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Analysts Say U.S. Military Options Against Bin Laden Few and Difficult
WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (News Agencies) - The United States has few attractive military options as it embarks on a "war against terrorism" that will rely far more on spies and commandos than on the overwhelming military superiority used to crush other recent U.S. foes, analysts said Monday.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself has said repeatedly that it will be a long, costly and unconventional process - quite unlike anything the United States has seen in recent times.
"People think of the wars we've seen lately, the kind of antiseptic wars where a cruise missile is fired off, shown on television landing in some smoke and so forth. That is not what this is about," he said Sunday.
It seems to be shaping up to be - to judge from the few hints dropped by Rumsfeld and others - a bloody, low-intensity conflict with clandestine raids by U.S. special forces, punctuated by the occasional cruise missile attack or air strikes.
At its most high-tech, this struggle may make the first extensive use of information warfare to track and disrupt the flow of money to terrorists, and to deceive and disinform them if the opportunity arises.
"We may have a military that's all dressed up in terms of capability but no place to go in a strike in terms of good targets to hit," said Andrew Krepinevich, a military expert and director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Affairs.
"That will likely make this kind of conflict much less firepower intensive and much more dependent on good information; speedy, stealthy forces; small forces that can be deployed very quickly over long distances," he said.
The immediate U.S. goal appears to be to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire suspected of masterminding the September 11th terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Center, and to destroy his global network.
And National Public Radio (NPR) reported Rumsfeld as saying that eliminating bin Laden would not stop terrorism, and that the group he created, al-Qaeda, described as a "holding company", could continue attacks even without bin Laden.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz set forth another, much broader goal last week: "ending" states that aid or abet terrorism.
Both those goals put Afghanistan, whose Taliban rulers shelter bin Laden and refuse to give him up, at the center of the storm.
A more forbidding battleground would be difficult to imagine. A wild land of impenetrable deserts and steep mountains cut by narrow gorges, it has been ravaged by two decades of war that saw Soviet forces retreat in defeat.
Through the ages, would-be conquerors have found Afghanistan a hard go: Alexander the Great, the Mongol hordes, Tamerlane, imperial Britain.
A U.S. invasion of Afghanistan "is probably the last thing you want to think about," said Krepinevich.
Launching a ground invasion to overthrow the Taliban and seize bin Laden and his lieutenants "could work, albeit at a cost of hundreds of thousands of casualties," said Michael O'Hanlon, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
"But there is a chance it would fail, given the difficulty of the Afghan terrain and the resilience of its fighters," he cautions.
"I could stake my life that there are no serious plans to defeat militarily the Taliban," said Daniel Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, another Washington think tank.
Short of an invasion, Bush has the option of using Special Forces commandos to "smoke out" bin Laden, analysts say.
That would require staging forces at remote bases on the country's periphery - in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, or even opposition-controlled areas of northern Afghanistan - to allow for swift, cross border actions with helicopters and AC-130 gunships.
But that kind of approach will require timely, accurate information from spies inside bin Laden's organization, and many doubt whether U.S. intelligence is capable of penetrating his inner circle.
Success may depend on the willingness of countries like Pakistan - or even Iran - to share intelligence with Washington.
"The real key is information," Krepinevich went on to say. "You don't want to be inserting Special Forces into an ambush or into a trap. You want the other folks to be surprised, not you. And surprise is key to their ability to operate effectively."
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