Last fall I interviewed a number of current and former CIA officers who worked the Pakistan-Afghanistan border during the days of the mujahideen's fight against the Soviets. I also spoke with current and former military officers with combat experience in Vietnam, the Gulf War, or the Balkans. The war in Afghanistan was in its earliest stages then, and most of the people I interviewed asked me to keep their comments off the record for the time being, "hoping against hope," as one put it, "that this will all work out." Yet the general sense among them was one of reservation -- not because they thought the Taliban would hold on to power but out of concerns about the state of U.S. military strategy and intelligence. Would the United States field the right troops at the right times in the right places? Would the best people be sought out and listened to in devising strategy and tactics? Were American forces really prepared to fight in the rugged, high-altitude conditions of Afghanistan? Would civilian leadership devise a sensible overall strategy, and would sound military tactics follow?
In recent weeks, I spoke again with some of the same military personnel.Naturally, all are in favor of eliminating the scourge of al-Qaeda, and all areconfident that the United States and its allies will eventually prevail. Butthey're also concerned that some segments of the military chain ofcommand -- particularly the Army's -- are engaging in wishful thinking aboutresources, capabilities, and political realities. They talk of an operationalmyopia creating a situation that's quite the opposite of the post-Vietnam"transformation" in military affairs that some have been proclaiming.
In this view, toppling the Taliban was the easy part. Echoing his commentsfrom a late September interview, Major Donald Vandergriff -- an Army officer whoisthe author and editor of several books on military strategy, tactics, andpersonnel -- recounted: "The Taliban was fighting from fortified trench positionsthat were equipped to deal with direct ground fire, but not air attack. You bringin air power, with Special Forces guys designating targets and pushing theNorthern Alliance to really attack, [and] a collapse is a given." A CIA veteranof the mujahideen days I interviewed on October 1 saw it the same way. "TheTaliban is not that strong of a force," he said, "and it's not going to take muchto kick them over."
But in the view of Vandergriff and others, a crucial U.S. mistake occurredafter the Taliban retreat. While the number of bombing sorties had increased, andthere were Special Forces teams advancing with the Northern Alliance, thereweren't any conventional ground forces to cut off the Taliban retreat. "Thereshould have been at least two air assault brigades on standby," Vandergriff said,"units that could have swept in and assumed blocking positions at key points."Others I talked to at the time took the same view, including the ex-CIA officerwho noted that, while sending in more U.S. troops is never easy, it would havebeen better to maximize Taliban prisoners and casualties than to let largenumbers flee to higher ground.
Granted, such an operation wouldn't have been easy, given the lack of U.S.bases in neighboring countries. But according to a number of Army officers, thefact that there were no regular Army units ready to go -- coupled with the factthat the first ground forces into Afghanistan were Marines -- highlights someserious institutional problems the Army has yet to fix. It's not that the Army isunaware of them; the force's top officer, General Eric Shinseki, has spoken atlength about making the Army into a lighter and more maneuverable force ofsmaller units that could be quickly deployed. Alas, Shinseki's overhaul seems tobe moving about as quickly as an Abrams tank stuck in a bog. And while everyoneinterviewed for this article viewed the Army's Special Forces favorably, somealso noted that the unit's strength is, as one put it, "Going in, really messingstuff up, and getting out." He added: "You can't fight every battle that way.Which is why you really have to look at how everyone else is staffed and trainedand equipped."
In short, "we have the world's fastest strategically immobile Army," as onecaptain stated in late December. West Pointer Bob Krumm, a captain with theArmy's Training and Doctrine command, went so far as to post his personal viewson a military-reform Web site called Defense and the National Interest(www.d-n-i.net). "My Army is operating equipment designed to fight Soviets in the Fulda Gap, and the stuff in the pipeline is just a more expensive version of the same," he wrote. "My Army has a personnel system that was built to defeat the Kaiser. My Army trains to fight fictional forces in make-believe lands instead of focusing on real-world enemies and missions. My Army has one-half the number of generals as we did at the height of World War II, even though the force is one-tenth the size. The end result of all this is we get to watch the Marines perform Army missions because they can do them better." GovernmentExecutive magazine recently noted a similar dismay among midlevel Army officers, chagrined that a sister service whose specialty is amphibious operations had been the first corps of regular troops into Afghanistan -- a landlocked country.
By march, however, elements of the regular Army's 101st Airborneand 10th Mountain Division were seeing action in Operation Anaconda. Early mediaanalysis saw Anaconda as a good thing, in that it showed the Army had learned thelessons of Tora Bora, where U.S. forces failed to capture scores of Taliban andal-Qaeda soldiers. In Anaconda, 1,000 American troops were deployed, as well as1,000 Afghan troops. The Pentagon line was that high-tech satellites and unmannedreconnaissance planes had been tracking the quiet return of an al-Qaeda cadre tothe area around Gardez and Shahkot for more than a month. Anaconda would positiontroops in a circle around the enemy, closing in like a snake and crushing them.
According to a Washington Post analysis written in the home office on March 5, Anaconda was a "message of U.S. resolve," where the choices for the enemy were, in the words of a retired Marine Corps general, "stark." It was also a "classic military maneuver routinely practiced by light infantry units," a "'movement to contact' that pushes the enemy against a pre-positioned blocking force" that would be made even more deadly by the use of direct fire, mortars, and coordinated airpower.
But as early as March 4, some skeptics I spoke with were raising questionsabout this maneuver and the rationale behind it. While the military wassaying -- and the media reporting -- that the operation had been mounted toencirclean enemy quietly creeping back, there was another possibility. The foreignlegions of al-Qaeda may have been untroubled by observations of their movementsbecause they were looking for a fight in which they could (a) kill Americans andmake themselves martyrs, and (b) use that martyrdom to fire up public opinion inArab and Islamic strongholds.
Such is not a reason to avoid engaging the enemy. However, the theory that atotal of 2,000 troops -- including some Afghanis whose trustworthiness isquestionable -- would be able to quickly and effectively encircle an enemy over a70-square-mile swath of land on top of enemy tunnel complexes, over brutalterrain at high altitudes, struck many as improbable. While it might have seemedimpressive to the average newspaper reader that the Americans and Afghanis couldrush reinforcements in as the battle unfolded, close observers took this as asign that Anaconda's planners had seriously underestimated the strength of theenemy.
Even for troops like the Army's 10th Mountain Division, which specializes insuch operations, these are still far from ideal conditions. One need only consultthe work of retired Lieutenant Colonel Lester Grau, the Army's leading scholar onAfghanistan and an author of books and articles on Soviet-Afghan tactics andbattle history, for a better understanding of the challenge. When I called Grauin early March, he told me he was under orders not to discuss with the media anyof his work in the context of Operation Anaconda. Another officer, however, drewmy attention to a recent article coauthored by Grau for the Military Review, published by the Army Command and General Staff College. Titled "Ground Combat at High Altitude," the article states that "the U.S. Army has no experience fighting in truly high mountains," and that its mountain training has been conducted at lower altitudes.
It is also worth noting a September 2000 report written by a U.S. Senatestaffer titled "10th Mountain Division, Ready or Not?" While noting a "favorableoverall readiness rating and an understandable expression of confidence byvarious commanders," the report also found that "the 10th Mountain is todayexperiencing multiple, serious shortages of people and material resources,training deficiencies, and other impediments to readiness, a large number ofthem resulting from policies imposed by Washington." And last year anothercongressional staffer -- who writes under the nom de plume Spartacus -- revealedthat Pentagon funds earmarked for things like training and maintenance (or"readiness") have been siphoned off to fund other defense programs, and that theBush administration was keen to continue drawing off money for new weaponssystems. "With defense spending increasing and with readiness spending declining,the current defense budget has achieved a condition of declining readiness atincreasing cost," the report marveled.
While Army troops fought bravely and, eventually, successfully in Anaconda,both CIA and military veterans are troubled at the number of avoidable errors inplanning and execution that accompanied the operation. As well, veterans of theCIA's covert operations in Afghanistan are growing increasingly concerned thatthe United States could get enmeshed in the seething tribal conflicts that havealways been characteristic of Afghanistan, where alliances are constantlyshifting and bribery and deception are the coin of the realm. There's a vagueconsensus among such observers that getting U.S. forces out of Afghanistan sooneris better -- that the U.S. Army may not be the right Army for the job. Ofparticular concern, March 10 saw ethnic Tajik troops from the Northern Alliancemove into the region of combat in support of U.S. soldiers. "If we're notcareful," said one former intelligence officer intimately familiar with theregion, "it's going to start looking like that barroom scene in Star Wars,with us caught in the middle. [Operation Anaconda] wasn't a disaster. But if [the military] keeps repeating this, it's going to start looking a bit like the Soviet model."
