U.S. Shifts Gears After a Week of Setbacks

WASHINGTON —  Stung by a week of setbacks in its Afghan campaign, the United States is adjusting both its military and political tactics, with shifts ranging from possible bombing pauses during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan to a more prominent diplomatic role for the United Nations.

Even Bush administration officials acknowledge that last week’s reverses were not encouraging. Airstrikes went awry, hitting Red Cross warehouses, mine-sniffing dogs and Toyotas. A rebel offensive collapsed near the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. A charismatic Afghan military hero, apparently the first to plot a daring overthrow of the Taliban, was captured and executed shortly after sneaking into Afghanistan. And a drive to unite the anti-Taliban opposition bogged down in jealous wrangling.

But the officials argue that these are only short-term problems.

“We’ve only been at it 19 days,” said one senior administration official who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of military operations and diplomatic efforts.

“Have there been ups and downs?” this official asked. “You bet. Things we didn’t anticipate? You bet. Should this be a surprise to anybody? No. . . . We have a good plan, and we believe it’s going to work.”

Yet U.S. officials face a strategic conundrum: Even as the likelihood is growing that defeating the Taliban will take months or even years, Washington is increasingly being warned that a short-term campaign is the only way to prevent a mounting backlash against the United States along with political spillover throughout South Asia and the Middle East.

Britain’s defense chief, Adm. Michael Boyce, predicted Saturday that the Afghan campaign could take three to four years.

Pakistan, on which the U.S. campaign is dependent, and other U.S. allies in the Islamic world have called on the United States to halt the bombing of Afghanistan. Even several European allies are concerned about growing civilian casualties and nonmilitary destruction caused by U.S. airstrikes, Asian and European diplomats say.

As a result, the administration is making some tactical adjustments while insisting that its strategy is still working.

On the military front, the administration is considering ways to demonstrate respect for Islam during Ramadan, which begins in mid-November. Instead of bombing straight through, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld vowed last week, the Pentagon may orchestrate brief bombing pauses during the holiest times of the month.

The United States is also hoping that greater coordination of airstrikes with Afghan opposition forces will prompt them to wage another offensive to capture Mazar-i-Sharif. The Pentagon has more confidence in Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum than in the other military leaders of the Northern Alliance, even though Dostum’s initial forays last week failed.

“The air campaign [is] now shifting to provide close air support and battlefield air interdiction in support of those forces arrayed against the Taliban. And if those forces show aggressiveness, if they’re prepared to move, if they have the supplies that they need--and I sense that they are getting what they need--then between the two, air and their ground, the Taliban would have a tough time coping with that over time,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

Yet the alliance insists that it needs more military aid.

“We only have enough now to be defensive,” said Haron Amin, the group’s Washington representative. “We need a lot more equipment to be able to move on the ground. Without adequate supplies, we can’t go on the offensive.”

The alliance has asked for mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and ammunition. Amin also charged that the United States is not providing adequate air cover for the alliance to gain ground against Taliban forces.

But the administration is not convinced that the Northern Alliance, a loose coalition of minority ethnic groups, is capable of taking the capital, Kabul, let alone governing the city.

“Nobody is counting on them to win the battle--and nobody is sure they could do it anyway, although anything they can do to put pressure on, harass, bother or push back the Taliban is welcome,” a senior State Department official said Saturday.

Meanwhile, in southern Afghanistan, the United States is still hoping that leaders among the Pushtun, the country’s largest ethnic group, will rise up against the Taliban.

“We’re beginning to have evidence that people in the south and Pushtun tribes are beginning to stir themselves,” a senior official said. But there has been no visible sign of an uprising.

Part of the problem is the administration’s hesitation to back the efforts of influential Pushtun commanders with anti-Taliban credentials, such as the late Abdul Haq in eastern Afghanistan or Gul Agha Shirzai in the south, according to Western diplomats in Pakistan.

U.S. officials counter that progress has been made.

“The fact that the forces in the north and south have not moved dramatically does not mean that the effort that’s been expended has been wasted,” Rumsfeld told reporters Thursday. “They are better off today than they were before. They’re in a position to be more successful.”

But he acknowledged that the United States is still not certain of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, who is accused of directing the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

On the political front, U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is launching a new round of negotiations with the fragmented Taliban opposition in Pakistan, Iran and Europe, trying to cobble together an alternative government. He left on a 10-day mission Friday.

“We can’t make a government from outside. It doesn’t work. It has to be an Afghan effort with outsiders pretty active in trying to get them to work it out, and Brahimi can best carry out that mission,” the senior State Department official said.

Last week, Afghan opposition members in Pakistan held their first meeting. A second group, which includes supporters of former King Mohammad Zaher Shah and the Northern Alliance, is scheduled to assemble in Ankara, Turkey, this week. But Zaher Shah’s bid to form a government-in-waiting has bogged down under the strain of ethnic rivalry and renewed mistrust among several groups, Afghans involved in the process say.

The strains are complicated by Pakistani meddling, opposition from Iran, India and Russia, and U.S. reluctance to embrace the exiled king’s plan, according to advisors to the former monarch.

Zaher Shah’s initiative calls for a Supreme Council for National Unity. The council would enter Kabul and run the country after Taliban rule collapsed. It would then elect a larger assembly740322158would appoint a two-year provisional government--all under the 87-year-old ex-king’s figurehead authority.

Under this plan, the supreme council would be made up of 120 people from all Afghan regions, tribes and ethnic groups; 50 members would be named by the former king, 50 by the Northern Alliance and 20 by the two sides jointly.

But Pushtun groups supported by Pakistan have complained that this numerical formula gives too many seats to the Northern Alliance, and they are pressing the king to add more seats to the council. The alliance, not surprisingly, opposes that idea.

Both the political and military fronts have been badly hurt by the lack of information about what’s going on inside Afghanistan. With virtually no decent intelligence network of its own in the country, Washington hoped its newfound friends in Pakistan would remedy the shortfall, according to Pakistani officials and Western diplomats. The Taliban is widely viewed as a virtual creation of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI.

But when Pakistan jettisoned the Taliban in a political U-turn last month, its intelligence network in Afghanistan shriveled, some officials say.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar said the flow of information from Pakistan “has slowed to a trickle.”

*

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Peshawar, Pakistan, Rone Tempest in Mingaora, Pakistan, and Richard Boudreaux in Rome contributed to this report.