ahmed Shah Masoud, to bomb-wielding suicide assassins earlier this month. But it knows the geography and the enemy, and it opposes both the Taliban and Bin Laden.

Western intelligence on the Taliban is limited, so foreign experts are left to guess the extent of its army and weaponry. The Taliban might have about 50,000 fighters, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. But an estimated 18,000 of those are fighting a major offensive against the Northern Alliance.

The Taliban reportedly has no more than 1,000 aging Soviet-era tanks, which are little match for the modern armor the U.S. could deploy. The Afghan force of about 80 armed helicopters and less than 50 warplanes also is from the Soviet era, and some can no longer fly, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an authority on the world’s military forces.

The Taliban fighters have an unknown number of shoulder-launched Stinger antiaircraft missiles, other antiaircraft batteries and medium-range Scud missiles, similar to those Iraq fired at Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War.

The U.S. and any allied countries that might join in an attack on Afghanistan would find it relatively simple to fragment the Taliban into isolated groups by cutting supply lines and communications, Rais said.

One of the Taliban movement’s biggest weaknesses is its fanatical allegiance to a supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. His rule by decree has alienated most ordinary Afghans, but they are too afraid to challenge him, Rais said. Without Omar, the movement would be weakened.

“If he is taken out, what is left is factions fighting for succession,” he said.

Legend has it that Omar became a local hero in 1994 when a warlord in Kandahar who was backed by Pakistan’s military intelligence raped two young women after having their heads shaved.

Omar, who had lost one eye as a guerrilla fighting Soviet occupation in the 1980s, rounded up 30 talibs, or students, and gave them guns. They captured the warlord and hung him from the barrel of a tank.

The Islamist student movement was born of such vigilante justice. The Taliban quickly came to the attention of Pakistan’s military intelligence, which had been trying for years to bring stability to Afghanistan, in part with the hope that Pakistan would become the gateway to the oil riches of Central Asia.

Omar’s Taliban movement went from obscurity in 1994 to seizing Kabul in 1996 without any heavy fighting, Rais said, largely because tribal warlords stood aside, either because of monetary incentive or the force of Omar’s persuasion.

Pakistan was crucial to the mullah’s quick rise to power and will be just as important in any effort to remove him--if only because the nation has good intelligence support and informants in Afghanistan.

“If you don’t have good intelligence, you are a blind giant looking for buildings to blow up,” said American analyst David Isby, author of several books on the Afghan military.

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Inside the Taliban

The Islamic militia that controls Afghanistan has called on all Muslims to wage a holy war on the United States if attacked.

Identity: The Taliban (“students of religion” in the Pushtu language) emerged in 1994 with many followers who had attended conservative Muslim schools in Pakistan. They rose to power on promises of peace in a country ravaged by a decade-long war with the Soviet Union and subsequent fighting between Islamic factions.

Leadership: Mullah Mohammed Omar, the reclusive leader, is supported by a circle of eight to 10 colleagues. Veterans of the war against the Soviets fill their fighting ranks. Rules are enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and for the Prevention of Vice, a religious police force.

Principles: “No other Islamic country comes close,” says Afghan scholar Amin Tarzi, to the TalibanUs extreme variant of Islam. Many of the rules that it bases on its interpretation of the Koran, including an end to schooling for girls past the age of 8, have alienated it from Muslims outsid Afghanistan.

Support and opposition: The Organization of the Islamic Conference refused to admit the regime, and only three of its members (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) have granted it full diplomatic recognition.

Internal Rise

1994: Pakistan appoints a group of Afghan fighters known as the Taliban to protect a convoy charged with opening a trade route to Central Asia. 1994: The Taliban captures the southeastern city of Kandahar, which becomes a base for it. 1996: Taliban forces sweep into Kabul, the Afghan capital. The group claims to control three-quarters of the country. 1996: Saudi millionaire and reputed terrorism mastermind Osama bin Laden receives Taliban protection in Afghanistan after being expelled by Sudan. 1998: The northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif falls to the Taliban. Thousands of ethnic Hazaras are reported slaughtered in the operation. 2001: About 95% of Afghanistan is under Taliban control. Main opposition leader is killed.