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A war that's never been won
US ground troops would face a long, brutish campaign
Special report: terrorism in the US
Special report: Afghanistan
Luke Harding in Islamabad
Tuesday September 18, 2001
The Guardian
If George Bush manages to subdue Afghanistan, he will
have succeeded where many illustrious names have
failed. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the
British, and finally the mighty Soviet Union all sent
their armies into Afghanistan, only to mount an
inevitable retreat.
The problem, put simply, is geography: the landlocked
country is dominated by the rugged Hindu Kush
mountains that sweep from the west to the east. The
range finally peters out near the northwestern city of
Herat, and sinks into the desert.
Afghanistan's jagged scree-strewn mountains and rugged
valleys provide an ideal territory in which to fight a
guerrilla war. They might almost have been designed by
a military commander on a shoestring budget.
Much of the debris from the last conflict with the
Soviet Union more than a decade ago has not been
cleared away. The unmade road from Torkham to Kabul
winds past rusted Soviet tanks and the carcasses of
armoured personnel carriers, a grim reminder of the
perils of foreign intervention. At Sarobi, a strategic
point 45 miles south of Kabul, field guns still litter
the high ground.
Invading Afghanistan is comparatively easy. The
problem is defending the territory you have seized
from determined groups of fighters armed with
rocket-launchers who occupy the high ground.
"Afghans are once again waiting for a foreign army to
capture Kabul," one Pakistani intelligence officer,
speaking from Quetta, close to the Afghan border, said
yesterday. "In 1979 Russian tanks took two days to
reach and conquer Kabul, but it took them eight years
with complete loss of Russian military pride to start
a return journey."
The fact that Afghanistan's civil war has gone on for
so long is a testament to how difficult it will be for
the Americans to mop up all pockets of resistance,
should they invade.
With the prospect of an imminent US attack, the
Taliban have sent their fighters out of the cities to
dusty hideouts in the countryside. Taliban soldiers
are busy renovating the network of bases in the
mountains used by the mojahedin to devastating effect
in the 1980s in their guerrilla war with the Soviet
Union.
Afghanistan's opposition Northern Alliance controls
less than 5% of the country. It has the beautiful
Panjshir valley 65 miles to the northeast of Kabul,
and a small enclave around the far northern provinces
of Badakhshan and Takhar. There are also anti-Taliban
fighters from the Hazara ethnic minority who control
parts of the exquisite, ravaged Bamiyan valley.
Suicide bombers
But it is not clear how much assistance Afghanistan's
indigenous opposition would be able to lend to an
American attack on the Taliban. The one commander who
prevented the Taliban from completing their conquest
of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Masood, was buried on
Sunday. He died of wounds inflicted by two Algerian
suicide bombers apparently sent by Osama bin Laden.
Masood controlled Kabul from 1992-1996. He eventually
abandoned the city in the face of a devastating
Taliban offensive from three directions. Over the past
18 months Masood's forces have received military help
from Iran, Russia, and India. But he has fewer
fighters than the Taliban, whose numbers are swollen
by volunteers from the hardline Islamist madrassas or
religious schools just across the border in Pakistan.
Should the Americans advance towards Kabul, the
Northern Alliance could be counted on to surge
southwards from their stronghold in the Panjshir
valley and across the Shomali plains, the gateway to
the capital from the north. They know the territory;
and they could provide the Americans with logistical
advice.
But even if a US force manages to capture Kabul with
relative ease, this would merely be the beginning of a
nasty, brutish and protracted war. Ex-Soviet
commanders who fought against the mojahedin, the
Taliban's forerunners, have cautioned the US against
sending in ground troops.
"If the Americans go to war, I pity those boys," Yuri
Shamanov, a former Soviet colonel, said last week. "I
pity their mothers and sisters and brothers. It will
be 10 times worse than Vietnam. Vietnam will be a
picnic by comparison. Here they will get it in the
teeth. Oh, they will get it good."
The impregnable terrain in Afghanistan made
conventional warfare impossible, he added. "Rockets
won't save you: there's nothing out there to shoot at.
Blast away years' worth of ammo, the mountains will
survive anything. My soldiers would ask me why we were
fighting in Afghanistan. I couldn't give them an
answer. We had no business being there."
Another factor also cautions against a US offensive
involving ground troops: the weather. In six weeks'
time Afghanistan starts to become very cold. By
November swirling snow will have descended on the
mountains, sealing off many of the valleys and high
plateaux.
The Taliban and the opposition rarely attack each
other during the winter months; it is too cold. The
peak fighting months are August and September. To
start a ground campaign now would be to invite
disaster.
Long haul
All the signs are, meanwhile, that the Taliban are
digging in for the long haul. Reports yesterday
suggested that a unit of "foreign" militants has been
stationed at a former mojahedin camp 40 miles south of
Kabul to repulse any American attack. The fighters -
Arab, Pakistani, Uzbek and Tajik volunteers - have
taken up positions in Kahki-I-Jabbar, in Darband
village. Bombing from the sky on its own will not be
enough to dislodge them.
Every foreign invader of Afghanistan has left some
kind of legacy. Alexander the Great swept into
Afghanistan with his armies in 329BC. En route to
India, he founded a handful of Greek settlements. They
blossomed several centuries later into
Greek-influenced dynasties, among them the
pleasure-loving Kushans who produced exquisite works
of art and sculpture (including the Bamiyan Buddhas).
After that things went downhill: Genghis Khan and his
Mongols left little behind except destruction. It took
three wars with the stubborn Afghans and several
chapters of colonial adventurism before the British
finally granted Afghanistan independence in 1921.
Nobody knows what Mr Bush's legacy in Afghanistan will
be, except perhaps further devastation in a country
that has already been ruined.
Special reports
Terrorism in the US
Afghanistan
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