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Unless President Bush has changed his mind at the last minute, U.S. troops are being deployed for the ground offensive in Afghanistan, according to the intelligence sources of DEBKA-Net-Weekly.
Helicopters taking off from the decks of the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in the northern Arabian Sea near Pakistan will ferry most of the soldiers to their targets.
The mission, according to DEBKA, is to capture the Afghan capital Kabul. They will be joined by additional U.S. forces, flown in to Kabul by helicopter from staging-bases in Pakistan, together with imported Turkish special forces units. Those Turkish troops are intended to stay on in Kabul as an occupation force.
The other mission is to seize the Taliban army lines blocking the advance of opposition Northern Alliance troops towards the capital.
U.S. strategy assigns high importance to keeping the opposition force – and especially its tanks – from entering the Afghan capital. The reason is simple: The tanks are Russian and manned by Russian crews. The strategic pact Bush forged with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a telephone conversation Sept. 23 admits Moscow to a position of influence in Afghanistan’s post-war government. But it also specified that no Russian military forces were to set foot in Kabul.
The two leaders will have a chance to explore their historic pact, face to face and in greater detail, when both attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shanghai Sunday.
Meanwhile, Washington – none too sure Putin intends to abide by the letter of the agreement – is taking no chances and has ordered American forces to keep the Russians out of Kabul, according to intelligence sources.
Other U.S. troop units will fly into Afghanistan from Tadjikistan to land simultaneously at the gates of Kandahar and Jalalabad. They should find some friendly faces on the ground. The sites where they touch down have been under the control of U.S. Special Forces for more than two weeks. In that time, the ground units have accumulated intelligence, marked out targets for U.S. bombers and missiles and ambushed forward command units of the Afghan Arab army, a force under Osama bin Laden’s direct command.
The damage wrought by the U.S. Special Forces units was palpable in the Middle East this week. Families in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Lebanon were informed that loved ones had been killed in Afghanistan. The news and rumors spreading like wildfire round the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula gravely embarrassed the affected regimes.
An Egyptian national, Abu Basir al-Masri, was among the most prominent casualties. Al-Masri commanded the Arab Afghan legion in Jalalabad. He was also senior operations officer under bin Laden and Iman al-Zuhari, head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, his very name a testament to his high rank – Basir is Arabic for “he who sees or leads the way.”
Basir was equal in rank to Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned in the United States for his role in the explosion in the World Trade Center in 1993.
U.S. troops will find comrades in arms not only in Jalalabad and Kandahar but also in Kabul. Sources report that combined units of U.S., British and German special forces, as well as special Pakistani military intelligence groups, already control large sections of the capital.
The Taliban military presence in Kabul effectively collapsed Oct. 15, and its commanders and forces fled the city. Some headed to the front lines facing the Northern Alliance, and others turned northeast. Only a few groups of Taliban soldiers linger in the Afghan capital without their officers, looting, sniping at coalition forces or strewing mines round the streets.
The Taliban attack on the Northern Alliance launched Wednesday was far from an orderly engagement. It was clearly not planned or overseen by an organized general headquarters and operations branch, but carried out by tag-ends of Taliban forces left behind in the area, joined by men in flight from Kabul. What they were after was to breach the Northern Alliance’s front line and link up with bin Laden in the Hindu Kush mountain range. Once there, they proposed to embark on a long guerrilla war.
On the night of Oct. 16, U.S.-led coalition bombers hit Taliban front lines in the area for the first time, hoping to pre-empt their drive to reach the mountains, although they knew the chances of this were slim. The Taliban, despite their collapse in battle, still believe they can fight their way past the Northern Alliance and make it to the Hindu Kush.
On the way, they will break into food and ammunition stores to pick up supplies sufficient to sustain them through the harsh winter months until the first snows melt next April.
On the night of the U.S. bombardment, Taliban ruler Mullah Mustafa Omar instructed his officers to surrender to U.S. Special Forces if their backs were to the wall. Omar’s plan was to distract the Americans and keep them busy processing and disarming prisoners while fellow Taliban forces slipped past to the Hindu Kush.
Although the Americans may have successfully rounded off the main thrust of their campaign for control of Afghanistan’s main towns, military experts believe the toughest ordeal is still ahead – the mountain fighting. Washington must also reckon on bin Laden opening up additional fronts in Central Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East, while at the same time intensifying his terror campaign inside America.
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