<

Taliban Will Unravel if Key Players Gone, Experts Say
Thursday, September 20, 2001

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- LA Times
To get their hands on Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, U.S.-led forces likely would have to first deal with his hosts, Afghanistan's Taliban fighters. And as military planners probe for weak spots, they would find several to exploit.

Compared with the modern armies the United States and its allies defeated in Iraq and Yugoslavia over the last decade, experts here say, the Taliban's weapons, training and organization are almost as poor as the country that the fundamentalist Islamic movement controls.

Though the Afghans are tough opponents in combat, as British and Soviet occupiers have discovered, the U.S. and allied forces could knock the Taliban government off balance by going after its key leaders rather than launching heavy airstrikes. Then the Afghan people might well finish the job by rising up against the unpopular regime, Afghan and Pakistani experts say. “In the Taliban, you have a force which is a ragtag army of the defeated late-19th century type,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political science professor at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University, who has studied Afghanistan's wars for 20 years.

“Frankly speaking, they literally are in a hopeless situation,” said Rais, who is convinced that the Taliban's days are numbered even if the regime turns over Bin Laden, who is viewed by U.S. officials as the prime suspect in last week's attacks on New York and the Pentagon. “In no way are they going to save their power. It's too late for that after this mischief.”

If U.S. forces were careful to focus on the Taliban leadership and avoided civilian casualties, the Taliban's worst enemy could be its own unpopularity among Afghans, said Abdul Hai Warshan, an Afghan journalist based in Peshawar.

“The weak point of the Taliban is itself,” said Warshan, who spends a total of about three months a year with the two sides in Afghanistan's civil war as a reporter for the Voice of America's Dari-language service. “They have lost their credibility in their own society. People are fed up with the Taliban.”

The Taliban emerged in the mid-1990s during the lawlessness that followed the 1989 withdrawal of the Soviets from the country. At first the U.S. and others saw the fundamentalists as a stabilizing force, but their strict interpretation of Islamic law and protection of Bin Laden turned American officials away.

The Bush administration faces risks of its own. The U.S. was badly stung before by underestimating its enemies, most recently during a 1993 debacle in Somalia, when the death of 18 American soldiers in a street fight brought criticism at home and forced the withdrawal of U.S. peacekeepers.

But a lot changed on Sept. 11.
(More: LA Times News Source)

Dan