Military Lands Exactly Where It Didn’t Want To

The fierce combat unfolding in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan is just what the Pentagon had hoped to avoid in this campaign: a battle in which superior air power and technology aren’t trump cards and hundreds of U.S. troops are fighting hardened guerrillas in rocky terrain, thin air and brutally cold weather.

The large ground assault near the town of Gardez is taking the U.S. military into precisely the sort of conditions that felled the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s--and precisely the sort of battle the Clinton administration assiduously avoided in Kosovo.

It is also the ground war Al Qaeda apparently wanted.

“Cities and mountains are two places where you don’t want to fight,” said one defense official who has been involved in planning the Gardez operation. “But if you’re a terrorist and you hear that, that’s where you want to go.”

Despite the heaviest U.S. combat casualty tolls of the war--eight servicemen dead and about 40 injured in the fighting to date--officials said the U.S.-led force of more than 2,000 will continue battling Al Qaeda and Taliban forces until the militants are either dead or captured.

But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters Monday that the Gardez combat is not likely to mark the end of the war. Indeed, he said future battles are expected to look more like this large-scale operation than the air campaign that marked the war’s early months.

“There will be other battles of this type” against “sizable pockets” of resistance scattered across the Central Asian nation until the Afghan government can assert full control, Rumsfeld said.

Soldiers Plunging Into Vulnerable Situations

In opting for this strategy of heavy U.S. troop deployment, the Pentagon hopes to seal off escape routes and avoid the problems that plagued earlier battles, when friendly Afghan forces did the heavy fighting but let hundreds or thousands of militants flee.

But the U.S. is knowingly plunging ahead in areas where it is most vulnerable.

The Pentagon is using MH-47 Chinook helicopters flying low to the ground, even though it knows from hard experience in Somalia--where 18 U.S. soldiers died in an ill-fated 1993 battle that saw two Black Hawk helicopters shot down--that the aircraft is highly susceptible to ground fire.

Special operations forces are engaged in risky combat and searches in and around caves--something Pentagon officials said in the early days of the war they wanted to avoid at all costs.

And ground troops are fighting in rugged, snow-covered mountains at elevations as high as 11,000 feet, where temperatures have dipped to about 15 degrees at night, even though only a few U.S. military units still engage in extensive cold weather training. Most U.S. troops are using cold weather gear first designed in the 1950s, rather than the new, high-tech materials and technologies widely available in the private market for cold weather activities.

U.S. forces do not have much recent experience fighting in such conditions.

“We’re best trained for the last war that we’ve fought, and if you look at the last wars, you had Somalia, the [Persian] Gulf War, back to Vietnam,” Marine Corps Capt. Ken Walker said. “All of those are very hot environments. There are not a lot of guys who can talk about what it’s like to fight in cold weather. It is one of the hardest environments to fight in, but it just has not been a real focus in a long time.”

The tactics and difficulties U.S. forces are facing in Gardez are already raising some concerns among current and former military commanders.

“It pretty much follows the trajectory of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, which was very successful at the beginning and then dragged on for years,” said retired Marine Corps Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, commander from 1991 to 1994 of the U.S. Central Command, which has responsibility for operations in Afghanistan.

“If it were easy, our proxies could do it,” Hoar said. “I don’t think we have any choice.”

Richard K. Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, said he hopes the Gardez fight turns out to be an anomaly.

“If it looks like there might be an indefinite problem of suppressing guerrilla operations and raids by small, surviving groups of these people, it will raise all the questions of whether this was risking suffering the fate of the Soviets,” Betts said.

With eight U.S. servicemen dead already in the battle, a debate has begun among current and former officers over the decision to mount a large ground assault.

Use of Ground Forces Rejected in Kosovo

In the 1999 effort to drive Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark called repeatedly for the use of ground troops supported by Apache attack helicopters but was overruled by policymakers in Washington afraid to risk casualties.

The thinking in the current campaign by advocates of ground force is that the only way to prove the usefulness of infantry troops is to overcome the fear of taking casualties.

“I think there was an element of guys wanting to see this kind of fight,” said a recently retired senior military officer. “There’s a whole school of thought that wants to get U.S. ground forces engaged. They are afraid that if they don’t get them engaged and show their utility, that people are going to start questioning how much [money] should be allocated to ground forces.”

But military officers said the U.S. will adapt as it goes along. While AC-130 gunships, which attack ground forces, were never used in Somalia to help the besieged Black Hawk choppers, they are being used extensively in Gardez.

“We’re going to learn a hell of a lot out of this engagement, so when we go on to other projects we will do things differently,” said retired Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, Air Force chief of staff until 1997. “I don’t think anybody will be taking people in Chinook helicopters in the same circumstances. They may have learned a lesson from that. We’ll adapt.”