The Taliban had some old Soviet mechanized equipment, some artillery pieces, and lots of ground troops with small arms, however they did lack anti-air assets. What they abounded in is time to construct command bunkers (some of which were so complex, the Viet Cong would be proud), foxholes, and fortifications over the years following the Soviet withdrawl. The Air Force was sent in to destroy these key “centers of gravity”, thus rendering the Taliban as blind and dumb as possible before sending in land forces.
I think you underestimate the toughness of the Taliban. They fought off the Soviets, and have had years to adapt to a Stone-Age infrastructure with modern weapons. They’ve learned how to communicate amongst themselves and use the land to their advantage. Trust me, that month of sorties was definitely necessary.
Tripler
Yes, it really did need to be “softened up”.
Ok. For a moment lets forget all about logistics and how difficult it would be to move in heavy armored formations, artillary, troops, and all the supplies they would need to fight in Afghanistan from gods know where (Saudi I suppose). Lets just work with what you are saying here (at least what I THINK you are saying).
So, the US would pound some area into dust (i.e. soften them up), then create a base out of whole clothe so to speak, then move in all these forces and supplies. You are right…Afghnistan didn’t have a lot of tanks, planes, AA, artillary, etc. Oh, they had some of all of that…mostly outdated Soviet stuff IIRC. What they DO have is some mean ass terrain and a lot of nasty irregular fighters who know how to use that terrain extremely well.
So, we would soften em up then start the process of building a base (or bases), moving in our military (into hostile territory) and supplies and such. At the same time we would do what we essentially did…which was to support the Northern Alliance by infiltrating in special forces to act as liason and to coordinate air strikes, to give them supplies and support. How would this help us to capture ObL? How would this have helped us to win the war faster in Afghanistan? How would it have helped us in Tora Bora against the AQ forces there (since that was the point of this thread)?
You are talking about months worth of build up to have sufficient forces to actually accomplish anything meaningful (and this is disreguarding the near impossibility of pulling off this logistics miricle in the first place). Look how long it took us to stage troops and supplies for either of the Gulf Wars…months. And we were staging them out of friendly countries and not while under fire.
Then gods know how long it would take to move that army out and surround Tora Bora (something I think is patently impossible no matter HOW many troops we put on the ground there…but I digress). We’d have to establish lines of communication and supply from our pounded out base, then you’d stage from there (presumably) and move your army into position. I’m not sure if you see where I’m going here so I’ll just cut to the chase…everyone and their goat would see exactly what we were doing and where we were going months ahead of time. ObL would know that Tora Bora was our objective because of how we staged out and set up lines of communication and resupply.
It would have been laughably easy for him to do exactly what he did anyway…slip out across the Pakastani border while leaving the rest of the spear carriers behind to fight the good fight and die for the cause. Hell, with the kind of time he’d of had he might even have been able to get more folks away (if that was his goal…gods know).
Essentially what it looks like to me you are advocating would have worked out exactly the same as it worked out anyway…except we would then have a large base in Afghanistan before hostilities officially ended, and a large body of troops and heavy equipment…and we probably would have lost more men. What would we have done while we were building up this base, filling it with tanks, bombs and beans? Exactly what we DID do…relied on the NA to harrass AQ and the Taliban on the ground while providing close air and tactical strikes, probably using special forces as liason and to scout. The only other difference is that this might have pissed off some additional Afghani’s as they would rightfully have seen our move as a more full scale invasion than what we actually did. Might not have mattered but could have been a factor.
Even assuming we COULD put a large ground force into hostile Afghanistan AND supply them I don’t see how this buys us anything at all…and I see it costs us a hell of a lot. Afghanistan, IMHO, went surprisingly well and was a very good basic plan…up to the point where the Taliban folded and we just kind of flailed around while the Administration decided that Iraq was shinnier.
Actually, we do have several “bigger” bases (as big as you want to get, to do the job at a forward deployed location).
Air Bases at Kandahar, Bagram, Kabul and other Army/Marine bases at Khowst, Tora Bora, and Gardez.
While they’re not like the typical mega-base you’d see around the Continental US, they’re not the rinky-dink company-sized hasty bases you see in the movies. The air bases especially have at least a thousand guys and gals at them.
Tripler
It’s an austere environment, but we do have bases there.
If you check out the latest Michael Schiavo thread in GD, you’ll find him touting Fox News as a welcome antidote to the rest of the secular liberal media. However, much as you’ve come to the conclusion that scott plaid is crazy, and undeserving of scorn, I’ve come to a similar conclusion that lekatt is not merely stupid, but rather, functionally retarded.
Never denied that we didn’t have bigger bases in Afghanistan…now. I believe several of them (IIRC) were former Soviet or Afghan bases. Afaik though we mainly occupied them in force AFTER the majority of hostilities had ceased and in the occupation phase (and probably to use as staging bases for air raids into Iraq during that brief war). The point I was trying to make is we didn’t attempt to move into those bases in force while hostilities were still going on, nor did we attempt to move heavy forces and the logistics to support them…and for good reasons. It takes months to build up sufficient supplies and force to fight a major battle (especially the way the US fights such things)…as surrounding and interdicting Tora Bora would have been.
Well, yeah. That’s the point of my job. Nearly all of them were Soviet built, but we did occupy them as they were taken, and the potential opposing forces situation calmed down around them. That’s just simple strategic doctrine–why occupy a taken base if you think it’ll be overrun next week?
Then I misread your post. I thought you were under the misunderstanding that we didn’t have any ‘substantial’ bases in Afghanistan. My bad!
It’s like the flood before the storm. You have to trickle in water in puddles before you let the flood wash arrive, just like aircraft and supplies. I can’t rebuild an old Soviet base if you don’t trickle in a bulldozer or grader here and there. . .
Tripler
What do I do? Just google a search for RED HORSE
Both of these wars were run as if they were political campaigns rather than sincere operations actually working under the hood the way they were sold as grand projects. That’s the core of the problem.
Well, I largely agree with this. We said “Hand over Bin Laden, or else!” At that point in time our primary goal was getting Bin Laden. At the time the Taliban said “Poop on you, you yankee imperialistic scum,” Bush decided to remove the Taliban (unless you think “Join his fate” meant have a knish and relax for a while )
So, from a military understanding, the mission was to remove the Taliban and ferret out Bin Laden, that’s what they planned and that’s what they tried to execute.
I really didn’t have a problem understanding that the mission had changed when the Taliban refused, though I concede that up until the point that they did, the goal was to get Bin Laden.
I think we can both agree that the goal changed at the time the Taliban refused to hand over Bin Laden, and that from that point forward the goal presented to the public and the mission of the military in Afghanistan was twofold.
Are we in agreement?
Not really. I’m not an expert, and while I didn’t think you were, I thought it presumptious to assume you were not without checking.
Without getting into a quest for cites, I think you are mistaken. In reading Charlie Wilsons War the military capabilities and weaponry of the Afghans is detailed. They were particularly strong and accurate in artillery, and the Taliban had been hoarding arms and armor, so there was certainly no shortage of air targets and their military was nothing to laugh at (as the Russians learned.)
But this is besides the point. Certainly there were targets to be hit from the air.
You may be right. I suspect though that the truth of the matter is that logistics procluded an immediate ground invasion. It takes time to move troops, equipment and the necessary support into place. In the meantime air power is much easier to project across distance, so we went with what was available. The protracted air war allowed us the time to get our troops in place. I don’t think the decision was made to have the ground troops hang back. Quite the contrary, I think they were rushed into place and implemented pretty damn fast.
Do you concur with this analysis?
Well maybe, but it seems to me that previously we were in agreement that delegating important tasks to our Afghan allies was kind of stupid. I certainly wouldn’t want our allies to botch the job and then have the Taliban on our troops’ collective ass while they were hunting Osama. I think that the responsibility for our troops safety and prudent military planning make the first priority eliminating the Taliban military. Secure the area and then search.
Cool.
I dunno man. I again, delegating our troops’ safety to the Northern Alliance seems imprudent, to say the least.
While I agree that getting Bin Laden was and should have been a priority, first things first. It would be hard to conduct a search in the middle of a civil war.
It’s a matter of degree. I guess he’s also responsible for the air conditioning being out at the DMV in Harrisburg today. However, I don’t think he personally made the decision to neglect the maintenance of that facility, so while blaming him in the abstract as the final link in the chain of command of government may be valid, it’s not particularly useful or satisfying. Being pissed at him personally for such a thing is just silly.
Similarly, the President generally isn’t and should not be involved in day to day tactical military decisions. That’s why we have a chain of command. The Pres. hands down large objectives and the military goes about executing them. The President says “overthrow the Taliban and bring me the head of Bin Laden.” THe military says “Yes, sir!” makes a plan, moves troops and takes it from there. The Pres doesn’t go out on patrol, take point or make any but the most general military decisions. That’s what the military is for.
I really don’t blame Clinton for the economic woes of 2000-2003. I don’t think we had too much control or influence and I do think he took steps to try to moderate the impact of the tech bubble. In hindsight, just not enough (but I didn’t think he could have known any differently.)
On the other side of the coin, I just don’t think one can reasonably suppose that Bush had an awful lot to do with the Tora Bora incident, and seeing that is the case, blaming him personally is kind of silly.
I honestly don’t know. Maybe. Personally, I’d be more afraid of Bush second guessing and interfering with the tactical decisions of his military.
Well, of course he’s at the center of every failing of this administration. He’s the President.
Personally, I don’t hold any President responsible for the failings of government in general. I hold the president responsible or laud him for his influence and leadership upon the body of government.
If you can demonstrate that Bush’s leadership or decisions he made contributed to or influenced a military mistake at Tora Bora then I think you have a case for holding him personally responsible. Failing that his responsibility is simply that of being commander in chief while a mistake was made.
Tha Taliban was barely organized, if it existed at all, when the Soviets left, and was not a force of much significance until well into the 90s. I’m sure that some of the guys who had fought the Soviets were also in the Taliban, but they aren’t the same set of people.
Bush is responsible for the fundamental error in all of this: the desire of a hammer to treat all problems as nails. The single most powerful military force in human history was precisely the wrong instrument, to the wrong end.
If the Taliban had wanted to hand over ObL, could they have done so? If they had offered no resistance to our efforts to seize ObL, would it have made the difference? I can’t say as I know the answer, but my point is that the question wasn’t asked. Is the real problem the Taliban, or Pakistan? What did we accomplish by raining baskets of hundred dollar bills on some of the worst examples of our species, the warlord?
We ached to strike back, its only natural, human, all too human. Its not that the Bushiviks were carried along by a tide of emotion, or ruthlessly exploited that emotion, its about half of each. And so we reached for our strong suit.
But you can’t effectively fight shadows with bullets, nor fend off a cloud of hornets with a baseball bat. This is a war that must be fought with stealth, treachery, snitches and propaganda. We need sympathetic eyes and ears in the markets of Ankara and the slums of Hamburg. We need people who will drop the dime on terrorists, either for love, money, or a green card. But it is purely futile to launch an artillery barrage on an incoming fog.
All in all, I think the invasion of Afghanistan was a mistake, on balance. A mistake, perhaps even a blunder. Amnesty Unintentional. But compared to the collossal blunder that is Iraq, it is the merest “oopsy”.
No, you’re absolutely right. For simplicity’s sake, I grouped 'em all into “the Taliban”.
Scattered bands of mujahadin warriors sucessfully attrited the Soviets to the point they witdrew, and through that experience, built their command and control networks, learned basic tactics, and built an overall strategy of defending Afghanistan. But of course, all militaries need one thing–money. That’s why they built up their opium business: to help fund their fight.
So, take your organized militias of muhajadin, throw in a little religious fervor, make 'em think they’re a legitimate government (which, for all intents and purposes, they were the only semblance of any government, since nobody else was around), and BAM! Instant Taliban.
In the same vein that the Pentagon went to Bush THREE times to take out Zarqawi when they knew where he was in Northern Iraq, and Bush nixed them each time.
They were too smart for that. The civilian meddling — and there was a hell of a lot of it — was carried out by Rumsfeld to insulate Bush from exactly this sort of accusation. But if you don’t think Rumsfeld was doing his boss’s will, you’re fooling yourself.
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