From: "Walter Lippmann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [CubaNews] Afghan army more formidable than it appears Afghan army more formidable than it appears By Margaret Coker, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Sunday, September 23, 2001 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Never mind the antiquated rifles, the rag-tag uniforms and miserable rations of the Taliban's guerrilla soldiers. As Washington prepares to retaliate against the Taliban in Afghanistan for harboring Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials should remember one thing: Afghan fighters have defeated superpowers in the past. Afghans have two centuries of practice routing invaders, thanks to their legendary grit and intimate knowledge of a land where radios don't work deep in rugged valleys, where dust storms clog engines and obscure vision and where narrow, high-walled canyons leave men trapped and vulnerable to ambush. Afghanistan presents an extraordinary challenge to the superbly trained and equipped U.S. special forces, who are expected to lead military actions in the Texas-size Central Asian country. America's special forces have little experience with the martyr's zeal possessed by fighters who occupy a nightmarish landscape of hidden caves and deep ravines, making them almost invisible to warplanes and reconnaissance satellites. >From a conventional military perspective, the Taliban army appears puny. But looks are deceiving, as the Soviet army found in the 1980s and the British army before them discovered in the 1840s. "You feel like a sitting duck," Andrei Kazakov, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Red Army, said from Moscow. "You never know when a pass is going to be mined. You never know when the ambush is going to come." Kazakov led a military intelligence unit in the Red Army during the time of its occupation of Afghanistan. It entered in 1979 and retreated in 1989. "The mujahideen throw themselves at your convoys," he said, referring to Muslim religious fighters. "It's like nothing I've ever seen." The London-based defense and security publishers Jane's believes the Taliban has about 45,000 armed men. The number is thought to include several thousand Arab and Pakistani soldiers who came to Afghanistan to train for terrorist missions and believe the harshly fundamentalist interpretation of Islam espoused by the Taliban (the word talib means student). Taliban leaders say they have 80,000 followers ready to fight. This higher number could reflect the total membership of the group, analysts say. While each Talib swears an oath to fight for Islamic causes, it is thought not every member has had rigorous military training. According to Jane's, the militia could have as many as 650 tanks and other armored vehicles, most of which were captured from the Soviet Army in the 1980s or from the Northern Alliance rebels, who retain about 5 percent of the country's territory after many years of civil war. Additionally, the Taliban has 250 aircraft, including a handful of fighters, and some anti-aircraft artillery. Yet the bulk of the Taliban fighters are armed simply with standard infantry weapons -- small arms, like the Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifle, hand-held rocket launchers and grenade launchers. During a military parade this year in Kabul, the Afghan capital, the Taliban displayed about 50 U.S.-made Stinger missiles, some of which might be left over from the arsenals provided to them by the CIA nearly 20 years ago during covert efforts to defeat the Soviet-backed Afghan government. This compact, highly mobile missile has proven a scourge for other special forces operations. Somali militiamen used Stingers to take down Black Hawk helicopters during the 1993 U.S. military intervention in that East African country during which 18 American soldiers died and 170 were wounded. Moreover, Afghanistan's craggy mountains and barren plateaus provide ample cover for those who know where to hide, and have proven insurmountable to past invaders who didn't. The landscape is made more dangerous by the fact that the country is studded with thousands of anti-personnel land mines, perhaps more than in any other country in the world. "No map exists to show where these mines are. In the heat of battle or retreat, one wrong step and that could be the end of it," said Sydney Petersson, a retired military officer who has been working for 10 years in Afghanistan as the director of a Swedish humanitarian aid group. Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorist organization is thought to have several hundred fighters in Afghanistan, perhaps in training camps in eastern Afghanistan. Despite the challenges for a ground-based operation, even more problems exist for U.S. fighter planes. Precious few targets exist in Afghanistan, a country wracked by more than 20 years of war. Stealth bombers will not see any military bases, large power plants, major bridges or railroads to hit. The headquarters where terrorists live and train are little more than adobe huts and mountain caves. And there is the probability that fighters also dwell in villages among innocent civilians. Hopeless as it sounds, Pakistan's former army chief of staff, retired Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, says the United States could succeed in destroying a select number of targets. "The Taliban have nothing to lose and everything to gain. This will strengthen their resolve," he said. "Short term goals could be obtainable. (But) if they (U.S. forces) think about staying in the country for a long time, they won't be able to get out." [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. 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