It has been a war fought like no other hi-tech,one-sided and very rapid. The Afghan campaign will revolutionise the way we think about conflict Paul Harris and Gaby Hinsliff in London, Ed Vulliamy in New York, Peter Beaumont in Quetta and Jason Burke in Jalalabad Hamid Karzai stood outside the ancient walls of Kandahar and watched the stream of Taliban vehicles fleeing the city. It was Friday December 7 and Karzai’s prayers had just been answered. A few days earlier the new leader of Afghanistan had negotiated the surrender of the last Taliban stronghold. Now it looked as if finally the city would be his without the feared bloodbath. The chilled air was silent. The sound of American bombs exploding in the streets was absent for the first time in weeks. Karzai watched the Taliban leave his prize. He later confessed to an aide that he was confused by his enemy’s lack of will to fight for the city. But it did not matter. It was a historic moment. The battle for Afghanistan had been won. But if Karzai was confused, what was the rest of the world to think? The Taliban movement, whose religious fanaticism seemed to spring from the Dark Ages, had just been crushed by the most hi-tech military power in history. With the fall of Kandahar the war in Afghanistan was practically over. A few hardcore al-Qaida fighters made a determined last stand on the hilltop stronghold of Tora Bora. Senior Afghan fighters leading the campaign to force the al-Qaida guerrillas out of their caves to an icy death in the snow-filled White Mountains said last weekend that the task had been completed.
Yet the war is not finished. From the start United States President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have talked of the long haul. That talk has not diminished. As the generals and politicians relish their victory, the implications of the Afghan campaign are just beginning to become clear. The victory has marked the beginning, not the end, of the”war on terror”. And it will be a war like no other the world has seen. Revolution was the last thing on Abdul Jabar’s mind. Surviving was all that mattered. Surviving the barrage of US bombs and rockets that had hammered down on his position in Mazar-i-Sharif’s Qila-e-Janghi fort for six days. But Jabar, an Uzbek fighting with the Taliban, had witnessed first-hand something historic. It is a revolution in waging war as far-reaching as the invention of the tank and perhaps as pivotal as the spread of gunpowder. In terms of technology and changing the role of ground troops, Afghanistan has been something new. It has heralded a way of hi-tech fighting that men like Jabar cannot compete with. He was lucky to escape with only a bullet in his foot. Hundreds of his comrades were killed during the siege of the fort. They managed to kill just one American in return. This new war is combat waged from the air and directed from the ground. It is not a war fought with battles, it does not have front lines, nor does it have marches or invasions. It is a war where men seated thousands of kilometres away can track the enemy’s every move and then destroy it with a few strokes of a keyboard. It is a war where a whole country can be put under intense surveillance without being occupied, where no enemy is safe to set foot outdoors for fear of the rocket-armed spies in the sky. It is 21st-century war, served up American-style.
Key to this are the Predator drones. They symbolise the sterile, hi-tech face of the new war. Unmanned and armed with Hellfire missiles, they can be remotely piloted from thousands of kilometres away. They can spot, identify and kill their targets with minimum risk to American life. Alongside the drones are the cruise missiles and guided bombs, bigger and better than in previous campaigns. Afghanistan has shown that while mistakes will still happen the technology that guides the explosives to their target has become accurate enough at last to justify the sobriquet”smart bombs”. Just as the bullet changed the face of war and rendered hand-to-hand battle obsolete, so this new technology has altered things again. With death coming from the sky, infantry, artillery and tanks the symbols of 20th-century war are being made redundant. Afghanistan saw no repeat of the troop build-up seen in the Gulf War. There were no massed tank advances. In the Gulf just 3,5% of bombs were”smart”; in Kosovo that figure had risen to 33%. In Afghanistan it was 60%. And it will rise higher still. The role of troops on the ground has been minimised to a few elite forces positioned to guide the missiles in with lasers, heightening accuracy. If there is any tough fighting to be done, it will be carried out by local proxies in the case of Afghanistan the Northern Alliance guided by special forces liaison officers. There is now simply no need to”send the boys in”. The result of this is that US casualties have been so reduced as to be almost incidental. Certainly most of these are accidental. So far just seven US soldiers have died and only one at enemy hands. On the Afghan side, hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters have been killed, civilians have been blown to pieces, thousands of refugees created, fortresses levelled and a government overthrown. Rarely has war looked so one-sided. Four men have been key to the success of this war US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, military supremo General Richard Myers and field commander General Tommy Franks none of whom doubted their technology would secure victory. They have been the heralds of this new era of war-making. Rumsfeld had decided what kind of long war this would be on September 11. Enigmatic, sometimes abrasive, quietly resolute, the defence secretary had spent the day helping rescue teams at the Pentagon, moving the length and breadth of his building like the captain of a wounded battleship. Then he retreated into his lair, alone, taking urgent calls but refusing to emerge for hours.”That,” said an aide”is when Rumsfeld began to prepare his war.” He is a slightly possessed, haunted, eccentric man; his enemies prefer to say”insane”. He has been compared to Dr Strangelove, and his solitary behaviour that day only enhanced the image. But he is a man with a vision as clear and surgical as the laser beams of the”Star Wars” missile defence screen he was appointed to deploy. This time there would be no ground invasion, no build-up of infantry. Rumsfeld had decided that the Gulf War was the last that the world’s last superpower would have to fight with tanks and battalions. At first there were doubts about the strategy. Many in the Pentagon hierarchy were dismissive of hi-tech war and the theatre of Afghanistan with its rough terrain and long history of fending off invaders seemed too tough a test. Now those critics are as silent as the Taliban.”Not once, not even when his own generals were having doubts, did he waver. It never occurred to Rumsfeld that the Taliban would not be crushed, and sooner rather than later,” said the aide. The Afghan campaign will be studied over the months to come as future operations are planned. The lessons learned at Kabul, at Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar could soon be applied on any one of a number of new stages worldwide.
Afghanistan seems to have been a textbook battle for the new age. The first bombs in this new war landed just before 9pm local time in Kabul on October 7. More than a month of relentless, targeted bombing devastated the Taliban strongpoints, wiping out their limited air defence systems in a few days. Then, step by step, the remit of the bombing was increased, moving from anti-aircraft guns to artillery and tanks and finally to carpet bombing of trenches and troop formations. Eventually, as the target list was exhausted, operations switched to patrolling”kill boxes” areas where planes would wait for the orders to attack as targets emerged. Only once did US forces deviate from the battle plan. On October 19 a helicopter-borne force of US Rangers took a compound near Kandahar used by Mullah Omar. It was the only old-fashioned US ground assault attempted during the campaign and it ended badly. The Rangers were forced to retreat under heavy Taliban fire. The lesson was clear. The old way is too risky. The stunt was not tried again. The bombing steadily eroded the Taliban as a fighting force. It paved the way for the victory in Mazar-i-Sharif on November 9, when the forces of General Rashid Dostum took the city, through a hole in the lines blasted by US planes. That triggered the fall of Herat three days later and, on November 13, the Northern Alliance drove into Kabul, a city that had been abandoned by its Taliban defenders a few hours earlier. By now it was clear that the Taliban had simply wilted in the face of the new war. The capture of Mazar-i-Sharif had triggered mass defections. Overnight whole areas of Taliban territory changed sides at the whim of their commanders. Black Taliban turbans were swapped for green Alliance military caps. With their long and brutal history Afghans know many things about war and that includes backing the winning side. Where they did stand and fight, the Taliban showed themselves to be brave soldiers. When the US marines landed in the south, an armoured column immediately set out to meet them, eager at last to engage the enemy. They were all destroyed by air before they got close enough to fire. In a war won at the push of a button, bravery counts for nothing. Certainly it seemed that way to the demoralised fighters on the ground. Thousands of Pakistanis volunteered to defend the Taliban. Hundreds have been killed, few will ever have seen an American soldier. Bordar Bagh (23) was lucky. He survived intense bombing of Kabul before fleeing home to the Pakistani tribal area of Malakand.”I came to fight the Americans but they just killed us from the air,” he said. In US military circles they are already calling it”the war of the spacemen”. In part because of the hi-tech backgrounds of the Pentagon elite, but also because of the use of satellites in selecting targets. Certainly at times the al-Qaida and Taliban fighters must have felt that they were being attacked by beings from some other planet unseen creatures from way beyond the horizon and with a might way beyond the imagination.
Now the weapons that wrought the Afghan victory are looking for a new target.”The future is now,” said former army chief, General Gordon Sullivan.
The battle plan against Iraq is already laid. Iraqi military installations and communication lines would be subject to the same relentless bombing. Rebel Shia and Kurdish troops would be backed by Special Forces commandos and air cover. The hunt for the prey would be similar, albeit in a more difficult urban terrain. The only major difference would be the deployment of ground troops around oil fields near the Shia port of Basra. Surveillance flights are circling the skies above Somalia, looking for al-Qaida camps, training grounds or anything that could be deemed a base at Somalia’s peril with a clear possibility of strikes. US warships are positioning off the African Horn. In neighbouring Sudan, the Pentagon has dispatched officials to try to intensify intelligence-sharing. The regime has expelled Osama Bin Laden, but still has links to al-Qaida, with one of his wives being a niece to Islamic leader Hassan Turabi. The US is reported to be ready to help end the protracted civil war in return for closer cooperation. A refusal to co-operate would not be countenanced. The”You’re with us, or you’re against us” mentality is still paramount. Military advisers have also been dispatched to the Philippines, to supplement a $100-million aid package, and pressure is mounting on Yemen to cooperate. Other missions have been sent to Uzbekistan, Paraguay, Uruguay and a nominal but wary US ally in Europe, Bosnia. However, some gaps are starting to show in the alliance between Britain and the US in the direction this war will take. Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith returned from an audience with Bush struck by one thing: the US administration’s lack of interest in anything other than destroying terrorists. The British interest in creating postwar political stability comes in a poor second. Although the political coalition is important to Washington, it is not nearly as central as Blair would like it to be. Downing Street denies that the US war aims are racing ahead of the tenuous international coalition that has sup- ported it. But Whitehall sources privately concede the war is rapidly moving on to its next stage like it or not though they are pressing for a closer look at non-military solutions. There is much unfinished business. Even as new countries are targeted and war plans drawn up, there is an unsettling question over the war’s direction so far. The Taliban did not attack New York. Al-Qaida did. Bin Laden has not been caught and the US does not seem to know where he is. In the arid mountains of the Afghan border with Pakistan he could still hide for months to come. And would it matter if he were caught or killed? For all that the US war machine has changed beyond recognition, so too has the enemy that it faces. Bin Laden is already a hero to millions of young and disaffected Muslims around the world. His face has become an icon sold in markets and worn on T-shirts from Peshawar to Peckham. If he is martyred as seems inevitable others will almost certainly rise to fill his shoes. And behind them will stand yet more. Al-Qaida itself, while shattered and broken in Afghanistan, is designed to withstand the weapons that the US has thrown against it. The US investigation is running into problems. Despite more than 1000 arrests the hunt for the network that planned the September 11 attacks is hitting a brick wall, FBI officials privately admit. The focus is switching to Western Europe where investigators believe many of the top suspects have already been arrested or are being sought. More globally, the FBI has moved for the first time to station agents in India and China. Terrorism has gone global and so has the hunt for the terrorists. The US has also cracked down on sources of cash for al-Qaida, seizing assets and winding up businesses worldwide. But despite the constraints put on its financial networks, there is probably no shortage of day-to-day funds available to its operatives. Mullah Omar used to store chests of cash under his bed and such tactics are not hurt by freezing Swiss bank accounts. Even if a cash crisis did hit al-Qaida, operatives could still raise their own money through crime. Or simply by getting a job. When an enemy lives among you, he is harder to stop. Each al-Qaida cell can work by itself, it does not need instructions from a central point. Each member knows what sort of targets they should be identifying. This is leaderless resistance at its most refined. It is an organisation that is almost impossible to infiltrate. Earlier this month the US issued its third terror warning of the war. Fresh attacks could be on the way, warned Tom Ridge, the US’s Director of Homeland Security, as he put police forces on the highest state of alert. His words spoke volumes for al-Qaida’s global reach and the impossibility of predicting its actions.”The quantity and level of threats are above the norm. The threats we are picking up are very general. The sources are all around the world,” he said.
In attacking the Taliban the US has not come close to dealing al-Qaida a mortal blow. US weapons are like none the world has seen, but neither is the enemy. Al-Qaida does not need tanks, camps or artillery, or planes or missiles. It does not seek to capture territory or invade the US. As much as the Predator drones, the al-Qaida fighter also has revolutionised the face of war. This is a whole new world. The terrorist hunters face huge difficulties. In the slums of Asian cities, in the refugee camps of Palestine and the madressas of the Arab world, al-Qaida is fighting its battles in the minds of its converts. That is not an enemy that can be defeated by bombs and rockets, no matter how well targeted. As the suicidal pilots of September 11 showed, al-Qaida’s main weapon is the will to attack. And that will is not in short supply. Bin Laden’s training camps were not full of conscripts but volunteers. Al-Qaida’s fighters were men who were attracted by the Saudi-born dissident’s cause, not his charisma alone. “We can destroy him with smart missiles and special forces toys for the boys, but destroying the things that brought him all the recruits is well beyond any military operation,” one Western intelligence source said. Just as the Taliban, sheltering in their caves, never saw their enemy before it was too late, so too for the victims of al-Qaida and the other terrorist groups the US now seeks to defeat. Just ask the family of Adam Winstein, a 14-year-old Israeli boy killed by a Hamas suicide bomber. He had been chatting to four friends on a busy Jerusalem street when the bomber strolled up to them and detonated the explosives strapped to his chest. None had time to realise what was happening. All that was left was the bloody remains, the mourning relatives and a new cycle of violence. The same can be said of the hundreds of civilians killed and injured by US bombs in Afghanistan. In a Peshawar hospital truck driver Fazl Rehman recounted the night bombs destroyed the village of Kakrak, near Kabul:”All I could see was that all the houses around had been levelled.” This may be a new way of war, it may be against a new type of enemy, but the tragedy of the innocent victims on all sides remains unchanged.