War Shifts From Combat Sweeps to Small Units Probing Shadows

U.S. officials have concluded after 10 months of war that the combat mission of U.S. conventional military troops in Afghanistan is largely over and that whatever fighting remains is likely to be carried out by small numbers of Special Forces troops and CIA operatives.

This new phase represents a sharp shift from the U.S. military posture of last spring, when thousands of regular U.S. infantry troops attacked al Qaeda positions in the Shahikot Valley and then conducted sweeps farther east along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

"The war is over militarily for the moment," said a senior U.S. military officer involved in the fighting.

Now, officials said, the Afghan war is reverting to the methods used last October and November, when small teams of Special Operations troops spotted targets for bombers and worked with Afghan fighters. These units, which are trained to conduct covert raids and to work hand-in-hand with the CIA and foreign militaries, are focusing on small-scale efforts to track down Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan and al Qaeda fighters who have fled across the border into Pakistan.

"It is now primarily a war in the shadows, as it should be," said a U.S. military expert on such operations.

These sources stressed that the situation in Afghanistan is fluid and unpredictable and that conventional troops could again take a central role if the new government in Kabul isn't able to establish its hold on Afghanistan. The uncertain status of President Hamid Karzai was underscored yesterday by the daylight assassination of Abdul Qadir, one of his three vice presidents.

But the intention now is that almost all of the 7,000 U.S. soldiers in the country should increasingly play less a purely military role and more a political one, in effect acting as a reassuring presence to deter challenges to the Karzai government and to the international peacekeeping force in Kabul.

The conventional troops are not likely to be withdrawn soon, officials say. Rather, units from the 82nd Airborne Division are deploying to Afghanistan to replace those from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne divisions, and such troops are likely to be required for years.

"It's a deterrent and response force," the senior defense official said. "The peacekeepers wouldn't be there without them."

The shift in approach hardly means that Pentagon officials think that their anti-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan are finished, or even becoming much easier to prosecute. Indeed, many defense experts, including some who have consulted with the Pentagon on the conduct of the war, say that the lull in fighting offers an opportunity to assess the U.S. approach and make potentially crucial adjustments in tactics and policy.

"We're at a point where we have to decide what we're up to there," said Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan who was deeply involved in the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. "This is the time to sit down, take off the rucksack, and assess where you are." Among other things, he said the Bush administration should stop bombing Afghanistan, where there was a friendly-fire incident last week in Uruzgan province.

U.S. officials were reminded of the difficulties they face in recent days when it appeared that Uzbek and Tajik factions from their old allies in the Northern Alliance were about to fight in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. That near-breakdown into localized civil war was only averted after determined intervention by the CIA, Special Forces officers and the Karzai government, officials said.

Some military experts predicted that this new, more political phase of the war could prove even more troublesome than last winter's bombing of the Taliban frontlines and the pushing of al Qaeda out of the country.

"I am fairly pessimistic," said Andrew Krepinevich Jr., a defense strategist at the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a frequent Pentagon consultant. "We won Phase One of the war, but Phase Two, supporting the successor regime, is the kind of military operation that is more difficult."