================================================== Is your child struggling in school? Live, Online Tutoring from eSylvan. Save $100 with eSylvan! http://click.topica.com/caaadKeb1ddNBb2HgmNb/ESylvan ==================================================http://www.azcentral.com
Taliban rulers plan hide-and-wait defense
Washington Post
Oct. 21, 2001
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - In their words and their actions, Afghanistan's Taliban rulers are revealing a military strategy that relies on U.S. reluctance to take casualties and the legendary ability of Afghan guerrillas to endure prolonged hardships in the mountains of the rugged country.
The hide-and-wait tactics, tested during more than two decades of irregular warfare, assume new importance now that the United States has moved into the ground phase of its battle to dislodge the Taliban and hunt down terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. As the Afghan winter settles in, Taliban fighters may seek to capitalize on the country's natural obstacles to frustrate U.S. commando raids such as the one mounted early Saturday morning near the southern city of Kandahar.
For two weeks, as high-flying U.S. warplanes pummeled targets across Afghanistan, the Taliban military has sought mainly to survive, unable to fight back effectively with its primitive air defenses. Now that U.S. soldiers have begun raids on the ground, Taliban officials express confidence that the fight will become more even, with guerrillas hiding and letting U.S. troops come to them just as Afghan mujahideen did against the Soviets in the 1980s.
"We are eagerly awaiting the American troops to land on our soil, where we will deal with them in our own way," said Jalaluddin Haqqani, a senior Taliban commander renowned for his role in the battle against Soviet occupation.
"I tell you the Soviets were a brave enemy and their soldiers could withstand tough conditions. The Americans are creatures of comfort," he said in an interview with the News, a Pakistani newspaper.
"They will not be able to sustain the harsh conditions that await them...Afghanistan will prove to be the graveyard of the Americans."
Haqqani, a strategic adviser to the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was displaying a bluster common to military commanders. But he was also describing the patient strategy that Taliban troops seem to be pursuing since the bombs began to fall Oct. 7.
According to refugees and aid organizations with Afghan employees, the Taliban military has dispersed equipment such as tanks and artillery, seeking to save it from marauding U.S. warplanes. They have spread most of its 40,000-man force around urban residential areas and the countryside to rob U.S. jets of concentrated military targets.
A Pentagon official agreed with this assessment, saying that "so far the Taliban isn't concentrating resources; they're staying dispersed."
Partly as a result, Taliban officials said, military casualties have not been heavy. One aid worker who just returned from Kabul said Taliban leaders there are "cheered by the low casualty figures."
Refugees from Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual and political base and Omar's headquarters before the bombing, said Taliban forces there have fanned out in two directions. "They are either heading into the mountains and caves or they are entering populated areas," said an aid worker who arrived this morning in Quetta, on the Pakistani side of the border.
Only in the plains north of Kabul has the Taliban mobilized large numbers of troops in one area. This was to create a buffer against any advance by the Northern Alliance rebel groups, whose front lines for the past several years have been about 40 miles north of the capital.
Many of the troops in these defensive lines were drawn from the 5,000 to 15,000 Arabs incorporated into the Taliban army, part of those attracted to Afghanistan for training by bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization. According to experts here and Northern Alliance leaders, they are among the Taliban's most motivated fighters.
According to Pakistani experts, the destruction of Taliban airports, air defense batteries and command and control centers has not changed the equation dramatically on the ground. The radical Islamic militia functions as a low-tech guerrilla force, they noted, and transmits more orders by hand-carried pieces of paper than by encrypted military radios.
"All this is bunkum, that their command and control system has been destroyed," snorted retired Gen. Hamid Gul, former head of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Copyright 2000, azcentral.com. All rights reserved.
----------------------------------------------------------- Time is money. Save both with TopOffers! Sign up for cool savings, hot deals, and free stuff, and collect a SPECIAL BONUS right away! It's easy! Click here: http://click.topica.com/caaadN9b1ddNBb2HgmNg/Topica -----------------------------------------------------------
Visit and show your support for the Grass Roots Oyate http://members.tripod.com/GrassRootsOyate Clemency for Leonard Peltier. Sign the Petition. http://petitiononline.com/Release/petition.html
==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?b1ddNB.b2HgmN Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [email protected] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
