US is prevailing with its most finely tuned war
Pentagon is likely to stick with low-risk strategy even as it chases bin Laden.
Wielding a few hundred elite troops and thousands of precision-guided missiles, the United States has spearheaded the defeat of Taliban and terrorist forces in Afghanistan while waging perhaps its most finely tuned war ever.
The almost surgical application of US force has so far helped limit American casualties to a handful of troops - none of them killed in enemy combat - while also minimizing the deaths of Afghan civilians.
All indications are that the Pentagon hopes to use the same finely calibrated investment of force - coupled with $25-million rewards - to achieve its ultimate goal in Afghanistan of rooting out the leaders of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.
"It's sort of the immaculate approach to warfare," says Mackubin Owens, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. While the Pentagon stresses that the US cannot fight an antiseptic war, so far the Afghanistan campaign has followed the past decade's pattern of use of heavy airpower and minimal US casualties.
The Pentagon's overall approach, a marriage of least-risk military strategy and political expediency, has its drawbacks, however. Chief among them: By relying primarily on Afghan opposition forces for manpower, the United States cannot dictate the outcome when its interests and those of the opposition diverge.
The limits of US influence are evident, for instance, in the occupation of Kabul by Northern Alliance resistance forces, which took the city against Washington's will. US defense officials also acknowledge their limits in negotiations between opposition leaders and Taliban-Al Qaeda holdouts in Kunduz and Kandahar.
The Pentagon says it opposes - but cannot prevent - deals for the escape of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar from Kandahar or the release from Kunduz of non-Afghan Al Qaeda fighters, who officials warn could "destabilize" other countries and should instead be imprisoned or killed.
"We are able to provide input into that process, but we're not in a position of determining it or controlling it," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday.
In the long run, experts say, America's calibrated approach to the conflict may also limit the US role in the delicate process of shaping a broad-based, multi-ethnic government that could prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a base for terrorism.
"It brings you to an age-old question about these kinds of wars, small wars for major powers. The major power wants to limit its investment ... yet too often the small investment is too little to produce the significant result that is desired," says Air Force Col. David Tretler, a professor of strategy at the National War College.
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