Thursday, September 27, 2001

Afghan troops have some potentially
critical capabilities, according to book

By Lisa Burgess, Washington bureau

WASHINGTON — If and when U.S. troops hit the ground in Afghanistan, whether in small strike teams or full-out ground warfare, they will be met by opponents who have significant skills.

They’ll be skilled in guerrilla warfare, night-fighting tactics, artillery emplacements, command-and-control arrangements and other sophisticated tactics that U.S. commanders may not expect.

Rare interviews with actual Mujahideen fighters that were conducted by Lester Grau and Ali Ahmad Jalali and published in a now out-of-print book, "The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War," reveal some potentially critical capabilities never mentioned in recent press reports on Afghanistan’s militant Islamic government, the Taliban.

Finding where terrorists live and eliminating them before they can engage coalition forces in battle will be a key priority for commanders — but U.S. troops probably shouldn’t waste their time looking in Afghanistan’s larger cities, Grau said in an analysis of an urban raid.

In order to avoid government spies and informants, "most of the guerrilla fighters live in the countryside or suburbs, moving into cities only to fight," Grau said.

When hostile forces do attack, U.S. troops can expect them to use not only conventional munitions, but also bombs, both simple and sophisticated, guerrilla reports revealed.

"Bombing is a necessary part of being an urban guerrilla," according to a report by Haji Mohammad Yakub, an urban guerrilla in Kabul. "The object is to create fear and take out selected individuals."

Others operational descriptions in the book show that the Mujahideen are very accustomed to crossing the line between military personnel and civilians, happily recruiting local people for the most dangerous operations.

Yakub, who helped mastermind a successful series of four urban bombing attacks in Kabul in 1980, notes that in two of the bombings, the individual who actually planted the bomb was a civilian woman. The guerrillas also used "elderly people as go-betweens to carry bombs and messages to us."

The Mujahideen are also more practiced in standard military ground tactics than some commanders may expect.

Fighter Mawlawi Shukur Yasini told Grau and Jalali that during the war with the Soviets, the Mujahideen "fired from fixed, surveyed sites and from mobile firing bases."

The Mujahideen also used unmanned firing bases against wide-open targets.

Afghan strengths

Another good source of information on Mujahideen fighting tactics and capabilities are recently translated and declassified documents from Russia’s Frunze Military Academy, the ground forces command and general staff college located in Moscow.

The Frunze, which trains select captains and majors in combined arms warfare in a three-year course, is the Russian (and former Soviet) equivalent of the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

According to a Frunze analysis of the war in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen’s tactics were based on the following combat principles:

• Avoid direct contact with the superior might of regular forces when your own forces are smaller.
• Avoid positional warfare — stay mobile.
• When threatened with encirclement, do not fight — abandon the position.
• In all forms of combat, strive to achieve surprise.
• Use terror and ideological conditioning on the populace, as well as on local government, to maintain control.

The Afghan guerrilla forces’ strong suits as reported by the Frunze, and backed by Grau’s reports, include:

• All types of night actions.
• The ability to rapidly and clandestinely move in the mountains.
• A very broad reconnaissance network.
• Intimate knowledge of difficult terrain.
• Excellent scouting abilities.
• Rapid transmission of extensive intelligence information and information about unit movements over great distances, using rudimentary communications gear and signaling devices.

The Mujahideen reported night fighting capabilities are notable, because U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers are generally taught that night operations are beyond the scope of forces that do not field night-vision equipment and advanced sensors.

During the war with the Soviets, many of the rebels’ difficulties were caused by a lack of portable, two-way radios, according to the fighters interviewed by Grau for his book. But this type of equipment is easily available off-the-shelf, and "it’s likely that the Taliban has long ago solved" the shortage, a former CIA analyst said.

Afghanistan military targets

There are four known operational air bases in Afghanistan, according to Defense Department officials. The Taliban controls two of them, at Mazar-i-Sharif and Shindand. The other two, Feyzabad and Bagram, are in anti-Taliban hands.

By the end of 1980, about 130 fighter jets, including MiG-21, MiG-23 and Su-17s, were flying missions from Bagram, Shindand and Herat military bases (Herat is reportedly inactive). Other models have since been spotted, including MiG-27, Su-20 and Su-25s, according to an Amnesty International report on Afghanistan.

What isn’t known is how many of these aircraft the Taliban has, in what condition and whether it has pilots trained to fly them. Ammunition stores are another unknown quantity.

Intelligence experts believe that the ammunition depot at Shin-naray, which the Taliban probably seized in 1994, is at least partly operational. Weapons held there in 1994 included a reported 400 Stinger missiles — many of which may have been transferred to Pakistan — and 15,000 truckloads of ammunition.

Rumors of U.S. attacks have almost certainly led Taliban forces to begin moving ammunition and weapons stores out of long-term caches and into mountain hideouts, the former CIA analyst said.

U.S. intelligence experts will be able to track those movements using satellite photographs of the region, the analyst added.

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