In the absence of new intelligence on the whereabouts of the Saudi-born extremist accused of masterminding the September 11 terrorist attacks, US generals are under pressure from civilian defence officials to send greater numbers of special forces into Afghanistan to try to accomplish what the bombing failed to do - flush out a target.

But the Pentagon's top brass are reluctant to deploy their best troops in the absence of good intelligence about Bin Laden's whereabouts, and before further bombing has softened expected resistance on the ground.

The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is reported to be increasingly frustrated by the caution of the generals and their inability to come up with a creative battle plan. One of his aides was quoted in today's edition of Newsweek as comparing the attitude of today's Pentagon to the conventional thinking familiar in the Gulf war - a thinking now considered to be out of date and inappropriate for the delicate nature of the war against terrorism. "The media are preparing to cover a second Gulf war," the aide said, "and the military are preparing to fight one."

It was always assumed that the second phase of the military campaign in Afghanistan would involve the deployment of significant numbers of special forces, but as the moment drew closer yesterday differences were becoming more visible over how many should be used and in what manner. Mr Rumsfeld had taken office planning a radical shake-up of the military hierarchy, but did not have time to do so before the US came under attack on September 11. After the suicide attacks on New York and Washington were traced to Bin Laden and his camps in Afghanistan, Mr Rumsfeld gave his top generals the task of drawing up a radical and innovative battle plan.

His aides predicted that apart from a few opening air strikes to destroy the Taliban's air defences, the war would be a largely covert conflict. Instead the first week of the campaign has involved wave after wave of Gulf war-style strikes, and a rising toll of claimed civilian casualties.

The traditionalist generals believe that there are more military targets in Afghanistan which can be hit from the air, and have backed the renewed use of heavy bombers this week, after a weekend in which most strikes were carried out by smaller, tactical strikers launched from carriers in the Arabian sea.

One potential target is the Taliban's 55th Brigade, made up principally of Arab fighters who are thought to constitute the regime's Praetorian guard.

The first week of bombing has not "smoked out" Bin Laden or the Taliban leadership from their strongholds, as President Bush had hoped, and the Pentagon's military planners are said to be still operating in an intelligence vacuum. Some feel the job of finding these elusive targets belongs to the diplomats and the spies. "I hope the military isn't given this to solve," General Anthony Zinni, the former head of the Pentagon's central command, is reported to have grumbled to other officers.

British defence officials were yesterday giving the clear impression that military planners are deeply frustrated by the lack of intelligence about the impact of the air campaign and what next they should do to attack such elusive targets.

They say they are continuing to look at all the options for the deployment of ground troops, including "small units" - a reference to special forces - or "larger numbers" - the prospect of airborne troops gaining a bridgehead inside Afghanistan as a base for raids against Taliban forces.

But sources describe the plans as "paper talk" and say no decision has been made.

Top officers in the Pentagon are leaning away from setting up a base inside Afghanistan on the grounds that it would be vulnerable. Instead the most likely option is that helicopter-borne special forces units will launch their missions from the deck of the Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier in the Arabian sea.

Military planners are concerned about the approaching winter and the pressures on the Pakistani leader, General Pervez Musharraf, as well as the immediate tactical problem of knowing where to strike against the forces of an unconventional enemy.

While most of the Taliban's air defences have been destroyed, their light forces and the small open-backed lorries they use to move about the country were reported yesterday to be mostly intact.

The Afghan militia's deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, yesterday offered to hand Bin Laden over to a neutral country if the US provided evidence of his guilt. But the offer, a reiteration of previous Taliban proposals, was immediately rejected by President Bush.

A White House spokeswoman said: "The president has been very clear: there will be no negotiations."

[The Guardian - UK - Monday October 15, 2001]: At one end of the US war machine are people like Donald Rumsfeld, the ultimate defense intellectual who views the war on terrorism as an intriguing puzzle requiring new ways of thinking. At the other are the long-serving men in uniform such as General Tommy Franks, the former artillery officer leading the campaign.

Gen Franks is the commander-in-chief of the central command, whose headquarters are in Tampa Florida, from where he is orchestrating the air strikes on Afghanistan. He is a blunt, outspoken veteran of the Vietnam and Gulf wars and, by all accounts, he has taken to heart the lessons of both: be very sure of what you are doing before you put soldiers on the ground, and rely as much as possible on the awesome destructive capability of US air power.

The two men embody the different approaches circulating in the corridors of the Pentagon over how to pursue the war on terrorism. Winter is coming to the Afghan highlands and decisions have to be made quickly, but a week's bombing under Gen Franks's command has so far failed to push Osama bin Laden or the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, into the open where they could be picked out by an air strike, or grabbed by special forces.

That would have been considered a bonus in the initial phase of the campaign, but in the absence of such a stroke of luck, differences over how the plan should proceed have come to the surface.

Mr Rumsfeld and his civilian advisers believe the US military does not have the flexibility to combat an enemy like Bin Laden. They point to a computerized war game in 1997 in which the army took on a terrorist organization similar to al-Qaida, and lost. The generals, the analysts concluded, spent too much time looking for things to bomb, and not enough time looking for innovative methods of eliminating the enemy.

Mr Rumsfeld is reported to be so frustrated with the pursuit of the war by Gen Franks's command, with its emphasis on waves of Gulf-style bombing sorties, that he is pressing to have operational control shifted from Tampa to Washington. Mr Rumsfeld and his circle want to pursue a new military doctrine built around small groups of special forces soldiers who will dart in and out of Afghanistan looking for intelligence and targets.

Uniformed top brass are more comfortable with the technique of the Powell doctrine - named after secretary of state, Colin Powell - which dictates the overwhelming use of air power until the deployment of ground troops is either unnecessary or met with minimal resistance.

This week US and British special forces units are expected to be deployed in Afghanistan, but they are being sent on highly dangerous fishing expeditions, concealing themselves along the sides of dirt roads and mountain paths on the chance that Bin Laden or Mullah Omar, or their top lieutenants, might pass by.

Senior Pentagon officers have pointed out the dangers in such missions. The terrain is littered with millions of landmines, and "butterfly" anti-personnel mines, dropped by Soviet helicopter pilots over hostile territory in the 80s.

Before sending in larger numbers of troops, the traditionalist generals want to continue the air campaign. It has been kept up for seven days, with only a pause on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer.

But such niceties are not helping the state department efforts to keep the international coalition together.

At the weekend the Pentagon admitted that an F-18 navy strike aircraft had accidentally dropped a 900kg (2,000lb) bomb on a suburb of Kabul, killing four civilians and wounding eight. Latitude and longitude were mixed up when the coordinates were entered into its guidance system.

The Taliban are claiming that civilian victims have been more numerous. In any case the distinction between combatants and non-combatants is blurred. Many of the "troop concentrations" targeted are conscripts who may have been market vendors only a few days earlier and who were rounded up by Taliban press gangs.

These troops have been hit by cluster bombs and on one occasion by a huge bunker-buster bomb which would have burrowed into the ground beneath them and then swallowed them as the explosion opened up a gaping crater.

As reports of the casualties percolate into the Middle East and Pakistan, support for the US is fast eroding. A poll of Pakistanis found that 83% supported the Taliban in its confrontation with the US. According to Newsweek, which conducted the poll, support for the Afghan militia jumped by 40% when the bombing began last week.

The Taliban are beginning to exploit the TV images of US mistakes by inviting reporters to view the damage. This "collateral damage" is inevitable in a bombing campaign. The only way to avoid it is to put troops on the ground, but that is fraught with human, military and political problems. The US population remains virtually unanimous in support of the campaign, but that may change with the return of body bags.

The Pentagon's military leaders have painful memories of the last two comparable special forces missions, which both ended in fiascos - the 1980 "Desert One" operation to rescue US hostages in Iran, and the 1993 raid on Mogadishu, Somalia, by Rangers and Delta Force commandos, which failed at the cost of 18 dead, 73 wounded, and two helicopters shot down.

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/10/465.htm