http://freedomofpress.tripod.com/reese1.html

U. S. Would Face Hard Task in Afghanistan

by Charley Reese

SEPTEMBER 24 -- I'm hoping and praying that President Bush will be extremely cautious before committing any military actions in Afghanistan, If we searched the globe for the one country where our forces are least-equipped, least-suited to fight, it would be Afghanistan. It has become a graveyard of foreign invaders, all of whom boasted of "military superiority" when they came in.

AFGHANISTAN IS 10,000 square miles short of being the same size as Texas. There is no further resemblance. It is crisscrossed by rugged mountains that divide the country into three regions. In the Central Highlands is the main Hindu Kush range. This area is about 160,000 square miles of deep, narrow valleys and tall mountains (some above 21,000 feet). The Southwestern Plateau is a region of sandy deserts, high plateaus and semideserts. It's about 50,000 square miles, and the average elevation is around 3,000 feet. The Northern Plains, part of the Asian steppes, are rolling foothills and normally the most densely populated and fertile areas In the extreme northeast, there is an area called the Badakhshan, epicenter for many of the 50 earthquakes that occur each year. And if we needed any more bad news, there are probably still a million or more land mines uncharted and scattered about the country.

But that's just the geography. It is the recent history that should make us cautious and wary. In 1979, the Soviet Union sent in troops to prop up a communist government; eventually, the Soviets committed 100,000 troops. The Afghans never had an organized army. Nevertheless, they killed 20,000 Soviets and wounded more than double that number. The Soviets left after 10 years of bitter stalemate.

Mujahideen (a Persian word meaning warrior) with no more Russians to kill began to kill each other. They've been at war continuously since the Russians left in 1988. The significance of that for us is that when we dump American soldiers into that country, they will be up against men who have far, far more combat experience than any of our guys. And these warriors, with all their experience, will be fighting in their own country on ground they know. Our guys will truly be strangers in a strange land.

OUR HIGH-TECH weapons won't help us. There isn't a target in Afghanistan worth bombing. If we bombed their cities, the residents would hardly know the difference. The cities are already in ruins. Their agriculture has been destroyed by years of war and drought. The Taliban has no central government vulnerable to bombs It has no army. It has no air force. It has no industrial infrastructure. It has about 20 obsolete planes and a considerable amount of armor and artillery left by the Russians, though how much of it works, no one knows. If war comes, they will probably abandon the planes and armor and go into the hills with their rifles and shoulder-fired missiles.

I wouldn't put too much stock in the offer of 15,000 troops by the Afghan opposition. The Taliban has whipped it good, and the opposition controls only about 10 percent of the country. The Afghans paid a fearful price in their war against the Soviets. The Soviets killed about 3 million of them, but it appeared to make no difference. It just made the Mujahideen meaner and more determined.

If we send in special-operations forces, we should be prepared to accept casualties. If we resort to bombing innocent people -- in Afghanistan or anywhere else -- we should be prepared to lose the war against terrorism. As 19 men, armed with nothing more than pocketknives, box cutters and airline tickets, have just shown us, we are a lot more vulnerable than the terrorists. We are, to use the military jargon, a "target-rich" nation.

We have a multibillion-dollar Army, Navy and Air Force. We have a multibillion-dollar intelligence operation. Yet, for about $30,000 worth of flight instruction and maybe another $30,000 in living expenses, these 19 guys killed more than 5,000 of us, caused more than $2 billion in just physical damage and brought the world's last remaining superpower to a standstill.

DON'T THINK for one second that there aren't a lot of terrorists in the world feeling very much encouraged by all of that. That's why it's so important to go after them, but saying it is a lot easier than doing it. And nowhere will it be harder than in Afghanistan.