Limited, Low Profile Strategy Called Key

Only a carefully calibrated, limited military campaign can achieve the stated American objectives in Afghanistan, according to political and military specialists in Pakistan, a front-line state and U.S. ally in the war against terrorism.

The Bush administration’s goals--getting its hands on terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden and his militant network, as well as taking down and replacing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime--cannot be realized either by massive military force or token reprisals, these sources insist.

The political costs of either option are too high, and the practical benefits would be marginal at best, they say. Defining the narrow boundaries of effective retaliation is arguably the biggest challenge facing U.S. leaders in the early days of the new war.

To avoid stoking anti-American sentiment in this region of Asia, the U.S. military must manage something it rarely does well, these experts say: operate with a low profile.

The debate over how to respond underscores the complexity and uniqueness of the conflict in which the United States finds itself. America’s enemy is not a powerful, highly visible opponent that fits easily into the cross hairs of a bombsight. It is something far more elusive: groups of shadowy individuals and the pockets of despair and hatred that spawn them.

“People are expecting a highly visible attack, but if you want to be effective, then you won’t do that,” warned Zulfikar Ali Khan, Pakistan’s retired air force chief and a former ambassador to the United States.

“If you bomb, what are your targets? Kabul already looks like Dresden in 1945,” he said, referring to the German city firebombed by the United States and Britain during World War II.

“I know the [American] public wants action, but this is the true test of leadership--making people accept what they don’t want to,” he added.

The use of raw military power might seem a logical approach in war, but it is not the answer in Afghanistan, according to those familiar with conditions there.

The Taliban’s defensive forces are hardly impressive. They include a weak, ill-disciplined regular force of about 50,000 fighters who don’t wear uniforms, along with an air force of about 20 aging Soviet-era MIG-21 warplanes. And with the Taliban virtually isolated diplomatically, there would be no friends to supply it with the kind of weaponry that allowed Afghan guerrillas to chase out Soviet forces in the 1980s.

But some of the world’s most rugged terrain, the Afghans’ proven ability at guerrilla fighting and millions of unexploded land mines from more than two decades of combat could make deployment of U.S. ground forces a nightmare.

Mountainous terrain ideal for ambushes could quickly turn the search for Bin Laden--suspected by U.S. officials in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon--into a bloody and humiliating wild goose chase.

“You could be chasing people all through those hills and come up with nothing,” Khan said.

When the United States decides to move forward militarily against Afghanistan, it should work to shield military operations as much as possible from the public eye in order to blunt reaction in the streets of the Muslim world, said Rifaat Hussain, chairman of the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad.

“Make your strikes, but don’t turn them into a media circus,” Hussain said, noting that scenes of carnage during the 1991 Persian Gulf War turned many in the region against the United States. “Media management of American military activities is going to be extremely important. They have to avoid a collective reaction from the Muslim world.”

While massive strikes by cruise missiles and B-52 bombers might win short-term applause from an American public eager for retribution, they could prove disastrous to the long-term objective of eradicating the seeds of terrorism.

Raining more misery onto a destitute country that already has more than 1 million internally displaced people and that faces the prospect of large-scale starvation this winter would only further alienate the United States from Muslims. It also would play directly into the hands of fundamentalists who are trying to frame the conflict as a war between the United States and the world’s 1 billion adherents of Islam, the specialists believe.

Ijaz Shafi Gilani, chairman of the Gallup/BRB market research organization in Pakistan, said that a survey taken in 27 Muslim countries after the Sept. 11 attacks found that only 9% of those questioned supported the idea of airstrikes against Afghanistan. “This means military action has no support here or elsewhere [in the Muslim world],” he said.

A token military response similar to the cruise missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan following the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa would be equally dangerous for the United States, regional specialists believe, because they would be seen as a sign of weakness and lack of resolve.

Some experts believe that taking advantage of Pakistan’s intelligence-sharing to mount a carefully planned special forces operation might be the most effective way to seize Bin Laden. The wealthy Saudi militant reportedly left Afghanistan’s southern city of Kandahar shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and is believed to be hiding somewhere in the remote mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

At the same time, experts say that ending the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan might be easier than many outside the region believe. Isolated internationally, weakened by years of war and increasingly unpopular at home because of its failure to deliver any hope for the future to most of Afghanistan’s 26 million people, the Taliban regime could collapse under only marginal outside military and political pressure, the experts believe.

According to one scenario making the rounds in Pakistan, a public appeal by the former king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah, for a government of national unity, coupled with military pressure from the Taliban’s internal foes, known as the Northern Alliance, might be enough to break the Taliban.

Zahir Shah, now in his 80s, lives near Rome. The former king, who was driven from power in 1973, told the Turkish newspaper Sabah in an interview published Monday that he is ready to return to Afghanistan if his presence could resolve the crisis.

Some argue that merely supplying the Northern Alliance and providing it air support could allow its forces to overrun the Taliban and take Kabul, the capital. However, this option carries risks, specialists say.

Indeed, some go so far as to say that a Northern Alliance victory over the Taliban carries the seeds of defeat for America’s longer-term goal of achieving stability. Because the alliance is dominated by minority Tajiks, it would probably be rejected by Afghanistan’s larger Pushtun population. And if the alliance’s brief history of ruling Afghanistan during the first half of the 1990s is any guide, it would be reluctant to share power and could even unleash a blood bath in an attempt to crush resistance.

“The trick is to get Afghanistan under a pro-Western government that can stand on its own,” said Hussain, of Quaid-i-Azam University. “That’s not the Northern Alliance.”