War Shifts From Combat Sweeps to Small Units Probing Shadows

To be sure, the majority view among U.S. officials and military experts is that U.S. policy there is still on track. But the strong minority view is that the United States could face real trouble in Afghanistan, especially if it fails to adapt its tactics as conditions change.

"We may be sliding into a losing dynamic," said retired Navy Capt. Larry Seaquist, an expert in security strategy. "There is not much positive data in view." As evidence of a drift in the U.S. approach in Afghanistan, he and others pointed to the incident last week in which more than 100 Afghan civilians were, according to Afghan accounts, injured or killed by a U.S. airstrike aimed at suspected Taliban hideouts. "Our forces seem to be chasing hither and yon and stumbling into one friendly-fire mess after another," he said.

Pessimists such as Seaquist worry about three trends they see, all related to the Pashtuns, Afghanistan's predominant ethnic group. Together, they fear, these trends could snowball into surprising trouble for the United States and for its allies in the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

The first is the resentment engendered by the months-long hunt in southern Afghanistan for Mohammed Omar and other Taliban leaders. To some defense experts, the Uruzgan "friendly-fire" incident underscored the diminishing returns of this effort. "We are now doing things that appear to give marginal return but at a potentially very high cost," said John Warden, a retired Air Force strategist who played a key role in planning the air campaign in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Others worry that the hunt for Taliban leaders continues only because of a strategic drift. "We are running the risk of letting our participation degenerate into continuous tactical scrapes without decisive action," warned retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, an expert in tactics and strategy.

The second trend is the Pashtun suspicion that the United States still backs the Tajik and Uzbek commanders who formed the core of the Northern Alliance, to the detriment of Pashtun ambitions to play a larger role in the new government. Indeed, at last month's meeting of the loya jirga, or grand council, to select a new Afghan government, Pashtuns complained that Tajiks held on to too many cabinet posts at their expense.

"There are extraordinary levels of discontent among the Pashtuns," said Robert Templer, Asia program director for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization. "It's hard to see a long-lasting peace based upon the political arrangements that exist in Kabul at the moment." Those arrangements were further called into question by the killing yesterday of Abdul Qadir, who had been one of the few ethnic Pashtun leaders in the Northern Alliance and who had protested last month what he called the loya jirga's discrimination against that group.

Templer believes the U.S. government should stop pursuing al Qaeda and Taliban forces and address other issues. "I don't think the Taliban and al Qaeda will be much of a problem in the future, but everyone else [in Afghanistan] might be," he said.

The United States could still lose the war in Afghanistan, Bearden warned, "if the Pashtuns decide that we're the enemy, or an occupying force."

U.S. officials say they are sympathetic to the Pashtuns' concerns. "There are some in the Pashtun community who feel that they lost ground, or they didn't command as many of the [cabinet] portfolios as they might have hoped," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage conceded in recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Behind the scenes, officials say, the U.S. government twisted arms to limit the number of cabinet seats that Tajiks from the Northern Alliance took in the new government.

The third Pashtun-related trend is the recent expansion of the war into Pakistan, which arguably is now a more important front than the war in Afghanistan. Tribesmen along both sides of the border mainly are ethnic Pashtuns. There the war is even harder to follow than it is in Afghanistan, with neither the United States nor the Pakistani government disclosing much about operations.

If Pakistan's recent crackdown on al Qaeda falters, then the entire U.S. effort in the region could crumble, experts warned. But how to bolster the Pakistani effort remains controversial. Pakistani officials disclosed last week that the U.S. military recently rushed reconnaissance equipment, including five sophisticated surveillance helicopters, to help in the hunt for al Qaeda members. Some CIA officers and Special Operations troops also are working with the Pakistani military in the border area.

More intrusive aid will be necessary, some contend. To prevent al Qaeda members from slipping back and forth across the border, retired Army Col. Stephen Robinette recommended the United States move the conventional war to Pakistan and begin conducting assaults with U.S. helicopters and troops.

Others say that such open intervention, which likely would be extremely controversial inside Pakistan, could help undermine the regime of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Even without such an escalation of the U.S. presence, experts already are predicting that Pakistan faces a spell of terrorist attacks, mainly aimed at westerners. This "sustained campaign" might not be executed by al Qaeda members, but might be funded by them, Templer speculated.

Few doubt that the destabilization of Pakistan would represent a major defeat for the United States in the war. "If Pakistan falls apart, our ability to pursue al Qaeda in the region falls apart with it," emphasized former U.S. diplomat E. Wayne Merry.

To avoid that, Armitage recently told Congress, it will be necessary to prevail against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "I don't think we're actually going to have a success unless we're successful in both countries," he said.