WASHINGTON: US officials have concluded after 10 months of war that the combat mission of US conventional military troops in Afghanistan is largely over and that whatever fighting remains is likely to be carried out by small numbers of Special Forces troops and CIA operatives.

This new phase represents a sharp shift from the US military posture of last spring, when thousands of regular US infantry troops fought al Qaeda positions in the Shahikot Valley and then conducted sweeps farther east along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Now, officials said, the Afghan war is reverting to the methods used last October and November, when small teams of Special Operations troops spotted targets for bombers and worked with Afghan fighters. These units, which are trained to conduct covert raids and to work hand-in-hand with the CIA and foreign militaries, are focusing on small-scale efforts to track down Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan and al Qaeda fighters who have fled across the border into Pakistan.

These sources stressed that the situation in Afghanistan is fluid and unpredictable and that conventional troops could again take a central role if the new government in Kabul isn’t able to establish its hold on Afghanistan. The uncertain state of President Hamid Karzai was underscored on Saturday by the assassination in broad daylight of Abdul Qadir, one of his three vice presidents.

But the intention now is that almost all of the 7,000 US soldiers in the country should increasingly play less a purely military role and more a political one, in effect acting as a reassuring presence to deter challenges to the Karzai government and to the international peacekeeping force in Kabul.

The conventional troops are unlikely to be withdrawn soon, officials say. Rather, units from the 82nd Airborne Division are deploying to Afghanistan to replace those from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne divisions, and such troops are likely to be required for years to come.

The shift in approach hardly means that Pentagon officials think that their anti-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan are finished, or even becoming much easier to prosecute. Indeed, many defence experts, including some who have consulted with the Pentagon on the conduct of the war, that the lull in fighting offers an opportunity to assess the US approach and make potentially crucial adjustments in tactics and policy.

“We’re at a point where we have to decide what we’re up to there,” said Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan who was deeply involved in the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. “This is the time to sit down, take off the rucksack, and assess where you are.” Among other things, he said the Bush administration should stop bombing Afghanistan, as it did earlier last week in Oruzgan province.

US officials were reminded of the difficulties they face in recent days when it appeared that Uzbek and Tajik factions from its old allies in the Northern Alliance were about to fight in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. That near-breakdown into localized civil war was averted only after determined intervention by the CIA, Special Forces officers, and the Karzai government, officials said.

Some military experts predicted that this new, more political phase of the war could prove even more troublesome than last winter’s bombing of the Taliban front lines and the pushing of al Qaeda out of the country.

“I am fairly pessimistic,” said Andrew Krepinevich Jr., a defence strategist at the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a frequent Pentagon consultant. “We won Phase One of the war, but Phase Two, supporting the successor regime, is the kind of military operation that is more difficult.”

To be sure, the majority view among US officials and military experts is that US policy there is still on track. But the strong minority view is that the United States could face real trouble in Afghanistan, especially if it fails to adapt its tactics as conditions change.

“We may be sliding into a losing dynamic,” said retired Navy Capt. Larry Seaquist, an expert in security strategy. “There is not much positive data in view.” As evidence of a drift in the US approach in Afghanistan, he and others pointed to the incident last week in which more than 100 Afghan civilians were, according to Afghan accounts, injured or killed by a US airstrike aimed at suspected Taliban hideouts. “Our forces seem to be chasing hither and yon and stumbling into one friendly-fire mess after another,” he said.

Pessimists such as Seaquist worry about three trends they see, all related to the Pakhtoons, Afghanistan’s predominant ethnic group. Together, they fear, these trends could snowball into surprising trouble for the United States and for its allies in the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

The first is the resentment engendered by the months-long hunt in southern Afghanistan for Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders. To some defense experts, the Oruzgan “friendly-fire” incident underscored the diminishing returns of this effort. “We are now doing things that appear to give marginal return but at a potentially very high cost,” said John Warden, a retired Air Force strategist who played a key role in planning the air campaign in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Others worry that the hunt for Taliban leaders continues only because of a strategic drift. “We are running the risk of letting our participation degenerate into continuous tactical scrapes without decisive action,” warned retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, an expert in tactics and strategy.

The second trend is the Pakhtoon suspicion that the United States still backs the Tajik and Uzbek commanders who formed the core of the Northern Alliance, to the detriment of Pakhtoon ambitions to play a larger role in the new government. Indeed, at last month’s meeting of the Loya Jirga to select a new Afghan government, Pakhtoons complained that Tajiks held onto too many cabinet posts at their expense.

“There are extraordinary levels of discontent among the Pakhtoons,” said Robert Templer, Asia programme director for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization. “It’s hard to see a long-lasting peace based upon the political arrangements that exist in Kabul at the moment.” Those arrangements were further called into question by Saturday’s killing of Abdul Qadir, one of the few ethnic Pakhtoon leaders in the Northern Alliance who had protested last month what he called the Loya Jirga’s discrimination against that group.

Templer believes the US government should stop pursuing al Qaeda and Taliban and address other issues. “I don’t think the Taliban and al Qaeda will be much of a problem in the future, but everyone else (in Afghanistan) might be,” he said.

The United States could still lose the war in Afghanistan, warned Bearden, “if the Pakhtoons decide that we’re the enemy, or an occupying force.”

US officials say they are sympathetic to the Pakhtoons’ concerns. “There are some in the Pakhtoon community who feel that they lost ground, or they didn’t command as many of the (cabinet) portfolios as they might have hoped,” Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage conceded in recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Behind the scenes, officials say, the US government twisted arms to limit the number of cabinet seats that Tajiks from the Northern Alliance took in the new government.

The third Pakhtoon-related trend is the recent expansion of the war into Pakistan, now arguably a more important front than the war in Afghanistan. Tribesmen along both sides of the border mainly are ethnic Pakhtoons. There the war is even harder to follow than it is in Afghanistan, with neither the United States nor the Pakistani government disclosing much about operations.

If Pakistan’s recent crackdown on al Qaeda falters, then the entire US effort in the region could crumble, experts warned. But how to bolster the Pakistani effort remains controversial. Pakistani officials disclosed last week that the US military recently rushed reconnaissance equipment, including five sophisticated surveillance helicopters, to help in the hunt for al Qaeda. Some CIA officers and Special Operations troops also are working with the Pakistani military in the border area.

More intrusive aid will be necessary, some contend. To prevent al Qaeda members from slipping back and forth across the border, retired Army Col. Stephen Robinette recommended the United States move the conventional war to Pakistan and begin conducting assaults with US helicopters and troops.

Others say that such open intervention, which likely would be extremely controversial inside Pakistan, could help undermine the regime of President Pervez Musharraf. Even without such an escalation of the US presence, experts already are predicting that Pakistan faces a spell of terrorist attacks, mainly aimed at westerners. This “sustained campaign” might not be executed by al Qaeda members, but might be funded by them, Templer speculated.

Few doubt that the destabilization of Pakistan would represent a major defeat for the US in the war. “If Pakistan falls apart, our ability to pursue al Qaeda in the region falls apart with it,” emphasized former US diplomat E. Wayne Merry.

To avoid that, Armitage recently told Congress, it will be necessary to prevail against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “I don’t think we’re actually going to have a success unless we’re successful in both countries,” he said.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post