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US sheds its gloves and ups the ante

More ground troops, more bombs, no pause for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan: Amid criticism it had pulled its military punches in Afghanistan for political reasons, the US this week intensified its war there.

American forces began carpet bombing Taliban positions north of the capital Kabul and the Pentagon laid plans to put more elite troops on the ground, sharply increasing bomb targeting and other support for anti-Taliban forces.

Meanwhile, entreaties that Washington halt its anti-terrorism war during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, were turned aside because it would allow Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaeda network of Islamic militants and Afghanistan's Taliban leaders to regroup.

To some US officials and analysts, such developments reflect a shift in strategy to refocus primary attention on aggressively pursuing military objectives, unfettered -- or less fettered -- by political goals.

"I think there have been too many people who thought they could calibrate the force levels with political outcomes," one senior Bush administration official said.

"It's now increasingly clear that at least in Afghanistan we're going to do what we need to do in terms of force levels and the politics are going to have to take a back seat," said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The comments are a small hint of a debate between civilian and military leaders at the Pentagon, as well as within the Bush administration, since Washington launched the anti-terror war.

The Taliban has refused to surrender bin Laden, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

One manifestation of the US debate: the decision, now reversed, to hold off for several weeks on bombing Taliban frontlines north of Kabul.

The US had also been simultaneously helping organize opposition Afghan factions into a post-Taliban government, under UN auspices.

There had been fears that if the US devastated Taliban frontlines too soon, the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, a loose grouping of ethnic minority militias, would rush to take control of Kabul and undermine establishment of a broad-based coalition that might have a chance of governing the country.

The US envisioned that a new government, not the alliance, would take control of Kabul and other major cities when they were seized from the Taliban.

But the political government-building effort has foundered and there is growing unease about reported civilian casualties in Afghanistan and the apparent resilience of the Taliban in the face of US military might.

"War is a miserable business. Let's get on with it," Senator John McCain wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week in an apparent attempt to steel American resolve.

The senator, a Vietnam veteran and former Republican presidential candidate, bluntly acknowledged that innocents would be killed and economies damaged. But he stressed that bin Laden and his associates started this fight, not the US.

Other analysts say it is ironic officials like Secretary of State Colin Powell might be waging less than all-out war on an enemy the US cannot allow to prevail.

That is because Powell and other critics of NATO's 1999 war in Kosovo faulted the US for initially not prosecuting that conflict with a clear determination to win, for employing inadequate air power and for ruling out use of ground forces.

"US and British leaders are now prosecuting a war in Afghanistan for far more serious ends. The initial effort bears a disturbing resemblance to the Kosovo war," according to Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon, senior scholars at the Brookings Institution.

Although events of the week suggest the Bush team is intensifying the military campaign, other officials insisted this does not mean abandonment of US political goals.

Washington has a comprehensive strategy to pursue both political and military tracks simultaneously, a senior US official said. But he acknowledged progress is uneven and "what we're not going to do ... is hold some things back on the military [side] completely unless the political things go on."
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