LONDON, Oct 8: The US-led alliance could send special forces ground troops into Afghanistan sooner than expected in a bid to catch the Taliban off-balance, a British defence analyst said on Monday.
“It is always good to catch the enemy off balance. Get inside their decision cycle and while they are still thinking about it hit them again,” independent defence analyst Paul Beaver said the day after the United States and Britain began air and missile attacks against targets in Afghanistan.
Special forces units are widely believed to be already operating in Afghanistan hunting for Osama bin Laden and acting as forward air controllers to “illuminate” targets for laser-guided bombs and missiles.
“You use search and destroy operations with special forces. That is the only way you can conduct these sort of operations,” Beaver said.
“You capture a piece of ground. You bring in the special forces with their helicopters, deploy them out, do your business, get who you can, destroy what you can and then extract them again.”
British Defence Minister Geoff Hoon said all of Sunday’s air strikes had been against Taliban military installations, and that the air campaign would continue unabated.
He refused to rule out the use of ground troops.
“We are committed to a relentless, deliberate and sustained campaign aimed at securing our objectives. Our armed forces will play their full part in this,” Hoon said.
“We are preparing a range of military options and the use of ground troops is clearly one of them,” he added.
Beaver said the wide-scale use of normal ground forces was out of the question in a mountainous country the size of France and Germany combined.
“There is no intention of invading Afghanistan. We don’t have the soldiers,” Beaver said.
Tim Ripley, defence analyst at Lancaster University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies, said he believed the air attacks would continue for several days.
He said special units, such as the British Special Air Service and the US Army’s Rangers, might be used to find targets including Osama.
“They will go in, take temporary control of a location, for a limited period of time, carry out a sweep of the whole area to get what they want and then withdraw,” he said.
Military analysts agree the war against terror will be a long affair.
“There are many chapters in this book. I don’t think the planners in the Pentagon know exactly which plan they are going to go with. I reckon we are talking about a 10-year campaign,” Beaver said.—Reuters
