Experts: U.S. ready, able to hit terror sites

As the United States considers military action against Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization, military observers say an assault in Afghanistan by paratroopers, supporting air power and ground troops is a main option.

Defense experts agree the U.S. military is capable of such a risky and difficult mission and is ready to move fast.

Speaking at the Pentagon Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said only that the U.S. is considering a wide range of actions.

“It’s not a matter of a single event,” he said. “We’re talking about a very broadly based campaign to go after the terrorist problem where it exists, and it exists in countries across the globe.”

But Rumsfeld said the U.S. response would be different than in the past.

“We were used to dealing with armies and navies and air forces and ships and guns and tanks and planes,” he said. “This adversary is different. It does not have any of those things. It does not have high-value targets that we can go after. But those countries that support them and give sanctuary do have such targets.”

Preliminary step

A U.S. air and missile attack against targets in Afghanistan is a possibility. But unlike in the Persian Gulf war and in Kosovo, such air power would be only a preliminary step toward an on-the-ground mission and future punitive actions--not a response in itself, experts say.

Such a mission would have to be relatively brief--an in-country deployment of a month or two at most, even for a unit as large as the 82nd Airborne Division, the spearpoint of America’s ground force rapid military response.

“Any sort of indefinite base in Afghanistan is fraught with every danger under the sun,” said British Royal Army Maj. Charles Heyman, editor of Jane’s World Armies. “You’ve got a time window of around two months. After that, you’re bogged down in a guerrilla war, and it’s certain they will grind you down.”

To succeed, an airborne assault would not necessarily have to bring about the capture of bin Laden, as long as some damage was done to his organization and Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, Heyman said.

“The U.S. and its allies will be satisfied with the destruction of certain Taliban assets and the humbling of the Taliban in the eyes of the Afghan people,” Heyman said. “The people loathe the Taliban by and large. They just want to be left alone. So I think your chances of getting hold of some of the Taliban movers and shakers who’ve probably been supporting bin Laden are good.”

The chances of a successful U.S. operation have been bolstered by having three British commando regiments totaling 20,000 troops just finishing an exercise in Oman.

But experts said the most important element is having the best possible intelligence on the location of bin Laden terrorist cells and Taliban leaders.

“Intelligence is key to everything we’re doing,” said retired Army Col. Bill Taylor, former director of international security affairs for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and one of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s teachers at the National War College. “If we don’t have intelligence, forget military options.”

Jumping-off point

Another requirement would be the seizure or creation of a large-scale military ground and air base within or near Afghanistan, from which to dispatch combat teams to seek out and destroy bin Laden and Taliban targets. One or two abandoned Russian airfields in northeast Afghanistan offer that opportunity.

America has at its disposal a powerful fighting force in the XVIII Airborne Corps, which includes the 82nd Airborne Division; the 101st Airborne Division, which flies in helicopters; the 3rd Infantry Division, Mechanized; and the 10th Mountain Division.

The parachuting 82nd, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., is the most mobile and can be deployed in 48 to 96 hours. Totaling 14,338 troops, the 82nd includes a “Ready Brigade” and battalions that can be moved out at once.

Also available are 13,000 to 14,000 Special Forces units, all of them airborne-qualified, and another 1,800 to 1,900 U.S. Army Rangers.

They possess a large array of high-tech weaponry and mobile artillery and, once an air base is established, could be supported by attack helicopters brought in by cargo jets as well as tactical fixed-wing aircraft.

According to Jane’s, the Taliban has an effective fighting force of about 45,000 men, of whom 7,000 to 8,000 are believed to be fundamentalist Pakistanis and another 2,000 or so like-minded Arabs from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf states, plus a few Arab-Americans and Anglo-Arabs.

Country is a weapon

Their most powerful ground weapons are 130 mm and 152 mm artillery pieces. The Taliban has no air force to speak of and only a few anti-aircraft guns and some old shoulder-launched Stinger ground-to-air missiles provided by the Reagan administration when they were fighting the Russians in the early 1980s.

The Taliban’s biggest weapon is Afghanistan itself, which has defeated would-be conquerors from the British of two centuries ago to the Russians, who lost 15,000 soldiers killed and another 50,000 wounded and injured in the Soviet Union’s unsuccessful invasion and occupation that began in 1979.

Nearly the size of Texas, Afghanistan has a barren and largely mountainous landscape. The country has few significant military or civilian targets of any value and its 12,000 miles of roads and highways are often primitive and prone to ambushes.

The Taliban is in control of perhaps 90 percent of the country, but the northeast is held or at least contested by rebel opposition groups, organized as the Northern Alliance.

How large a force the U.S. would have to place in Afghanistan would depend on the size and value of its targets.

“If the target is no more than bin Laden and a couple of henchmen, then you’re talking about a Delta Force unit or Rangers,” said Dan Goure, national security expert at the Lexington Institute. “If you’re talking about destruction of infrastructure or a base camp, then you’re talking about company-size or better. If you’re going to go after the Taliban, then you’re talking 82nd Airborne.”

Russian officers interviewed this week tried to put a damper on such prospective U.S. operations, saying it would take months to move up supplies and troops for a major land assault or even an operation such as the allied occupation of Kosovo.

But that is not how the 82nd operates. A likelier scenario would be for air domination to be established by Navy warplanes from the carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Enterprise, now in the Persian Gulf, and Air Force aircraft stationed on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Tankers would provide aerial refueling and AWACS flying command center jets would coordinate aerial attacks.

Sustained air bridge

Under this air cover, the scenario goes, parachuting forward elements of the 82nd or a special operations force would seize one of the Russian airfields or other territory, establish a perimeter and then provide security for additional units who would expand the base area and establish a command center and facilities for continued air supply. Attack helicopters could be brought in by C-17 jumbo cargo planes.

“You’d have to have a large, sustained air bridge,” said Heyman. “I think you’re going to insert a division because there’s a considerable amount of security to do. You’re not going to line the fence. You’re going to be patrolling out there. The airfields built by the Russians will take C-130s. They can put [Army] engineers in and they can have a C-17 strip in a couple of weeks. There is no doubt the 82nd are the ideal troops for this sort of thing. This is tailor-made for the 82nd.”

Resistance by large-scale Taliban units would be unlikely, defense experts said.

Non-lethal weapons

“This is a cat-and-mouse game,” said Heyman. “You’re not going to get any meaningful opposition from the Taliban. They’re not configured that way and they’re not equipped for it. They’ll take to the hills and they will do classic insurgency, guerrilla-type fighting. That’s going to be a real problem.”

Bin Laden’s units move about the country under cover and hide in caves fortified in some cases with 20 or more feet of granite.

“We don’t have a conventional weapon of any kind that will penetrate 20 feet of granite,” said Taylor. “But, given good intelligence, as long as we know where the targets are, we can find the caves. If they come up and start moving, we can move in.”

Attack helicopters, like the Apache, as well as ground troops are equipped with high-tech, night-firing weaponry that can locate targets in the dark.

A major concern in small or large-scale U.S. military operations in the area is avoiding killing or injuring innocent civilians, though Bush has alluded to that possibility in some of his statements.

“We don’t have to blow everything up,” said Goure.

The U.S. military possesses a variety of non-lethal weapons, including a gas that can make many people unconscious. But that, notes Heyman, raises the specter of the U.S. using chemical weapons when it fears terrorists employing them against American civilians.

Word of bin Laden and Taliban movements will be key. As one senior intelligence official said last weekend, “our best allies in this may be the Afghanistan people on the ground,” especially if discontent with the Taliban rulers is as widespread as believed.

The CIA has been recruiting agents fluent in the various Afghan languages, but they are many. Though 50 percent of the population speaks Afghan Persian, 35 percent speak Pashtu, and 11 percent Uzbek and Turkmen, and there are 30 minor languages in the nation.

Extraction of the U.S. forces should follow in reverse order, with the troops manning the security perimeter the last to leave.

Success for the U.S. now depends on the extent of the goal.

“The long-term aim in this has to be to divorce the international terrorist groups from the countries that harbor them,” said Heyman. “The choice is going to have to be given. You either harbor these guys or you don’t. If you don’t want them there, you take them out yourselves, or you’ll get allied assistance to take them out. If you don’t take them out, we’re going to take them out for you.”

Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Colin McMahon in Moscow contributed to this report.