Analysts say Taliban has exploitable weaknesses

Los Angeles Times

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — To get their hands on Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, U.S.-led forces likely would have to first deal with his hosts, Afghanistan’s Taliban fighters. And as military planners probe for weak spots, they would find several to exploit.

Compared to the modern armies that the United States and its allies defeated in Iraq and Yugoslavia over the past decade, say experts here, the Taliban’s weapons, training and organization are almost as poor as the country that the fundamentalist Islamic movement controls.

Although the Afghans are tough opponents in combat, as British and Soviet occupiers discovered in the past, the U.S. and allied forces could knock the Taliban government off-balance by going after its key leaders rather than launching heavy airstrikes. Then the Afghan people might well finish the job by rising against the unpopular regime, Afghan and Pakistani experts suggest.

"In the Taliban, you have a force which is a ragtag army of the defeated late 19th-century type," said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political science professor at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University, who has studied Afghanistan’s wars for 20 years.

"Frankly speaking, they literally are in a hopeless situation," added Rais, who is convinced the Taliban’s days are numbered even if the regime turns over bin Laden, viewed by U.S. officials as a prime suspect in last week’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon. "In no way are they going to save their power. It’s too late for that after this mischief."

If U.S. forces were careful to focus on the Taliban leadership and avoided civilian casualties, the Taliban’s worst enemy could be its own unpopularity among Afghans, said Abdul Hai Warshan, an Afghan journalist based here.

"The weak point of the Taliban is itself," said Warshan, who spends about three months a year with the two sides in Afghanistan’s civil war as a reporter for the Voice of America’s Dari language service. "They have lost their credibility in their own society. People are fed up with the Taliban."

The Taliban arose in the mid-1990s amid the lawlessness that followed the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet forces. At first the United States and others saw the fundamentalists as a stabilizing force, but their strict interpretation of Islamic laws and protection of bin Laden turned American officials away.

The Bush administration faces risks of its own. The United States was badly stung before by underestimating its enemies, most recently during a 1993 debacle in Somalia, when the death of 18 American soldiers in one street fight brought criticism at home and forced the withdrawal of U.S. peacekeepers.

But a lot changed on Sept. 11.

For now, President Bush would appear to have widespread U.S. public support for military action. The protests Washington has to worry about are in Pakistan, where supporters of the Taliban and of bin Laden are calling for widespread strikes and demonstrations Friday.

The Taliban’s biggest military advantage is Afghanistan’s rugged terrain, the barren mountains and dusty flatlands which have been a graveyard for foreign invaders for centuries.

But the Taliban’s home ground advantage could be overcome if, as the Pentagon has indicated, the U.S. strategy relies on small Special Forces units that move in and out of Afghanistan.

This "smaller-is-better" way to wage war plays to the American advantage of stealth, mobility and overwhelming technological superiority, Rais said.

In effect, the United States would be sending in guerrillas to fight guerrillas. And as Bush tries to build a military coalition against bin Laden and its Taliban hosts, Rais suggested, the Americans should try to bring Afghan refugees and Taliban opponents in as allied soldiers.

"There are so many hungry Afghans who want handsome salaries, I think that raising a national army where everyone has some experience in killing someone is not very difficult," he said. "There are many Afghan generals (exiled in Pakistan) looking for a job."

In addition, the United States could make common cause with the Northern Alliance militia run by Burhanuddin Rabbani, who is recognized by the United Nations as Afghanistan’s ruler, though his weak coalition only controls about 5 percent of the country.

The Northern Alliance has been backed into a small sliver of northern Afghanistan and lost its top general, Ahmed Shah Masoud, to bomb-wielding suicide assassins earlier this month. But it knows the geography and enemy, and opposes the Taliban and bin Laden.

Western intelligence on the Taliban is very limited, so foreign experts are left to guess on the size of its army and its weapons. The Taliban may have about 50,000 fighters, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. But an estimated 18,000 of those are fighting a major offensive against the Northern Alliance.

The Taliban has no more than 1,000 aging Soviet-era tanks, which are little match for the modern armor the United States could deploy. The Afghan force of about 80 armed helicopters and less than 50 warplanes is also from the Soviet era, and some no longer can fly, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an authority on the world’s military forces.

The United States and any allied countries would find it relatively simple to fragment the Taliban into isolated groups by cutting their supply lines and communications, Rais argued.

One of the Taliban movement’s biggest weaknesses is its fanatical allegiance to a supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. His rule by decree has alienated most ordinary Afghans, said Rais, though most are too afraid to challenge him. And without him, the movement would be weakened.

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