By GREG JAFFE
Staff Reporter of T
HE WALL
STREET J
OURNAL
As U.S. officials embark on what promises to be the most dangerous phase of the war in Afghanistan -- finding top al Qaeda and Taliban leaders -- they are keeping a close eye on the Soviet's bloody war there in the 1980s.
So far, they are going out of their way to avoid the two biggest traps that bedeviled the Soviets: alienating the Afghan people by occupying their territory and offering the tough Afghan fighters a big target.
The Soviet invasion, much like the U.S. experience, was marked by early successes. Within a few days, Soviet troops captured Kabul. But they were never able to destroy the mujahedeen force, hidden in caves, mountains and cities, in large part because they couldn't find them.
"The Soviets failed to find the mujahedeen unless the mujahedeen wanted them to," writes retired Army Col. Lester W. Grau, who has contributed to the Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned, Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Big Targets
The mujahedeen had no problem finding or attacking the Soviets, who gave the Afghan resistance big targets. The Soviets rolled into Afghanistan with as many as 100,000 troops who had to be fed and resupplied. Avoiding a head-on confrontation with the Soviet Army at all costs, the mujahedeen attacked Soviet supply lines and troop garrisons, where the defenses were the weakest.
The U.S. is working hard to avoid that mistake, keeping its ground force small and resupplying its few troops as much as possible by air rather than by convoy, which is susceptible to ambush. Several hundred U.S. Marines began arriving at an airfield near Kandahar Sunday afternoon as part of a deployment that U.S. officials say could exceed 1,000 soldiers.
But U.S. officials won't keep those troops in any one place for too long. The troops may briefly occupy an airfield or a piece of territory to serve as a launch pad for special-operations raids on hideouts. It is likely, however, that their small bases and headquarters will move often.
"The biggest lesson from the Soviet's war is: Don't go into Afghanistan with a large ground force, and never, never try to occupy territory," said retired Navy Capt. Dale Herspring, a former U.S. defense attaché to the Soviet Union who has studied and written about the Soviets' experience in Afghanistan.
Another big mistake the Soviets made was alienating the Afghan people. Unable to find the mujahedeen, who often hid in villages among civilians and didn't wear uniforms, the Soviets simply flattened entire cities in an effort to kill the mujahedeen. For every mujahedeen fighter they killed, they created several more among the survivors who were determined to exact revenge.
"If you don't win the support of the people, it's very difficult to count on success," said Gen. Makhmut Garayev, a senior adviser to former Afghan President Mohammed Najibullah, who was backed by the Soviets. At the same time the Soviets were losing that crucial support, mounting casualties among Soviet troops eroded support for the effort back home. That, too, could figure in the U.S. war plans.
The U.S. has gone to great lengths to confine its air strikes to military targets of Afghanistan's Taliban rulers and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. Some officers involved in the campaign have claimed that the current strategy, which requires most targets be approved by U.S. officials at command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., has been too restrictive. Though with the Taliban in retreat, one Air Force officer who has played a role in the campaign and has been a critic, admitted that it was "working despite all the restrictions."
Unlike the Soviets, the U.S. has mounted a large-scale psychological operations campaign, designed to undermine support for the Taliban. Using leaflets and four airborne radio stations circling over Afghanistan, the campaign has portrayed the al Qaeda network, made up largely of Arabs, as foreign invaders who have brought shame and suffering to the Afghan people. And it has castigated the Taliban for sheltering them.
The broadcasts, which consist in large part of Afghan music that had been banned by the Taliban, repeatedly tell the Afghan people the U.S. has no interest in occupying their country. "Our soldiers are not here to take over your way of life. Your culture is important to you and to us," according to one radio script.
Latching On to Successes
Not all of the Soviet's strategies in Afghanistan were failures, and the U.S. so far has been quick to latch on to some of the successes. In the early days of the conflict, the Soviets relied heavily on helicopter gunships, bearing loads of Spetnatz Soviet commandos, to execute lightning strikes on mujahedeen positions and to cordon off the war zones to prevent reinforcements from coming in to bolster enemy forces. "Without the helicopter gunships, the Soviets may have withdrawn years earlier," writes Col. Grau.
When the U.S. began supplying the mujahedeen with shoulder-firing Stinger missiles, however, the helicopters also became far more vulnerable to ambush and the strategy backfired. So far, the U.S. hasn't had to worry much about Stingers. Defense officials have said that there have been no reports of the Taliban firing Stingers at U.S. helicopters or planes. Although the Taliban could be saving the weapons, most defense officials have said it is unlikely the old Stingers still work.
Without the Stinger threat, the U.S. ground force has relied exclusively on commandos and quick-moving helicopters, following the Soviet model. Even though the U.S. has been careful to avoid the mistakes of the Soviets, it could still face some bloody fights in the days ahead.
Test of Wills
During the Soviet war, the mujahedeen hid in dozens of miles of underground tunnels, built to conserve water, that run throughout southern Afghanistan. They planted landmines around the entrances for protection. The Soviets questioned local residents about the tunnels and sometimes succeeded in getting maps of them. They even created special weapons designed not to detonate until they were deep below the ground.
Still, rooting out the mujahedeen fighters in the tunnels and cities generated huge numbers of casualties on both sides. Instead of a high-tech fight, the Soviets found themselves in a bloody test of wills.
The U.S. is clearly determined to avoid such a fight. Asked if the U.S. had developed any new weapons or tactics to fight the Taliban in these tunnels, Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff replied laconically, "Our specialized approach to caves and tunnels is to put 500-pound bombs in the entrance."
But such an approach won't always work. Many of the irrigation tunnels in which the Taliban are likely to hide run through cities, where the U.S. can't explode 500-pound bombs without causing civilian casualties. And even if the Taliban don't hide below ground, finding them in cities, where they can melt into the local population, won't be easy. Currently, tens of thousands of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters appear to be hunkering down for a final stand in Kandahar and Kunduz. Unless they surrender, tunnel-to-tunnel and house-to-house fights are inevitable.
For the U.S. military, which tries to avoid such fights at all costs, that poses a huge problem.
"The Soviet-Afghanistan war demonstrated that a guerrilla war is not a war of technology vs. peasantry," Col. Grau wrote in an essay he co-wrote with a mujahedeen commander in 1995. "Rather, it is a contest of endurance and national will. Victory is often determined by morale, obstinacy and survival."
-- Jeanne Whalen in Moscow contributed to this article.
Write to Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@wsj.com