November 8, 2001
MONTH 1

A Month in a Difficult Battlefield: Assessing U.S. War Strategy

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 — There is a saying at the Pentagon that no plan survives contact with the enemy. With the war in Afghanistan now a month old, the United States military has been forced to adjust its strategy.

The Bush administration initially hoped that it could destroy the Qaeda terrorists and topple the Taliban regime that protects them through a combination of day and night airstrikes, commando raids and support of anti-Taliban groups in Afghanistan. It hoped for large defections from the Taliban that have not occurred, and it underestimated the Taliban's resilience.

With its caves, tunnels and urban hiding places, Afghanistan has proved to be an especially difficult battlefield. The United States has been compelled to adapt its approach in several ways, including accepting help this week that it had initially shunned from NATO allies including Germany, France and Italy.

Those allies are not expected to play a decisive military role or to shape strategy, but they do provide political support. As public opinion in major European countries has begun to drift away from supporting the daily bombing of an already ravaged country, the administration has embraced European offers of military support to demonstrate that the campaign against terrorism is a broad one.

On the military front, the first surprise came when the Americans discovered they lacked the intelligence information to carry out the flurry of Special Operations raids they had projected.

The Pentagon's hope was that the bombing attacks would force Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders to leave their sanctuaries, exposing them to attack. The image the Pentagon conjured up was of helicopter gunships packed with commandos in "hot pursuit" of Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants, to use President Bush's description.

The whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden, whom Mr. Bush has vowed to take dead or alive, appear to be as much of a mystery now as when the bombing began.

Given the dearth of intelligence information and the risk of ground operations, there has been only one commando attack, an Oct. 19 assault whose targets were a compound of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's leader, and an airport southwest of Kandahar. The intelligence gathered on the raid was not of great value.

The United States has already suffered little-publicized casualties. During the Oct. 19 raid, five commandos were wounded when the explosives they used to break into a Taliban compound sent pieces of concrete flying.

More than two dozen Americans were injured in their low-level parachute jump onto a darkened airfield. And two Army soldiers were killed when their search-and- rescue helicopter, set aloft for the commando raid, crashed when it tried to land in Pakistan. Last Friday, four Army soldiers were wounded when their helicopter crashed on a misson to rescue a soldier who was sick.

The slow, almost methodical pace of the war has now spurred an important debate about American ground forces and whether there is a role for them in Afghanistan. Some conservative lawmakers are urging the administration to prepare for a ground war, a view that is seconded by some Army officials, who insist that the United States will not win any other way.

For now, the front lines remain largely where they were a month ago, with about 15,000 forces of the Northern Alliance, the main opposition group, arrayed against Taliban forces estimated at 40,000 throughout the country.

Operating without the benefit of an active resistance in the south, the Pentagon has sought to make the best of what friendly forces it can use on the ground: the Northern Alliance, a loose coalition of ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks who have been fighting the Taliban in the northern part of the country.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has never ruled out sending substantial numbers of ground forces, but the Pentagon seems content to let the Northern Alliance do the dirty work on the ground in the winter.

The Pentagon has been obliged to take this course largely because an effective anti-Taliban resistance movement failed to materialize in southern Afghanistan.

Abdul Haq, a legendary mujahedeen commander, was captured and executed by the Taliban when he entered Afghanistan without the Central Intelligence Agency's support. And Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun tribal leader was on the verge of being captured by the Taliban when he was plucked from deep inside Afghanistan by an American military helicopter. He has since been ferried back to Afghanistan.

In the north, the fighting abilities of the Northern Alliance are limited. A Pentagon briefer said today that some of the alliance's attacks involve cavalry charges against Taliban tanks. He said the United States was air-dropping horse feed to the alliance.

Still, the administration clearly hopes that the Northern Alliance succeeds in capturing Mazar-i-Sharif, a strategically important city in northern Afghanistan, before winter sets in. That is now the chief immediate military target, Pentagon officials say.

At the front line about 35 miles north of Kabul, there are no signs of movement as yet, while the Northern Alliance has reported a limited advance in the north.

To aid the Northern Alliance, the United States has sent teams of Special Operations forces into Afghanistan to call in airstrikes and to determine what weapons the alliance needs. American warplanes, in turn, have dropped an ever expanding tonnage of bombs, including two "daisy cutters," which are 15,000 pound bombs.

Seizing Mazar-i-Sharif would enable the Northern Alliance to open a vital supply line to Uzbekistan to the north. It would also enable the Pentagon to claim that its proxies have taken an important piece of terrain that the Americans might use to use to set up temporary bases inside Afghanistan.

Even with a breakthrough on the northern front, however, the Northern Alliance's campaign is unlikely to be decisive. The movement is not acceptable to the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan.

In the end, the crucial war theater is not the north but the south, especially near Kandahar, the Taliban's political stronghold and an important base for Al Qaeda operatives.

At home, Mr. Rumsfeld has told the American people to prepare for a conflict that would drag on for years. But the projected duration of the war appears to vary, depending on the venue.

In South Asia, he predicted the war would end in a matter of months, an important assurance for Pakistan, which would like to see a short war and an early departure for American forces in the region.

The long and uncertain nature of the war has not only led Washington to adjust its military strategy; it is adjusting its political strategy as well. For weeks, the only assistance embraced came from Britain, America's closest ally, which has very able commandos, and Turkey, a Muslim nation whose forces are very much in demand by the United States, and Canada and Australia.

In essence, the Defense Department had concluded that including forces from other nations was not worth the trouble of getting a broad coalition to agree on what to do. That has now changed.

The German, Italian and French forces now joining the war effort are unlikely to play a vital military role, nor are those nations likely to have a major influence on the American and British war strategy. But their role is a politically important statement and an indication that the tougher the war gets, the more company America is likely to seek.

The Troops: 50,000 Americans Across a Vast Region

Quietly, in the month of war, the United States has nearly doubled the number of American military forces involved, underscoring the deepening commitment to a conflict that is already costing tens of millions of dollars a day, with those costs rising daily.

Today, more than 50,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are deployed across a region stretching from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, Pentagon officials said. Thousands more are expected to join the effort along with still more warplanes and other matériel in still more countries surrounding Afghanistan.

Roughly half of the total American forces — about 25,000 — are aboard naval vessels operating in the northern Arabian Sea, but significantly higher numbers than the Pentagon has previously disclosed are flowing into bases around the region, including several hundred soldiers and marines in Pakistan.

There are also nearly 3,000 Americans in Oman, including Special Operations soldiers from the Third Battalion of the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, officials said for the first time today. An additional 1,500 to 2,000 Americans, including soldiers from the Army's 10th Mountain Division, as well as Special Operations forces, are based in a former Soviet air base in Uzbekistan.

More than 400 American aircraft — including sea- and land-based fighter jets and long- range bombers — are already flying scores of combat missions a day, supported by reconnaissance aircraft, cargo jets and aerial refuelers in elaborately choreographed operations. That includes aircraft continuing to patrol the "no flight" zones over southern and northern Iraq, some of which have been diverted to the war.

In addition, nearly two dozen American ships are operating in the North Arabian Sea, including nuclear-powered submarines, an amphibious assault group carrying the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and two aircraft carriers, the Theodore Roosevelt and the Carl Vinson. A third carrier, the Kitty Hawk, is also in the area, carrying an undisclosed number of Special Operations helicopters and soldiers.

That fleet, supplemented by warships from other allies including Canada, Australia and Britain, is also expected to grow. The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, composed of 2,200 marines aboard three ships, led by the Bataan, have also been ordered to join the campaign, a Pentagon official said.

The American forces are spread out in a way that reflects diplomatic sensitivities in several countries about accepting large numbers of American troops and aircraft.

Problems of acquiring permission to base combat aircraft have sorely complicated the operation, limiting the intensity of bombing raids, officials said. American B-52 and B-1 bombers are based in Diego Garcia, the British island in the Indian Ocean, and must fly several hours before they enter Afghan air space, refueling at least once on the way. This limits their ability to bomb.

Hoping to intensify air strikes on Taliban forces fighting rebel groups in the north, the United States has begun surveying additional bases in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. American commanders hope to use at least some of those bases to stage raids with F-15E's and A-10's, both attack jets that could more rapidly attack targets that emerge unexpectedly during battles on the ground.

So far, the war has been almost entirely an American campaign, with the exception of two instances in which a British submarine fired Tomahawk cruise missiles. Soon, however, the effort will involve a broader coalition of allies, though still mostly in support roles.

France, which already has 2,000 troops in the region, plus Japan, Germany, Italy and New Zealand have all pledged to send additional ships and troops to the area if needed. Turkey and Australia have both announced that their own special operations forces would join the effort.

Italy said today that it would contribute 3,000 troops to the effort, including ships and aircraft.

The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, said the 3,900 Germans planning on taking part would include some 100 special operations troops who could be used on reconnaissance missions. While German forces flew reconnaissance and other support missions during NATO's air war in Serbia in 1999 and later sent ground forces to the peacekeeping operations, the use of special operations troops would be the first German combat operation overseas since World War II.

With allied aircraft, including reconnaissance and other support aircraft from Britain, Canada, Australia and France, the total number of allied warplanes involved in the war reaches nearly 500.

Here in the United States, the deployments are also being keenly felt. On Tuesday, the number of national guardsmen and reservists mobilized since Sept. 11 for the first time exceeded 50,000 — the loose figure Secretary Rumsfeld initially told Mr. Bush would be enough. An additional 415 naval reservists were mobilized today, bringing the total to 52,907.

A senior Pentagon official said that as the campaign progresses and as the administration turns to the Guard and Reserves for missions in the United States, including guarding airports, bridges and nuclear power plans, the total number of reservists mobilized could swell as high as 150,000.

That is still below the number — 265,000 — mobilized for the Persian Gulf war in 1990 and 1991, but it would amount to more than 1 in 10 of the total number of reservists in the military today.

The Battlefield: North and South: 2 Different Theaters

The north and south of Afghanistan present different climates and terrains that increasingly compel different military approaches. In the north, the mountains are already snow-capped and winter is setting in; any military results will have to be achieved soon. In the south, where citrus groves can be found, the constraints imposed by the weather are less severe.

Time will certainly be needed in the south to engineer a coherent strategy and conjure a force to execute it. One month into the American bombardment, a vacuum exists in the Pastun-dominated south, where resistance to the radical Islamic Taliban government seems fragmented or nonexistent.

As Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, an officer on the Joint Chief of Staff, put it the other day, "There are individuals who would try to put together what we — at least, I have heard in one occasion — called a Southern Alliance."

But Roseanne Klass, an Afghan scholar for 40 years, said flatly, "There is no Southern Alliance."

She continued: "The major figures who could form such an alliance are dead or in exile. People with a sense of government, not a sense of fighting, are scattered all over the world. The others keep getting killed. The United States, which washed its hands of Afghanistan 10 years ago, wants an instant result. But they don't know the people or the situation."

The C.I.A. has been working hard to identify potential leaders of a force that could become a Southern Alliance, without visible success. One potential leader, Mr. Haq, who did not have C.I.A. support, was killed last month by the Taliban.

United States officials say a southern force could include former military commanders or political leaders or the exiled king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, who has not set foot in Afghanistan in 28 years. It could even include Taliban turncoats. Anyone could be part of that alliance who might command respect in a loya jirga, an Afghan grand council, that might someday be convened to form a new Afghan government.

But it would have to be controlled by Pashtuns, who also dominate the Taliban. The Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan and its traditional rulers. The Northern Alliance is dominated by Tajiks and Uzbeks.

A Western diplomat who closely follows Afghanistan said the concept of a Southern Alliance was little more than a wish for a silver bullet to speed the Afghan war to a close. "There are still these unrealistic hopes that the Taliban will somehow crumble or that Zahir Shah will convene a loya jirga and somehow set things straight," he said.

A second Western diplomat who also follows Afghanistan said: "These ideas of trying to create government, institutions, policies out of nothing — they can't be done. There's going to be a messy give and take."

For now, with few resources to exploit in the south, American planners are concentrating on the north, and particularly Mazar-i-Sharif. If it falls, the administration will have a tangible victory in hand that might allay concerns in Europe and elsewhere about the bombing strategy.

But the Northern Alliance remains a largely untested force, and the difficulties of marshaling it, or any faction, were clear enough at the Pentagon today. "There is not one `the' Northern Alliance," the Pentagon spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, said. "There are different factions. And there are tribes in the south. And there are people within the Taliban itself that oppose the Taliban regime."

To see what she meant, consider the resistance forces in the north who, with the support of American bombing and American advisers, are pressing to attack Mazar- i-Sharif.

The city, which lies along the Silk Road through Central Asia, is widely seen as the battleground where the control of northern Afghanistan will be decided. As Mazar goes, Northern Alliance leaders say, so goes the rest of the north.

The city sits on a highway that touches many of the main pockets of anti-Taliban activity, from Herat in the west to Taliqan in the east. It also controls a highway that runs from Kabul to Uzbekistan. Its capture by the Northern Alliance could open up the area to greatly increased assistance from the United States, which has established an important base in Uzbekistan.

The campaign for Mazar-I-Sharif brings together two colorful Northern Alliance commanders: Ostad Atta Muhammad, who was a mujahedeen commander at age 18, and Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord long known for his healthy appetites and fickle loyalties. Until recently, they were making little progress, gaining ground one day and losing it another.

According to an aide to General Muhammad, who is in charge of the Mazar campaign, that began to change when Americans on the ground pinpointed Taliban positions for the bombers, helped plan the ground attack and gave orders to commanders and soldiers alike.

The Americans, who apparently wear no uniforms, are said to have set up a camp in Dara-i-Suf, a remote village in the mountains south of Mazar-i-Sharif.

But along the 50-mile front that stretches from the Tajik border to the outskirts of Taliqan, the military campaign seems uneven. For two weeks, American B-52's and fighter-bombers have been pounding Taliban positions along a five-mile area just south of the border with Tajikistan. The Taliban positions sit dangerously close to an important supply route for the Northern Alliance.

The commander of rebel forces there, Mamoor Hassan, says his units are ready to attack, and at the same time he complains that his food and ammunition will last only four days.

In that way he differs little from his comrades in the Northern Alliance. American helicopters have been spotted in the air along Afghanistan's northern borders, but the presence of American advisers here and nearer to Kabul has been kept quiet.

The Weapons: Change in Air Forces May Be in Works

For the Pentagon, every war becomes a laboratory for new weapons and tactics. In the Persian Gulf war, the military sent the Joint Stars aircraft, a surveillance plane that tracks troop movements on the ground, while it was still in development. The plane helped track armored columns of Iraqi Republican Guard.

In this campaign, a high-flying, long-range drone called Global Hawk has been pulled out of development and sent to the front, to expand the military's reconnaissance abilities.

The air campaign, now entering its fifth week, has seen a role reversal in combat flights. Unlike the case in the gulf war, in which Air Force warplanes dominated the skies, the lion's share of the bombing missions in this war have been flown by Navy F- 14's and FA-18's off carriers in the Arabian Sea.

That may change soon. The Pentagon is assessing airfields in Tajikistan and other Central Asian countries that would allow Air Force fighters now flying long missions from the Middle East to operate from bases much closer to Afghanistan.

Not all the American technology has worked perfectly; it never does. Errant American bombs have strayed into residential neighborhoods, reportedly owing to malfunctions or human target-selection mistakes. Many Afghan civilians have been killed.

B-52's and FA-18's mistakenly attacked warehouses used by the Red Cross for relief supplies when military officials forgot to take the buildings in Kabul, the Afghan capital, off a target list.

Although the American military is famous for its high-technology precision weapons, the Pentagon has relied on some of its oldest arms to attack Taliban ground forces and try to shatter their will to fight.

B-52 bombers, upgraded since the Vietnam War, are dropping dozens of 500-pound unguided bombs on Taliban troops dug in along the front lines. Lumbering AC-130 Spectre gunships rain heavy caliber machine-gun and cannon fire down on enemy positions as they did in Southeast Asia more than three decades ago.

There are certain places on the battlefield where commanders want the maximum punishment, not precision. Last weekend, for instance, the Air Force hit front-line Taliban forces with two of the 15,000-pound BLU-82 "daisy cutter" bombs — one of the most powerful conventional weapons in the American arsenal that also dates from Vietnam. The bombs can obliterate an area hundreds of yards in diameter.

"They explode about three feet above the ground, and as you would expect, they make a heck of a bang when they go off," Gen. Peter Pace, the deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week, describing the daisy cutter. "The intent is to kill people."

Of course, the Pentagon has also thrown its most advanced weaponry into the fight against an elusive enemy that hides in caves and tunnels, and tries to elude electronic surveillance by using couriers to pass orders between commanders.

Most of the bombs dropped over Afghanistan have been guided to their targets by satellites or laser beams. In some cases, Special Operations forces on the ground have called in airstrikes using laser pointers. In the gulf war, only about 10 percent of the bombs dropped were precision munitions.

Air Force F-15E fighter-bombers can carry a 2,000-pound AGM-130 missile that is guided by a video camera, and can fly horizontally into caves carved into mountainsides, although it is not known if they have yet done so in Afghanistan.

Warplanes have dropped 5,000-pound bunker-busting bombs that are designed to burrow more than four stories down before detonating in subterranean Taliban command compounds.

The Pentagon is using new and improved technological eyes and ears in the war in Afghanistan. One unmanned surveillance aircraft, known as the RQ-1 Predator, has been praised by commanders as an effective, inexpensive and risk-free means of spying on enemies and pinpointing targets. The C.I.A. has armed some of its Predators with missiles, and fired at convoys believed to be carrying Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. But Mullah Omar has apparently escaped unscathed.

The Logistics: Rebel Forces Need More Supplies

If the loose alliance of Afghan rebel armies opposing the Taliban is to go on the move and fight through the formidable military perils, natural obstacles and remorseless winter that face them, they will need a steady flow of supplies of all kinds.

So as they strive to break out of their stalemate, the most important thing they need may not be more aerial firepower or ingenious American tactical advice. As veteran commanders never tire of saying, amateurs discuss tactics, but professionals understand logistics.

"We are providing equipment, food, ammunition, weapons, water, food for their horses," said General Pace of the Joint Chiefs. This, it seems, is the first war of the 21st century to be fought on horseback.

Only in the last week or two have supplies from outside started to flow to the rebels in significant amounts. But there are signs that the flow is about to increase markedly.

In a rear area behind the Northern Alliance lines outside Kabul, for instance, an airstrip is being completed and expanded, some supplies are being ferried in by Soviet- designed helicopters, and a team recently arrived to help prepare the short runway for deliveries by cargo planes. American Special Forces have been seen arriving by helicopter at the airfield.

Air Force C-130's, their rear doors opened so that parachutes can yank pallets out of the plane in flight, could glide in close and drop tons of supplies onto the airfield, without their wheels ever touching Afghan soil. A smaller C-17, designed for short, rough runways, can land and take off from just 3,000 feet of hardpack.

What will they deliver? Weapons, of course, mostly of Russian design. Medicine, as disease is as likely to thin their ranks as anything fired off by the enemy.

But as Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday, a crucial advantage will come from being able to move in the desperate cold and survive.

"We are resupplying the opposition with ammunition, with food, with blankets," he said, "we hope in the not-too-distant future with cold weather gear. The fighting forces on the side of the opposition on our side will be much better prepared for winter than will the Taliban."

"If you remember, the first part of our campaign against the Taliban was going against the warehouses," he continued. "and their ammunition supplies, and we've done a pretty good job of taking those things out, so what's left for the Taliban is what they have on their back and what they have stored in caves and other places around Afghanistan, which we don't think is very much."

Of course, will is an intangible thing, and it is not clear yet that even a better-equipped, warmly clothed Northern Alliance has the resolution to take on a Taliban army that is far larger and fortified by large numbers of Arab volunteers.

Some rebel commanders say that their trigger fingers are itching but that their bellies and their bandoliers are still too light.

Atiqullah Baryalai, the Northern Alliance's deputy defense minister, said this week that some of his men did not have shoes.

Flying supplies in by helicopter is risky, especially in mountainous terrain. Dropping it by parachute from up high is not accurate enough on a fluid and ragged front line. Roads, if not cut off by the enemy, are on the verge of being snowed in by the yards-high drifts that are common in the Hindu Kush. Some supplies can be hauled overland by donkeys, but as in World War I, when moving fodder for draft animals was half the logistical effort, supplying feed is itself difficult.

As the military supplies flow in, so will some supplies for civilians, and not just the packets of ready-to-eat meals scattered from high above. Yesterday and today, Air Force C-17 cargo planes are to operate airlifts from Pisa, Italy, to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, to be forwarded to northern Afghanistan, where most of the hungry refugees are.

The first flight carried 6,000 wool blankets and two forklifts. The second flight carried another 16,000 blankets and about 2,000 cases of high-calorie biscuits. The third carried 4,000 more cases of biscuits. Three more flights will follow this week, according to the United States Agency for International Development.

From Turkmenistan, the United Nations World Food Program delivers food to the Western city of Herat and eastward to Mazar-i-Sharif, where the agency bakes bread for 120,000 people and says many people have run out of food and are surviving by begging and by boiling grass to eat.

"We need to bring about 12,000 tons of food to internally displaced people in various provinces in northern Afghanistan to sustain them for six months," said Khaled Mansour, the Food Program's spokesman in Pakistan. "This effort should start in the coming couple of weeks."

The group is using two Russian-designed cargo planes to fly flour to Turkmenistan. It has 2,000 tons in Quetta, Pakistan. Each plane can carry about 45 tons and can make a few round trips each day.

This article was reported and written by John H. Cushman Jr., Dexter Filkins, Steven Lee Myers, Eric Schmitt and Tim Weiner, with Mr. Gordon.