Down And Dirty

Sunday, Oct. 14, 2001 By MICHAEL ELLIOTT

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Will it all work? The helicopters will be vulnerable to the 100 or so shoulder-launched, CIA-purchased, Soviet-war-era Stinger missiles still in the hands of the Taliban. The Stingers have one of the greatest records of any killing machine ever invented; a 1989 U.S. Army study found that the Afghans took down 269 Soviet aircraft with them in 340 attempts. But less high-tech weaponry will serve just as well; in 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. soldiers were killed, including six Delta Force commandos who tried to rescue airmen from two Black Hawk helicopters downed by rocket-propelled grenades.

And then there is--apart from the skinning alive--Afghanistan's most frightening contribution to modern warfare: the cave. Afghanistan's limestone cliffs are honeycombed with them, many with multiple entrances and all of them capable of being booby-trapped. Pentagon officials are convinced that bin Laden and his top associates are holed up in caves and that they might move to a different one every day. Some are big enough to be seen in satellite images, and the Air Force has already targeted them. EGBU-28 bunker-buster bombs can drill like masonry bits through 20 ft. of stone before detonating, and B-2s dropped the behemoths on several caves last week. Pentagon officials got excited when secondary explosions from inside the caves continued for hours after the initial attacks. Fuel-air explosives are also handy; an explosive aerosol can be injected into the entrance of a cave and then ignited. Anyone left inside will suffocate and be fried to a crisp.

But that's if the Americans get lucky. Whereas U.S. special forces have recently revised their training for the sort of urban jungles they had to cope with in Mogadishu, there has been little or no training for Afghanistan's terrain. "We're going to figure out this cave business as we go along," says a former special-forces commando. In much the same way, they will figure out what to do if they catch up with bin Laden or another al-Qaeda leader. In that event, the special forces would have to choose between a "snatch-and-grab" mission--tossing their target into a helicopter and getting out fast--or a "blow-and-go," in which case the captive would be killed. Sources tell TIME that the Pentagon and State Department had made plans last week to fly FBI agents to a Navy warship in the region, ready to arrest bin Laden or any other al-Qaeda operatives caught alive. The FBI blocked the plan, claiming it didn't have agents to spare for arrests that might never happen.

All these plans assume that the leadership of al-Qaeda remains in Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence officials are convinced that bin Laden is indeed still there. But sources tell TIME they are worried that other leaders of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban may have slipped out of the country, or be trying to. Their favored destinations are thought to be Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. (U.S. officials are also trying to check movements into Somalia, Chechnya and Sudan.) In all three of the likeliest havens, the CIA has been working with local officials to round up the members of extensive al-Qaeda cells, while U.S. diplomats have been pressing their host countries to bolster surveillance at airports and border checkpoints. No U.S. special-forces operations have been launched against cells outside Afghanistan as yet, but in a letter to the U.N. Security Council on the war last week, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte pointedly noted that Washington reserved the right to take "further actions with respect to other organizations and other states."

For now, however, the focus remains on Afghanistan. In the mountains and deserts, winter is approaching; with its onset, said Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British defense staff, "things will slow down a bit." But only a bit. The war may be won by small teams of dedicated warriors, but by most standards this is going to be a pretty big show. The Pentagon intends to send more troops to the region next week. Some of them could come from the 23,000 U.S. troops, including special-forces units, now participating in Operation Bright Star maneuvers in Egypt. Another contingent might be supplied by Britain's 3 Commando Brigade, currently on exercises in Oman.