Massive Buildup Gives U.S. Political, Military Options

With U.S. air, land and sea forces positioning themselves within striking distance of Afghanistan, the broad outlines of a military campaign to destabilize the country’s ruling Taliban and root out terrorist leader Osama bin Laden are beginning to take shape.

The campaign has probably begun, with covert intelligence-gathering and elite commando units quietly working with opposition forces in the country. Next may come nighttime bombing raids on the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the southern city of Kandahar, where the Taliban has some of its headquarters, said military analysts and former Pentagon officials.

And while Bush administration officials indicate that Afghanistan will be the primary target of military strikes, military action is not likely to end there.

The buildup of conventional forces in the region--enough to fight what the Pentagon calls a “major theater war”--is being put in place both to back initial strikes within Afghanistan and to deter others in the region, such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, from using the opportunity to strike out at the United States.

“The more [military] power you have, the more diplomatic and political power you have,” said Anthony Cordesman, a former official at the Defense and State departments. “You don’t know when you may have to use massive power to rescue a special forces operation if something unexpected were to happen. And deterring other countries like Iraq is important as well. Iraq is not a sideshow. It is there, and it has chemical and biological weapons.”

In the last 10 days, elite special forces commando teams from the Army and Air Force, trained to drop quietly behind enemy lines, have been ordered to deploy to the region.

Over the weekend, according to defense officials, units of the 82nd Airborne and 101st Air Assault divisions arrived at bases in Pakistan, near the border towns of Quetta and Peshawar.

Those units joined 100 to 130 planes deployed to the Persian Gulf area last week. The planes include F-15E fighter bombers, F-16 fighters, B-52 bombers, B-1 long-range bombers, E-3 AWACS airborne command-and-control aircraft and tanker aircraft to be positioned in the skies between the United States and the Gulf region to refuel warplanes.

Two Navy aircraft carrier battle groups are in the region; two more may be steaming toward it.

Pentagon officials have said that search-and-rescue aircraft would probably be based in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan. But they said that no fighter jets or bombers have been placed there. The Uzbek government reported that U.S. military aircraft carrying reconnaissance equipment landed Saturday at a base near Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.

A senior Pentagon official said the administration was also continuing to negotiate with the government of Saudi Arabia over the use of military facilities there to direct any assault against Afghanistan or other targets.

The concentration of U.S. military might in the region gives military planners a wide range of options and should allow the military to move swiftly and change tactics as what is known about the terrorists changes.

The Pentagon has kept a tight lid on operational details of its plans, aware that surprise is a key element in fighting the shadowy and dispersed Al Qaeda terrorist network believed to be responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

But given the visible buildup of U.S. forces and military equipment in the region, combined with what is known about Afghanistan’s limited military, energy, infrastructure and communication assets, it is possible to construct several scenarios for the use of military force.

All indications point to an initial two-pronged military campaign driven by covert operations within Afghanistan. It will rely on fleeting intelligence about where Bin Laden and his lieutenants are at a given time and be combined with sustained bombing of Taliban assets.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned that the war against terrorism will be hard to pinpoint, unconventional and sometimes “invisible.”

“Needless to say, there’s not going to be a D-day as such,” Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld also alluded to U.S. intentions of going after the Taliban to get to Bin Laden, as well as the need to use unconventional methods and ground forces.

“It’s a little like a billiard table, trying to figure out exactly how it might happen,” Rumsfeld said. “The balls careen around for a while, you don’t know what will do it. But the end result, we would hope, would be a situation where the Al Qaeda is heaved out and the people in Taliban who think that it’s good for them and good for the world to harbor terrorists and to foment and encourage and facilitate that kind of activity, lose, and lose seriously.”

Increasing U.S. land, sea and air assets in the region allow military planners to prepare for a broad range of contingencies, including supporting covert operations and ground troops, and being able to rapidly change tactics.

“The military planners are trying to seize the initiative, to put themselves in a place where they hold the cards and they are not just reacting to the other side’s moves,” said Larry Seaquist, a retired Navy battleship captain and Pentagon strategist.

But accomplishing U.S. aims in Afghanistan in particular will be maddeningly difficult.

Nearly the size of Texas, Afghanistan is mountainous, largely barren and racked by generations of war. Its 12,000 miles of roads and highways are mostly unpaved, primitive and often prone to ambush. Land mines regularly kill and maim adults and children in the city and in the countryside, and pose a threat of unknown dimensions to U.S. ground forces. And while the country has a primitive electric grid and phone system, smashing them may do little to force the government in Kabul, which hardly relies on modern command-and-control systems, to deliver Bin Laden.

The Pentagon is likely to use heavy bombers, such as the B-52, and carrier-based fighter jets to target the dozen or so airfields the Taliban has scattered around the country, as well as militia headquarters and depots that house troops, trucks, ammunition and supplies.

The Taliban, buttressed largely by foreign mercenaries, can field 15,000 to 50,000 men armed with an aging collection of Soviet equipment, plundered and in varying states of disrepair. The motley arsenal includes MiG-21 fighters from the 1960s, SU-22 fighter jets and Soviet-made transport and attack helicopters, plus some armored vehicles, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

The Taliban’s militia, currently deployed north of Kabul and in the northeastern sector of the country, also has Soviet-made Katyusha rockets, SA-7 surface-to-air missiles and about 100 T-55 and T-62 tanks.

To determine the strengths and weaknesses of both the Taliban and Al Qaeda, special operations units made up of a few people with language skills are likely to put in sensors to help intelligence analysts detect the terrorists’ movements. Then small commando units might helicopter in, equipped to hold a single airfield or to capture a junction point.

Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes on aircraft carriers and at military bases in the region are likely to move quickly to bomb Taliban training camps, including one large camp immediately outside Kabul. Other Taliban air bases include Shindand and Herat in the west, and Mazar-i-Sharif and Qonduz in the north.

Larger ground-force bases and training camps in and around major cities may be secondary targets.