da es naheliegend erscheint,dass die bestens ausgebildete 55.Brigade,die aus Arabern,Algeriern ,Pakistani und anderen Ausländern besteht und sich in Richtung der Nordfront abgesetzt haben soll,das nächste Ziel sein wird,bringe ich den Artikel der Washington Post.
Übrigens machen die grossen Brokerhäuser an der Wallstreet derzeit jeden Morgen bevor es an die gewohnten Bilanzkennzahlen geht militärische Lagebesprechungen,in denen Militärexperten den Investoren die strategische Lage zwischen Jalalabad und Kandahar erklären (schreibt heute die Eurams)
U.S. military will hammer the Taliban militia's 55th Brigade
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 14, 2001; Page A01
The Pentagon is planning an extensive range of actions during the next phase of the war in Afghanistan, including covert raids, continued bombing and large-scale helicopter attacks conducted partly to signal that the U.S. military is engaged on the ground in pursuing terrorists, defense officials and outside military experts said.
Over the next month, the U.S. military will hammer the Taliban militia's 55th Brigade, a seasoned assault force made up mainly of several thousand Arabs and other foreigners, sources said. Some experts see destroying that unit as crucial to undermining Taliban rule in Afghanistan and crushing the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden; to a great extent, the 55th Brigade represents bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan.
With a dwindling number of bombing targets remaining after one week of airstrikes, the next month will bring a new emphasis on ground activity by U.S. Special Forces, including commando raids and reconnaissance missions, defense officials and analysts said.
U.S. troops who recently moved into the region around Afghanistan will focus on liaison with Afghan rebels already working to overthrow the Taliban, military experts said. In that role, they would coordinate U.S. airstrikes and rebel ground attacks aimed at weakening the Afghan rulers.
The military plan appears designed, at least in part, to reassure Americans that the government is going after terrorists. "You'll see the total effort," said a Defense Department official familiar with military planning. "It will be an air assault, and it will be real visible. I think the administration will want to show that things are being done."
Yesterday, U.S. warplanes continued to pound Afghanistan for a seventh straight day. In Friday's airstrikes, which were limited in deference to the Muslim sabbath, a 2,000-pound bomb dropped by a Navy F-18 missed its target, a helicopter at the Kabul airport, and killed as many as four civilians when it hit a house about a mile away, Pentagon officials said.
Military planners are operating under some time constraints as they plan the next phase of the war. Shirin Tahir-Kheli, a South Asia expert who previously served on the National Security Council staff, said the Pentagon has "a one-month window," from the middle of this month until mid-November, when the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins, to take apart terrorist networks and undercut the Taliban.
She noted that U.S. military planners have shown an unusual deference to religious sensitivities and are unlikely to carry out much overt activity during Ramadan. After that, the onset of winter is likely to force the United States to curtail much of its activity for several months.
The 55th Brigade is believed to number well over 1,000 fighters, and has grown more powerful and more politically significant inside Afghanistan over the last year as more foreigners have come into the country, said Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan army who was a planner for the resistance after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Jalali recently wrote an analysis of the military situation in Afghanistan for the U.S. Army's professional journal, Parameters.
"The brigade was specifically formed under the Taliban to arrange, train and control the participation of Arab volunteers," he said. "The Taliban relies heavily on it." The unit spearheaded the Taliban takeover of Mazar-e Sharif, the major city in the north, several years ago, and reportedly was active in attacks on the opposition Northern Alliance last week.
Even other experts who disagree with the view of the 55th Brigade as the keystone of Taliban power say they expect it will be a major target of U.S. attacks in the coming days, because it is an easily targeted conventional military unit that is associated both with bin Laden and the Taliban, and is believed to have sent some of its trainees outside Afghanistan as members of the al Qaeda network.
"I think those guys are going to get crushed," said Michael Vickers, a former Special Forces officer experienced in Afghanistan. "They are symbolic -- they are interlopers in Afghanistan."
Destroying the brigade might take months, the experts also warned. Tahir-Kheli, the former National Security Council staff member, warned that the unit appears to be spread out across the country, with a hard core of several hundred protecting bin Laden.
She predicted they are likely to fight to the death. "They have nothing to lose," she said. "They took over a country by force, and they've got nowhere else to go."
The key tactic of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan is to keep up "continuous pressure," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. To achieve that, the U.S. military plans to operate round-the-clock and across Afghanistan, appearing anywhere at any time. The purpose, officials said, is to keep bin Laden and his network off balance, forcing them to make mistakes that will reveal their locations to the unmanned aerial vehicles the Air Force is operating constantly overhead.
"You'll see raids, constant reconnaissance, and hitting targets when you get intelligence," said retired Army Col. James Hallums, a veteran of unconventional warfare in Central America and Bolivia.
E. Wayne Merry, an expert on Central Asian defense issues at the American Foreign Policy Council, said, "We are going to be probing, hunting, searching, provoking and generally seeking to use our strengths" -- which he listed as mobility, long-range communications, all-weather capabilities and night fighting.
But experts on special operations said the United States, while willing to take more risks than it has in past attempts to kill bin Laden, will be extremely selective about actually putting U.S. troops into combat on the ground in Afghanistan.
"It's dangerous," said Vickers, the former Special Forces officer. When the U.S. military receives good intelligence on the location of bin Laden's associates or Taliban hard-liners, he said, it is likely instead simply to call in airstrikes.
The process of finding those targets already is well underway, analysts said, with the Pentagon now sifting through the results of the first week of bombing and combining it with reports from the Northern Alliance and from CIA contacts with Pushtun leaders in the south. Some of the first raids by U.S. Special Operations will be to capitalize and deepen on that intelligence, they said.
One question facing the U.S. military is that historically it does not have a good track record -- at least in public -- with such secret raids. In 1970, a group of U.S. troops on helicopters flew to the Sontay prisoner-of-war camp just west of Hanoi, only to find it empty. A decade later, Navy RH-53D helicopters trying to rescue American hostages in Iran crashed while refueling, killing eight. In 1993, 18 U.S. troops were killed during a Special Operations raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, that was carried out by some of the same units deployed to Uzbekistan.
On the other hand, experts say, the quality of Special Forces troops and training improved radically in response to some of those failures. Also, said retired Lt. Gen. Thomas Burnette, a former chief of operations for the Army, "There have been a lot of fairly successful ones [raids] that nobody will talk about."
When the United States does conduct raids inside Afghanistan, the troops first will rehearse them extensively, probably in another country, Special Forces veterans said. When they do go in, it will almost certainly be at night, to capitalize on U.S. technologies and skills.
High overhead the helicopters carrying troops will be layers of air support -- including AC-130 Spectre gunships or fighter jets for air cover, surveillance aircraft to monitor enemy activity, and refuelers to keep them all flying. If a tank approaches troops on the ground, they are likely not to try to destroy it themselves, but instead use laser designators to guide bombs that can be dropped from as high as 23,000 feet.
"A special operation will involve a few people on the ground but be supported by massive firepower overhead," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a Green Beret during the Vietnam War who later served as a Special Operations planner.
The most spectacular kind of raid is a "snatch and grab," in which Special Operations seize people they want to interrogate for intelligence or capture for prosecution. But experts said that such efforts are among the most difficult missions that can be done, and probably would be rare in Afghanistan.
"Prisoner snatches are very hard, much harder than just blowing people up," said Killebrew, who conducted them during the Vietnam War. It is even harder, experts noted, when the prisoners are members of a group that has shown a willingness to die if Americans can be killed at the same time, raising worries about people carrying grenades in their clothes and detonating them when aboard a helicopter.
A former high-ranking CIA officer with extensive experience in Afghanistan said he doubted that orders would be given to Special Forces to capture bin Laden or any of the other 21 most wanted terrorists named earlier this week by President Bush. "I think we want to kill all 22 guys," he said. "We probably don't want to have any more guys in orange jumpsuits."
Staff writers Vernon Loeb and Bradley Graham and researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
Übrigens machen die grossen Brokerhäuser an der Wallstreet derzeit jeden Morgen bevor es an die gewohnten Bilanzkennzahlen geht militärische Lagebesprechungen,in denen Militärexperten den Investoren die strategische Lage zwischen Jalalabad und Kandahar erklären (schreibt heute die Eurams)
U.S. military will hammer the Taliban militia's 55th Brigade
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 14, 2001; Page A01
The Pentagon is planning an extensive range of actions during the next phase of the war in Afghanistan, including covert raids, continued bombing and large-scale helicopter attacks conducted partly to signal that the U.S. military is engaged on the ground in pursuing terrorists, defense officials and outside military experts said.
Over the next month, the U.S. military will hammer the Taliban militia's 55th Brigade, a seasoned assault force made up mainly of several thousand Arabs and other foreigners, sources said. Some experts see destroying that unit as crucial to undermining Taliban rule in Afghanistan and crushing the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden; to a great extent, the 55th Brigade represents bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan.
With a dwindling number of bombing targets remaining after one week of airstrikes, the next month will bring a new emphasis on ground activity by U.S. Special Forces, including commando raids and reconnaissance missions, defense officials and analysts said.
U.S. troops who recently moved into the region around Afghanistan will focus on liaison with Afghan rebels already working to overthrow the Taliban, military experts said. In that role, they would coordinate U.S. airstrikes and rebel ground attacks aimed at weakening the Afghan rulers.
The military plan appears designed, at least in part, to reassure Americans that the government is going after terrorists. "You'll see the total effort," said a Defense Department official familiar with military planning. "It will be an air assault, and it will be real visible. I think the administration will want to show that things are being done."
Yesterday, U.S. warplanes continued to pound Afghanistan for a seventh straight day. In Friday's airstrikes, which were limited in deference to the Muslim sabbath, a 2,000-pound bomb dropped by a Navy F-18 missed its target, a helicopter at the Kabul airport, and killed as many as four civilians when it hit a house about a mile away, Pentagon officials said.
Military planners are operating under some time constraints as they plan the next phase of the war. Shirin Tahir-Kheli, a South Asia expert who previously served on the National Security Council staff, said the Pentagon has "a one-month window," from the middle of this month until mid-November, when the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins, to take apart terrorist networks and undercut the Taliban.
She noted that U.S. military planners have shown an unusual deference to religious sensitivities and are unlikely to carry out much overt activity during Ramadan. After that, the onset of winter is likely to force the United States to curtail much of its activity for several months.
The 55th Brigade is believed to number well over 1,000 fighters, and has grown more powerful and more politically significant inside Afghanistan over the last year as more foreigners have come into the country, said Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan army who was a planner for the resistance after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Jalali recently wrote an analysis of the military situation in Afghanistan for the U.S. Army's professional journal, Parameters.
"The brigade was specifically formed under the Taliban to arrange, train and control the participation of Arab volunteers," he said. "The Taliban relies heavily on it." The unit spearheaded the Taliban takeover of Mazar-e Sharif, the major city in the north, several years ago, and reportedly was active in attacks on the opposition Northern Alliance last week.
Even other experts who disagree with the view of the 55th Brigade as the keystone of Taliban power say they expect it will be a major target of U.S. attacks in the coming days, because it is an easily targeted conventional military unit that is associated both with bin Laden and the Taliban, and is believed to have sent some of its trainees outside Afghanistan as members of the al Qaeda network.
"I think those guys are going to get crushed," said Michael Vickers, a former Special Forces officer experienced in Afghanistan. "They are symbolic -- they are interlopers in Afghanistan."
Destroying the brigade might take months, the experts also warned. Tahir-Kheli, the former National Security Council staff member, warned that the unit appears to be spread out across the country, with a hard core of several hundred protecting bin Laden.
She predicted they are likely to fight to the death. "They have nothing to lose," she said. "They took over a country by force, and they've got nowhere else to go."
The key tactic of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan is to keep up "continuous pressure," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. To achieve that, the U.S. military plans to operate round-the-clock and across Afghanistan, appearing anywhere at any time. The purpose, officials said, is to keep bin Laden and his network off balance, forcing them to make mistakes that will reveal their locations to the unmanned aerial vehicles the Air Force is operating constantly overhead.
"You'll see raids, constant reconnaissance, and hitting targets when you get intelligence," said retired Army Col. James Hallums, a veteran of unconventional warfare in Central America and Bolivia.
E. Wayne Merry, an expert on Central Asian defense issues at the American Foreign Policy Council, said, "We are going to be probing, hunting, searching, provoking and generally seeking to use our strengths" -- which he listed as mobility, long-range communications, all-weather capabilities and night fighting.
But experts on special operations said the United States, while willing to take more risks than it has in past attempts to kill bin Laden, will be extremely selective about actually putting U.S. troops into combat on the ground in Afghanistan.
"It's dangerous," said Vickers, the former Special Forces officer. When the U.S. military receives good intelligence on the location of bin Laden's associates or Taliban hard-liners, he said, it is likely instead simply to call in airstrikes.
The process of finding those targets already is well underway, analysts said, with the Pentagon now sifting through the results of the first week of bombing and combining it with reports from the Northern Alliance and from CIA contacts with Pushtun leaders in the south. Some of the first raids by U.S. Special Operations will be to capitalize and deepen on that intelligence, they said.
One question facing the U.S. military is that historically it does not have a good track record -- at least in public -- with such secret raids. In 1970, a group of U.S. troops on helicopters flew to the Sontay prisoner-of-war camp just west of Hanoi, only to find it empty. A decade later, Navy RH-53D helicopters trying to rescue American hostages in Iran crashed while refueling, killing eight. In 1993, 18 U.S. troops were killed during a Special Operations raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, that was carried out by some of the same units deployed to Uzbekistan.
On the other hand, experts say, the quality of Special Forces troops and training improved radically in response to some of those failures. Also, said retired Lt. Gen. Thomas Burnette, a former chief of operations for the Army, "There have been a lot of fairly successful ones [raids] that nobody will talk about."
When the United States does conduct raids inside Afghanistan, the troops first will rehearse them extensively, probably in another country, Special Forces veterans said. When they do go in, it will almost certainly be at night, to capitalize on U.S. technologies and skills.
High overhead the helicopters carrying troops will be layers of air support -- including AC-130 Spectre gunships or fighter jets for air cover, surveillance aircraft to monitor enemy activity, and refuelers to keep them all flying. If a tank approaches troops on the ground, they are likely not to try to destroy it themselves, but instead use laser designators to guide bombs that can be dropped from as high as 23,000 feet.
"A special operation will involve a few people on the ground but be supported by massive firepower overhead," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a Green Beret during the Vietnam War who later served as a Special Operations planner.
The most spectacular kind of raid is a "snatch and grab," in which Special Operations seize people they want to interrogate for intelligence or capture for prosecution. But experts said that such efforts are among the most difficult missions that can be done, and probably would be rare in Afghanistan.
"Prisoner snatches are very hard, much harder than just blowing people up," said Killebrew, who conducted them during the Vietnam War. It is even harder, experts noted, when the prisoners are members of a group that has shown a willingness to die if Americans can be killed at the same time, raising worries about people carrying grenades in their clothes and detonating them when aboard a helicopter.
A former high-ranking CIA officer with extensive experience in Afghanistan said he doubted that orders would be given to Special Forces to capture bin Laden or any of the other 21 most wanted terrorists named earlier this week by President Bush. "I think we want to kill all 22 guys," he said. "We probably don't want to have any more guys in orange jumpsuits."
Staff writers Vernon Loeb and Bradley Graham and researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
