LONDON: Col David H Hackworth, the US’s most decorated soldier, does not mince his words. “I would be reluctant to jump into a battle zone with any conventional American unit. I would hate to take them into battle - they ain’t ready, they are not good to go.”

With UK and US's ground troops poised to take the war against the Taliban into a new, perilous phase, Hackworth’s appraisal of the army he once served will do little to calm nerves in the corridors of power. And his verdict on ‘crack’ American troops such as those likely to be deployed in Afghanistan, is scarcely more complimentary. The soldiers of the vaunted 82nd Airborne are only “a little better” than ordinary infantry. And of the supposedly fearsome 10th Mountain Division, he says,

“I hear a lot of rhetoric about the famous 10th Mountain Division. In World War II it was unquestionably America’s finest unit - trained for three years, made up with men from Colorado, Montana, Idaho, really tough men, experts in mountain fighting. What we have now in the 10th Mountain Division is a bunch of kids that are better qualified to play computer games than they are to fight in that kind of terrain.”

Confronted by the sudden prospect of putting their training to the test in Afghanistan, more than a handful of American soldiers show signs of agreeing with Hackworth’s dismal assessment. “A large number of them have been submitting release from active duty requests, feigning that they’re conscientious objectors, which is exactly what we went through in Vietnam,” he says.

He condemned US involvement in Vietnam. It was, he said, “a bad war. It can’t be won. We need to get out.” He also predicted that the North Vietnamese flag would fly over Saigon within four years - a prediction made no more palatable to his superiors by being right.

During his years of self-imposed exile, he had become an anti-nuclear campaigner but that proved no bar to re-establishing contacts with friends in the army, who were invaluable allies in his next career as a war reporter.

He discovered that - with some admirable exceptions - most of his new colleagues “wouldn’t know a tank from a Range Rover or a B-52 bomber from a Valujet”. During the Gulf war, he sensed that it was “almost as if frightened reporters who knew nothing about military realities wanted to inflate the war to inflate themselves”. He decided on a mission: to educate and inform his countrymen about those “military realities”.

Military reform, he says, will only come after the US has suffered “a terrible performance in battle. Then we’ll see maximum attention to re-establishing discipline and getting standards up”. This, though, will come too late to make a difference in Afghanistan. Hackworth watched three weeks of basic training at Fort Jackson and left “appalled at the lack of discipline, the lack of hard training”. The US military, he argues, is undermined by twin evils - a culture of grotesquely profligate, misdirected expenditure and by a toadying, self-serving caste of senior officers interested only in securing their own advancement.

As for the tens of thousands of US troops wondering if they could soon find themselves face to face with the Taliban, Hackworth suggests they should not expect to experience real combat any time soon. “I see them only in a defensive, perimeter role, because that’s what they’ve got experience doing in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo: standing behind a wall of sandbags and peering out into the darkness. That’s what they’re very good at.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.