Source: Carnegie

While traveling with the anti-Soviet Afghan Mujahedin in the province of Nangrahar in 1989, I found myself for a while living in a cave. At the time, what struck me most forcibly about the place was the damp, the smell, and the number and voracity of the fleas; but of more military significance then and now was the fact that the cave was big enough to hold several dozen Mujahedin and a small contingent of mules and horses. In other words, this was very much the kind of place in which Osama bin Laden may be based today, and where his men and diehard Taliban guerrillas are likely to hide up if they lose control of the main cities. And there must be thousands of such potential hideouts scattered around southern and eastern Afghanistan.

The difficulty of fighting in Afghanistan can admittedly be exaggerated. It is very large, mountainous and rugged, but in by far the greater part of the country, there is no forest cover whatsoever. This obviously gives tremendous advantages to armed forces with air dominance. In the first years of the Soviet intervention, this allowed the Soviet forces to make great progress against the Mujahedin, at an acceptable cost in Soviet lives - though at a horrendous cost to Afghan civilians in Mujahedin-controlled areas, who were exposed to merciless and indiscriminate bombardment.

The tide of war only turned against the Soviets when US Stinger and British blowpipe hand-held anti-aircraft missiles began to reach the Mujahedin in large numbers in the mid-1980s. Today, although the Taliban do still possess some of these, it would seem from the lack of damage to the allied airforces that they are probably no longer very effective. And even the Stingers did not win the battle decisively for the Mujahedin. In the end Gorbachev withdrew as much for political as military reasons. Above all, Soviet-backed Communist airpower contributed a great deal to preserving the Communist regime for almost three years after the Soviet ground forces withdrew. During the failed Mujahedin assault on Jalalabad in March 1989, I felt naked as a worm in the face of repeated air attacks, which inflicted considerable casualties among the Mujahedin and played a crucial role in defeating their attack.

However, as in that battle, airpower can only play an overwhelming role if enemy troops are forced to concentrate on the ground to fight other ground troops. It will of much less utility when or if the present war turns into a man-hunting operation to track down Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda or Taliban leaders, who will probably move at night and be helped by some at least of the local population. Of course, airpower will still have a very important reconaissance and support role, which will probably be helped by Afghan laxness about camouflage and security—these are after all people who frequently siphon petrol from one tank to another with a lighted cigarette stuck in the corner of their mouths.

In the much shorter term, US and British airpower is already playing a critical role in helping the Northern Alliance ground forces in their assault on Mazar-e-Sharif, and it will do the same when they move on Herat and other centers in Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara territory. The problem is that for ethno-political reasons, the US is being very cautious about using ground-attack aircraft to help an Alliance assault against Kabul—let alone Kandahar, Jalalabad and other ethnically Pashtun cities in Taliban-controlled territory.

If the Northern alliance does not attack and no serious offensive by Pakistan-based anti-Taliban Pashtun forces develops, then obviously Kabul and the other centers will not fall to airpower alone. I may be wrong, but I doubt that the present air campaign itself will lead decisive numbers of key Taliban forces to defect or surrender. All of these people are extremely tough, and many have over the years suffered bombardments by the Soviets and indeed by other Afghans more brutal and indiscriminate than anything likely to be launched by America and Britain. Many have no families left, and have no life to go back to but the squalor of refugee camps or semi-starvation in wrecked villages. So far, whatever defections have occurred seem to have been matched by new volunteers.

In this context therefore, bribes to key figures and a new focus of political loyalty are likely to be as important than bombs - as they were indeed during the Soviet war and many British operations from the 1830s to the 1940s. Or as the cynical tag has it, "You cannot buy an Afghan—you can only rent him". It should be noted though that in all these campaigns, the bribes were usually to secure neutrality rather than outright support.

Whatever happens, significant numbers of enemy fighters will probably decide to fight to the death. The al Qaeda -backed Arab forces—estimated at around brigade strength—have little choice in the matter. The core Taliban fighters too have never shown much fear of death, as the impressive collection of wounds accumulated by their leaders indicates.

How large this core may be is something that I at least cannot answer. If it runs into the thousands, then the most troublesome battlefield for their enemies may be not the mountains and deserts, but that classic jungle of modern guerrilla warfare, the city. Long before I saw the Chechens decimate the Russians in Grozny in 1994-96, I was impressed by the Soviet failure in ten years of war even to subdue some of the suburbs of Kandahar and Herat, though they reduced them to surreal jagged moonscapes. I was based in a ruined suburb of Kandahar for a while in January 1989, and was struck by its impenetrability to any force which did not have a really intimate knowledge of its geography.

From time to time the Soviets occupied these areas, only to fall back again under constant sniping, booby-traps and ambush. Mostly they relied on long-range bombardment. When I visited Herat on the government side in June 1989, I looked out from the government machine gun nests in the ancient fortress over an immense field of ruins - from which the Mujahedin went on sniping. We had better hope that such horribly destructive urban battles do not develop, because as in the case of Grozny, scenes like this would not have a good effect on important sections of international public opinion.