After Bombing: Ground Troops, Nation Building or Walking Away?

WASHINGTON--Indications here that military action was imminent started to crop up toward the end of the week. "Sunday or Monday," a senior intelligence source mumbled to himself at the end of a conversation Friday evening. Late Saturday afternoon, key mid-level Pentagon officials were suddenly called into work. And by Sunday morning, Washington-time, the aerial bombardment of Afghanistan was underway. But by Sunday night, the question still remained: What difference did it make?

At this point, it's far too early to tell. The first meaningful indications won't come until the sun rises on Afghanistan, when satellites and reconnaissance aircraft survey the ground and analysts start compiling detailed battle damage assessments. But in a refreshing change of pace from previous exercises in cruise missile diplomacy, the Bush administration seems aware that a torrential downpour of aerial ordinance won't be enough to deal with Al Qaeda and the Taliban; "There is," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said from the Pentagon Sunday afternoon, "no silver bullet in this battle."

Nonetheless, it was hard not to detect signs of satisfaction as various administration officials discussed the probable destruction of targets they hold are key components of Taliban/Al Qaeda "infrastructure." But according to a number of career military and intelligence officers interviewed Sunday afternoon and evening by AlterNet, the real thrust of the bombing has considerably less to do with physical demolition than it does with psychological and political warfare.

"Let's be clear, there is no infrastructure over there," says Mel Goodman, a professor at the National Defense University and former chief of the CIAs Soviet/Third World analysis desk. "There's so little to bomb. Their air defenses aren't that formidable. Neither is their air force. You can break communications, but that's temporary." A veteran officer of the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) with extensive South Asia experience concurs. "You can batter that ground to death and eliminate what few facilities there are for training terrorists," the officer said, necessarily requesting anonymity. "And maybe you take out some ammo dumps and generators. But I dont know that that's really going to make much difference. So you knock out the electricity in Kabul and Kandahar. Big deal. Most of the country doesn't have electricity anyway, and electricity was never key to mujahideen victory."

The real question, old spooks and soldiers say, is how the bombing will impact the notoriously fickle relationships between certain tribal factions who constantly shift allegiances between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. For spies and diplomats who worked Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s or the Taliban's rise during the 1990s, a quiet mantra has been, "You dont buy an Afghan, you rent him" -- something then-Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphel publicly noted in a December 1996 press conference, adding that this "is nothing new and certainly not exclusive to any faction."

While the Taliban's cadre are certainly battle-hardened, Goodman points out that in the entire decade the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, "they never brought anything to bear on the mujahadeen like what the U.S. unleashed today," and suspects the bombardment will cause some tribal commanders to throw their lot in with the Alliance. (Whether or not those commanders will require something sweeter to maintain alignment with the Alliance -- and whether or not the CIA has a mechanism in place to give them what they might want -- remains to be seen.) According to the veteran DO officer, this is "exactly what were after. We want to get them to go do it themselves. We're not screaming to send in the army, because it's an extremely difficult place to supply, and armor and artillery are almost useless."