Bombing them to bits
Week 5 therefore opened with more fearsome bombing raids on Taliban frontlines, including the reported use on Sunday of two 15,000-pound fuel-air "daisy cutter" bombs — the largest known conventional explosive, which ignites the air and incinerates everything in a 600-yard radius. The Pentagon claimed its air attacks have killed a "substantial number" of Taliban troops, and Rear-Admiral John Stufflebeem reported Monday that Taliban forces are pinned down by bombing and have been unable to return fire against its opponents for several days. He also claimed that al Qaeda's "known infrastructure" had been destroyed and the organization was "not free to operate in Afghanistan at this point."
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The U.S. has also moved to expand the presence of its special forces inside Afghanistan with a view to improving the targeting of air strikes and the capabilities of the Northern Alliance and other opposition forces. Assisted by Russian intelligence, the U.S. has also been dropping "bunker-buster" bombs on suspected cave complexes used by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, in the hope of getting a lucky break against the command structures of both groups.
Northern Alliance's big test
Despite progress reported by the Pentagon, nobody in Washington believes the Taliban can be defeated from the air alone, and the short-term prospects of victory now rest heavily on the efforts of the Northern Alliance and any opposition forces that can be raised against the Taliban in the south.
The Northern Alliance forces on the Kabul front put on a show of force for foreign journalists Monday, mustering some 3,000 troops and 24 tanks for a pep-talk from former president Barnarhuddin Rabbani and some drilling and live fire exercises. At the rally, some Alliance commanders boasted they could take Kabul within two weeks, but the progress of their counterparts on the Mazar-i-Sharif front may be something of a reality check. The northern city remains the focus of U.S.-backed efforts by the Northern Alliance to score an important victory over the Taliban before winter sets in. Alliance troops have begun moving on Mazar, but with mixed results. A spokesman said Tuesday the Alliance had captured the district of Zari, south of the city, from the Taliban, but had lost part of the neighboring Aq district in a Taliban counteroffensive.
Progress and problems
U.S. forces appear to have greater freedom of movement than ever in Afghanistan. Unconfirmed reports Monday suggested American helicopter gunships had attacked a hotel commandeered by the Taliban in downtown Kabul, and the U.S. confirmed that its commandos had gone into an area near Kandahar to rescue resistance leader Hamid Karzai, who had been trying to rally local chieftains to the anti-Taliban cause. The fact that U.S. personnel could move into the Taliban's heartland to collect a resistance leader was cause for confidence; less so, though, the fact that Karzai needed rescuing in the first place. Pashtun warlords have plainly not defected to the anti-Taliban cause in anything like the numbers hoped for at the outset of the bombing campaign.
The onset of winter may also hamper U.S. efforts to use helicopters in strikes and to deploy special forces — freezing rain reportedly played a role in bringing down the helicopter that crashed in Afghanistan last Saturday, and the weather last week restricted U.S. efforts to insert more commandos on the ground.
Preparing for U.S. ground troops?
Even if the Northern Alliance manages to cast aside doubts over its fighting ability and seizes Mazar-i-Sharif before the onset of winter impedes the prospects for ground warfare, the U.S. will have to do more of the heavy lifting itself in the campaign to defeat the Taliban. With Washington having been given the nod by Moscow, U.S. personnel are currently scouting airfields in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, not only as logistical bases for long-term resupply efforts in an expanded Northern Alliance-controlled slice of northern Afghanistan, but also as potential staging areas for a more substantial commitment of U.S. ground troops. The search for new bases also signals the limits on what Washington is able to ask of Pakistan.
Although General Pervez Musharraf remains solidly behind the U.S. campaign and appears to have accepted that bombing won't be halted for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Pakistan remains a dangerous prospect for U.S. military operations. Local authorities have warned the U.S. to keep a low profile in military operations from their territory. While Musharraf has thus far contained anti-American protests from Islamic radicals, Ramadan is likely to see an uptick in anger as far more Muslims visit mosques on a daily rather than weekly basis.
Propaganda fight-back
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's comments in India Monday that he expected that the war against the Taliban would not go on for years appeared to have been directed at regional allies concerned at the negative domestic fallout from a protracted bombing campaign. After all, back home the Pentagon is having to massage the complex and sometimes contradictory message that America's patience is required for a war that will inevitably be drawn-out and costly, but also that substantial progress is being made and the enemy is on the ropes. European allies may have expressed skepticism over the nature of the campaign, but nobody's breaking ranks — indeed, Germany on Tuesday agreed to send 3,900 soldiers to the region to play a support role to the U.S. effort.
The prospect of a protracted campaign has made more urgent the waging of the propaganda war in the Arab and Muslim world, and the U.S. last weekend unveiled a new secret weapon — former ambassador to Syria Christopher Ross. Within two hours of Osama bin Laden's latest propaganda tape broadcast on the pan-Arab cable network al-Jezeera, viewers heard a rebuttal from Mr. Ross delivered in fluent Arabic. And with it, the message that Washington plans to challenge Bin Laden in real time for the hearts and minds of the Arab world. The U.S. might have been helped in this respect by bin Laden's bizarre rant against the United Nations. The terrorist leader may have been trying to discredit the international body in anticipation of any progress in international efforts to broker a new Israeli-Palestinian peace breakthrough (which would undermine one of his key propaganda devices). But two days later, his Taliban hosts were on TV demanding urgent humanitarian assistance — from the United Nations.