Lull in Afghan war raises questions about U.S. plans

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan - The lull in the hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan has Afghans and Americans alike demanding that the U.S. military make clear what it is doing here and how much longer it plans to keep doing it.

Four months after the last major military engagement of the Afghan war, the U.S.-led military coalition has more than 10,000 troops on the ground. Their mission has evolved from a clear-cut effort to topple the Taliban and cripple al-Qaida into an increasingly uncertain operation mired in the complexities of Afghan politics.

More than two dozen recent interviews indicate that few people doubt the Americans will be here for several years, at least. But as fewer and fewer enemy fighters are reported captured and popular anger over civilian casualties grows, Afghan leaders have become increasingly restive about the ongoing U.S. military presence.

A top aide to President Hamid Karzai says U.S. forces should adopt a "significant change in tactics," while others call for U.S. troops to focus on providing humanitarian aid. At a time when the Pentagon still says it has a war to fight, Karzai and his government believe that they need U.S. troops to act as peacekeepers and nation-builders.

"It doesn't fit into the living-room definition anymore of what war is supposed to be like," acknowledged Col. Roger King, the chief spokesman here for the U.S. forces. "It's almost like deterrence during the Cold War."

Senior Western officials suggested that the U.S. command is aware of those new realities. "We're now in a different phase," said a high-ranking diplomat here, "so the military is thinking of changing their techniques to deal with that."

Mission has tapered off

In the meantime, thousands of fresh troops continue to rotate into Afghanistan but find little to do. An American helicopter pilot, wandering around the sweltering base here in shorts and a T-shirt, chafed at the inactivity. "It's so boring," Chief Warrant Officer Mike Smith said last week. "We're trying to figure out what we're still doing here."

Like other soldiers who have spent months in this dust bowl that was once a Soviet military base, Smith described the gradual tapering off of the U.S. mission. It has been at least a month since he has carried any prisoners on his helicopter, he said, and even longer since the soldiers on his chopper had come under enemy fire.

"I can see why we're going to be here for an indefinite period of time, but somebody should make a decision. If we're going to go into a humanitarian phase, we should just do it, so we can have something useful to do," he said.

The commander of U.S. forces here, Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, said he is not yet ready to stand down from the large conventional force under him - between 11,000 and 12,000 troops, down from a high of about 13,000. About 3,000 elite combat troops from the 82nd Airborne Division are rotating in this summer, replacing soldiers from the 101st Airborne who have been here for months.

"Perhaps they do feel, `What exactly am I supposed to be doing?' " McNeill said in an interview. "I am replying to them there will be some fighting," though mostly of the "smaller-scale, special operations type." One change he envisions in the short term is a more aggressive presence in outlying areas of Afghanistan. Although he did not specifically refer to it as such, McNeill described an extension of U.S. forces that sounded a lot like the peacekeeping role Pentagon officials have vowed not to undertake in Afghanistan. His plan, he said, is "to keep up coalition numbers out in the field, away from the base tether, out in areas where we are helping to provide some degree of stability and security." The last set-piece battle of the war, Operation Anaconda, took place in March - a two-week assault in eastern Afghanistan on al-Qaida and Taliban fighters who fled toward the border with Pakistan and have been largely elusive since. Since then, thousands of British troops have come and left without finding much of anything, and hundreds more Canadian soldiers at the military base in the southern city of Kandahar are also headed home.

As the hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban grinds painstakingly on along the Pakistani border, McNeill has focused more on the political side of the U.S. military mission here: bolstering the weak central government under Karzai. Supported by the Bush administration and recently elected president by an assembly of delegates from all over Afghanistan, Karzai nevertheless has been unable to extend his authority much beyond Kabul, the capital.

In particular, sources said, the Afghan president has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, sought U.S. military help in curbing regional militia leaders such as Bacha Khan, an ethnic Pashtun tribal chief whose forces have squared off against the Karzai-appointed governor in the eastern province of Khost. Although the Khost area, near the border with Pakistan, has been the focus of the U.S. military hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban leaders, McNeill said he has no intention of intervening against Bacha Khan.

"Clearly, there's a problem there. It's a problem that Afghans should solve," he said.

The Karzai adviser, however, said: "We can't do it. We don't have the resources. If they don't get involved, we're going to be starting '92 all over again," he added, warning darkly of a return to the civil war that dismembered Afghanistan in the early 1990s.

And while Karzai repeatedly emphasizes the need to break the "culture of warlordism" that grips Afghanistan, McNeill made clear that the U.S. military would continue to work with Karzai's regional rivals. "There is an alpha wolf syndrome here, and people behind the alpha wolf do not typically take actions on their own in Afghanistan," he said. "What would you give me as an alternative?" As the Americans continue to grapple with such political issues, Afghan leaders have been adamant in urging the United States not to press ahead with a military strategy better suited to the early days of the war. From Karzai down, they say they are tired of the Americans treating Afghanistan as a free-fire zone at a time when the war is yielding diminished results.

"It's very necessary for the Americans to change their strategy for their operations," said Gen. Anwar Kohistani, an Interior Ministry official who was part of a team that flew to Uruzgan province to investigate the July 1 U.S. airstrike there that killed about 48 villagers, most of them women and children at a wedding party.

McNeill said the U.S. forces were acting on information that fugitive Taliban leader Mohammed Omar might have been in the area that night, but Afghan officials have said the disastrous attack was simply another case of Americans relying on bad intelligence.

"The fundamental problem is that the Americans do not respect anybody except themselves," said Col. Mir Jan, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry. "They say, 'We are the God of the world,' and they don't consult us." Fearing a political backlash from the Uruzgan bombing at a time when he is already closely identified with the Americans, Karzai, too, has said the time is ripe for a new type of war. "We have to conduct more small-scale, surgical operations," said a senior presidential adviser. "It's a different phase, even though we agree the war is not really over." The American commitment to help train an Afghan national army is another illustration of the complications that have arisen here - and the reasons why the U.S. presence may be required for far longer than top officials are currently willing to acknowledge.

Afghans envision a multiethnic force of 60,000 trained men who will replace the regional militias that currently hold power in the countryside. Last week, with much fanfare and an out-of-tune marching band, Americans graduated the first 300 soldiers.

The 10-week training program was less than a rousing success. More than 200 recruits dropped out, most of them disappointed with the $30-a-month salary offered by the Americans. Regional leaders have been reluctant to send new trainees, and most Afghan officials say they can hardly envision the day when the national army will be able to replace the U.S. military as guarantors of stability.

"It's a mess," said Attah Mohammad, a militia commander from the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, who said he has no plans to disband his personal army of 20,000 in the immediate future. "This national army is a joke - 300 people from all over Afghanistan? It does not work."