[iwar] [fc:Experts.Predict.U.S..Will.Fight.1st.Extended.Commando.War]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-17 06:21:52
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Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 06:21:52 -0700 (PDT)
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USA Today
September 17, 2001
Experts Predict U.S. Will Fight 1st Extended Commando War
By Bill Nichols and Dave Moniz, USA Today
WASHINGTON - Imagine a war in which U.S. forces rely on Russian spies,
Pakistani airspace, Iranian political pressure and support from six of the
seven nations on the U.S. list of terrorist sponsors. Imagine a conflict in
which there would be no marching of massed troops against the enemy, no
seizing of capital cities, no huge formations of tanks and warplanes
squaring off in dramatic, high-stakes battles.
Such a campaign was unthinkable before last week's terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington. But Bush administration officials and military experts
say this is the very kind of war being plotted by the president and his
closest military counselors.
It is shaping up to be a lengthy, broad-based assault on a far-flung set of
terrorist targets by an international coalition of unlikely allies. It
almost certainly will yield significant U.S. casualties. And it will be
different from any war Americans have ever seen.
President Bush told reporters as he returned to the White House from Camp
David on Sunday that his administration is readying a "crusade" against
terrorism. "We will work with the nations that one would have felt a couple
of years ago would have been impossible to work with," Bush said.
"This will not be a short-duration, six cruise missiles, two stealth
bombers, then read about it in the morning operation. It's a war and it's
going to go back and forth," says Bill Nash, a retired Army major general
who commanded U.S. forces in Bosnia in 1995-96.
The planning for the military response to the attacks, officials say, is
requiring out-of-the-box thinking to conduct what in all likelihood will be
America's first commando war. That is necessitated by the suspected enemy.
It is not a hostile government with clearly defined targets, but a shadowy
network of terrorists hiding in remote regions of Afghanistan and elsewhere
in the Middle East, Africa, and possibly the West.
Later rather than sooner
Military experts do not rule out the possibility of an immediate response in
the coming days, followed by a more sustained campaign. But the strong sense
from the administration is that the heart of the operation would come later
rather than sooner. The reasons: The difficulties of planning such an
unorthodox operation and of keeping a global anti-terrorism coalition
intact.
"Cruise missiles do not get people who are operating in the shadows,"
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on ABC's This Week. "And the era
of antiseptic warfare - planes dropping bombs from 20,000 feet, cruise
missiles flying off in the night, no one getting hurt on the United States
or the coalition side - that will not work with this enemy, let there be no
doubt."
Americans seem ready to back a war, even one with major casualties,
according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll Friday-Saturday.
Even so, experts say most Americans are utterly unprepared for the type of
war their government is about to wage.
"Terrorism has become an act of war. The question is, do the American people
have the stomach for it?" said Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., a member of the
House Intelligence Committee. "This is not going to be a war viewed on CNN
with some missiles exploding over tents in Afghanistan and 2 months later
it's over. This is going to be a long process. ... It may take losing some
people"
The terrorist organizations themselves and the terrorists don't have targets
of high value," Rumsfeld said on Fox News Sunday. "They don't have armies
and navies and air forces that one can go battle against. ... They work in
the shadows."
Senior military analysts and former commanders outline several scenarios if
fugitive Saudi financier Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network in
Afghanistan are targeted. Administration officials say bin Laden is their
chief suspect.
Afghan neighbors are crucial
The key to success, given Afghanistan's mountainous, sprawling topography,
will be developing staging bases from either its neighbor to the east,
Pakistan, or parts of the former Soviet Union that border northern
Afghanistan. Short of that, U.S. forces might have to operate from at least
400 miles away in the Arabian Gulf or seize airfields in Afghanistan.
Massive bombing from air and sea to minimize U.S. casualties won't work this
time. "This is a threshold event," says retired Air Force Gen. Charles
Horner, air commander during the 1991 Gulf War that drove Iraq out of
Kuwait. "In the past, we've used cruise missiles to avoid the loss of troops
and collateral damage. Those two things are off the table now."
The most likely scenarios:
*Get bin Laden. U.S. commandos, highly trained and secretive special
operations forces, would be aided by massive air cover and naval protection
as they launch coordinated attacks on bin Laden and his foot soldiers. The
attacks could include the top-secret Delta Force, Navy SEALs and the elite
Army Rangers. Experts say an option involving elite ground forces is among
the most likely.
Horner says one difficulty will be finding bin Laden, who moves constantly
from one hiding place to another. Any invasion, therefore, might have to go
after several sites simultaneously.
Horner foresees a scenario in which Army special forces or SEALS, in squads
of five to 500 troops, enter Afghanistan in helicopters flying over Russian,
Pakistani or Iranian airspace.
These units, Horner says, would need heavy air support from B-2 stealth
bombers and perhaps B-52 bombers. Air Force F-15 and F-16 fighter jets and
Navy and Marine F-18 fighters would provide air cover.
In a possible sign of operations to come, more than 3,000 Marines rehearsed
helicopter and ship-to-shore landings off East Timor on Sunday, Reuters
reported. Before the terrorist attacks, the ships from the 15th Marine
Expeditionary Unit and Amphibious Squadron One had been set for purely
humanitarian work.
*Mount an air campaign. Some say the administration could choose a
Kosovo-style air campaign to attack countries that harbor terrorists. Iraq
is being frequently cited as a possible target. But many analysts believe
this option is unlikely because many countries on any target list, including
Afghanistan, are already poor and lack obvious targets, such as
anti-aircraft batteries, military command centers or power grids or
communication and transportation systems.
*Arm resistance movements. Another option is arming resistance movements in
Afghanistan and other countries that harbor terrorists and using elite
ground forces in commando raids. In Afghanistan, at least, this is a
plausible scenario, given the organized resistance to the rule of the
radical Taliban militia from groups based in northern Afghanistan.
The administration faces a major hurdle, however, because of the
assassination last week of the head of the Afghan opposition, Ahmad Shah
Massood. He likely would have spearheaded any U.S.-backed effort to topple
the Taliban. U.S. intelligence sources say Massood was killed 2 days before
the attacks on New York and Washington by two North Africans working for bin
Laden. The two men, posing as journalists, detonated a bomb during a bogus
interview.
Late last week, Afghan opposition forces named Gen. Mohammed Fahim, an
active leader of the opposition since 1973, to temporarily replace Massood.
*Invade Afghanistan. Some analysts have speculated that U.S. forces might
invade Afghanistan with large contingents of Marines and Army troops in an
all-out push to eradicate bin Laden's network.
There are logistical and political problems to a Desert Storm-style military
operation that cause many to discount this scenario. The chief roadblocks:
convincing Pakistan, Russia or former Soviet republics such as Tajikistan to
provide a large-scale staging ground for U.S. forces.
Negotiations with Russia, Pakistan and Tajikistan are just a few of the
diplomatic challenges the administration faces as it plots various war
scenarios.
On one hand, administration officials believe they face the opportunity of a
lifetime to unite the world against terrorism. That would include
cooperation from countries that have had strained relations with the United
States, such as Iran and Syria, which are on the U.S. list of terrorism
backers, and China, which U.S. officials have denounced for human rights
abuses.
One motivation is what White House aides call a sense among U.S. allies and
adversaries alike that "there but for the grace of God go we."
"Every single leader in the world that I've spoken with, they can picture
those two planes crashing into anything from the Eiffel Tower to
hundred-story buildings in Shanghai," Senate Foreign Relations chair Joseph
Biden, D-Del., told CNN. "This has been a wake-up call."
Many of the countries that are seen as crucial to any U.S. response also
have their own problems with bin Laden and the Taliban and find cooperation
with Washington to be in their own self-interest.
Diplomatic risks ahead
But many potential members of a U.S.-led coalition face significant risks if
they decide to cooperate in an all-out war:
*Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has been praised by U.S. officials for
granting use of his country's airspace, providing intelligence and sealing
Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. But there is significant support for bin
Laden in Pakistan, particularly by the country's powerful intelligence
service. Some experts believe Musharraf could risk being overthrown if he
helps Washington.
*Saudi Arabia will be pushed by Washington to give its assistance to any
military response. But in Saudi Arabia, too, the ruling monarchy must gauge
the level of anti-American sentiment it might face, given the anger that
still exists about the use of Saudi soil by Washington to launch the Gulf
War.
*In neighboring Iran, the government has sealed its 560-mile border with
Afghanistan for fear of a massive refugee influx into Iran in the wake of a
U.S. attack. The Taliban has killed numerous members of Afghanistan's
Farsi-speaking, Shiite Muslim minority linked culturally to Iran. The
Taliban also killed nine Iranian diplomats in the Afghan city of
Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998. The Taliban also allows drug smugglers to cross into
Iran, where heroin addiction has become a serious problem.
At the same time, Iran has its own power center of Islamic fundamentalists,
as well as its own links to terror groups. It's also far from clear how
Tehran would react to a full U.S. strike on bin Laden.
That's why experts say it is unlikely that Iran will stop supporting
Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, terrorist groups that have
attacked Israel.
Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East expert at the Nixon Center, says Iran would not
provide bases or allow the United States to over fly its territory to attack
the Taliban. "The best we can hope for is probably that they have the same
attitude they did during the Gulf War," Kemp says. "They will not interfere
and make things worse."
Kemp also says that Iran might take some of its cues from Syria's untested
new president, Bashar Assad, who has expressed condolences. And there is an
opportunity for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to try to ingratiate
himself with the Bush administration by rethinking his tacit support for
terrorism, Kemp says.
*In Russia, President Vladimir Putin was one of the first world leaders to
call Bush after the terrorist attacks to promise full cooperation in any
response. Putin's motivation: Russia has had its own problems with bin
Laden-linked terrorism, particularly in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.
But Russian officials have begun to backpedal in recent days. They suggest
that no U.S. invasion could be staged from Russian soil or from any former
Soviet republic. Those statements, U.S. officials say, reflect a fear of
terrorist reprisals against Russia, as well as lingering anti-American
feeling within the Russian armed forces.
Surreal is the word Americans and citizens around the world use to describe
the tragic developments of the past week. Within the U.S. government, there
also is the sense of moving into a new world of untested methods and
unimagined choices.
"I was raised a soldier and you are trained: There is the enemy occupying a
piece of ground. We can define it in time, space and other dimensions, and
you can assemble forces and go after it," Secretary of State Colin Powell,
the retired Army general who oversaw U.S. forces in the Gulf War, said
Friday. "This is different."
Contributing: Kathy Kiely, Barbara Slavin and Andrea Stone.

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