Down And Dirty

Sunday, Oct. 14, 2001 By MICHAEL ELLIOTT

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If civilian casualties are a constant of war, so is politics. In that respect Afghanistan is no different from anywhere else. The air campaign makes the point. Last week's bombing was carried out by the B-2s from Whiteman, B-1 and B-52 planes based on Diego Garcia--a tiny island in the Indian Ocean--and Navy F-18s flying off the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and U.S.S. Enterprise. Cruise missiles were fired from surface vessels and submarines (including, on the first night of the attacks, a British one). The attacks hit more than 60 targets, such as air-defense systems, weapons dumps and training camps run by both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Pilots had it as easy as anyone flying a mobile-weapons platform ever will. "My crews," said a lead B-52 pilot who would identify himself only as "Woodstock," "didn't encounter any threat that we weren't prepared to deal with and nothing that put us unduly at risk." Navy Lieut. Commander "Chris," who piloted an F-18 from the U.S.S. Enterprise on a six-hour mission to Kandahar, said, "The amount of resistance we've seen in this theater is significantly less than you would see in Iraq, significantly less than we saw in Kosovo."

After six days, the bombing slowed, in part for observance of Friday prayers at mosques. When it was resumed at a steady pace early Saturday, the conventional wisdom grew that Afghanistan is not, as they say in the Pentagon, a "target-rich environment." Rumsfeld made the point in his inimitable style. "We're not running out of targets," he said. "Afghanistan is."

That was not entirely true. Politics intruded on the air war and, for the first week at least, prevented some targets from being attacked. To the north of Kabul, troops of the Northern Alliance have been preparing for an offensive; their people are hungry and spoiling for a fight. Baba Qool, a refugee from the village of Hazarbagh who is in a camp under the troops' protection, lost his wife, three sons and two daughters when the Taliban--with Pakistani, Uzbek and Uighur Chinese troops in its force--raided the village last year. One old woman was rolled in a mattress, doused with gasoline and set on fire. The Northern Alliance's commanders thought their chance for revenge would soon come; the American bombers, they hoped, would target the Taliban forces massed against them.

In the first week that didn't happen. What had once been the expected strategy for combat

Easy: international politics. To conduct the war in Afghanistan, Washington needs allies in the region. Bombers can fly from Diego Garcia and aircraft carriers, but the helicopters vital for close-in work--to say nothing of the soldiers who will do it--generally need bases nearer to the action. So far, the U.S. has made more headway than expected; last week Washington signed a forces agreement with Uzbekistan allowing for the long-term stationing of American troops and aircraft in the Central Asian country. Khanabad, an air base 125 miles north of the Afghan border, has become the staging-post for U.S. forces in the region. More than 2,000 members of the 10th Mountain Division are based there, and American and British special forces have used it as a jumping-off point for missions.

The price the Uzbeks are extracting for basing rights is modest. They just want some assurance that the Americans won't drop the region like a cigarette butt, as the U.S. did after the Russian army was defeated by the Afghan mujahedin 10 years ago. Pakistan is a different matter. The support of Islamabad is vital because of Pakistan's links to the Taliban and its proximity to the war zone. But in return, Pakistan wants Washington to put the brakes on the Afghan opposition.

So far, the U.S. has secured the use of two Pakistani bases, at Pasni on the Arabian Sea and at Jacobabad, where a fleet of U.S. helicopters and a Marine contingent have already landed. (Ostensibly, their mission is limited to search and rescue and the evacuation of Americans endangered by protests in Pakistan, though the Pentagon seems relaxed about the constraint. "There's not that much difference between a search-and-rescue and a search-and-destroy mission," says an official.) The price for this help? Islamabad won't tolerate a postwar government in Kabul dominated by the Northern Alliance.