- The photographs released by the Pentagon this week depicting
pockmarked runways and shattered aircraft portray a successful US bombing
campaign in Afghanistan, but military experts warn that the carefully selected
images reveal far less than meets the eye.
Scant details about the effectiveness of the airstrikes can be gleaned
from the more than two dozen images released by the Defense Department,
which says it is hitting targets with an 85 per cent success rate.
Independent experts interviewed Friday said the images tell the story of
a US bombing campaign that appears to have handily picked off easy aerial
targets, such as buildings and airstrips. In fact, some Taliban targets
- such as a row of ageing Soviet MIG fighters lined up in plain view -
appeared so vulnerable in the photographs that some experts wonder whether
they were Taliban decoys.
Others suspect that the photographs reveal an astonishing lack of preparation
and resourcefulness on the part of Taliban troops, who appear to have done
little to camouflage equipment or salvage it after it was struck.
Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Department intelligence officer and
now senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International
Studies, said the photographs don't show what's really going on in the
military campaign.
"The photos are chosen because the missions were successful and because
they are not revealing," Cordesman said. "Trying to second-guess
them is ridiculous."
Defense officials have declined to talk at length about the photographs,
saying the images speak for themselves.
In addition to trying to keep a tight lid on information that might prove
helpful to the extremist Islamic regime in Afghanistan, the military is
still stinging from criticism levelled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
when military photographs and video footage drastically overstated the
effectiveness of the bombing campaign.
"They are being careful this time not to sell air power as a silver
bullet, as they have in the past, said Mackubin Owens, a strategy professor
at the Naval War College in Newport, RI.
The Pentagon has released 21 photographs and five videos, providing before
and after shots of at least 10 targets, including three airfields, three
surface-to-air missile sites, two terrorist training camps, a radio station
and a regiment headquarters. (The photographs are available on the Internet
at the Pentagon,s Web site, www.defenselink.mil.)
Experts say the Pentagon's photographs so far have focused on the kinds
of targets the US military is good at hitting, such as large objects, both
fixed and mobile.
More telling is the fact that the Pentagon has not released images or statistics
about harder-to-reach targets such as tanks, troops and underground facilities,
according to Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,
a Washington-based think tank.
'It's not so much a question of whether we,re hitting 85 per cent or 75
per cent or 65 per cent of targets," O,Hanlon said. "The notable
thing to me is that the targets we're trying to hit so far seem to be limited
to the kinds of things we've always been good at. It's a little like a
high school football player bringing home a report card that shows an 'A'
in physical education."
Others also questioned the significance of some of the targets depicted
in the Pentagon photos.
One photo shows about 20 MIG fighters and a cargo plane at Herat airfield
in northwestern Afghanistan. The post-strike picture shows nearly all the
aircraft broken into pieces.
Tim Brown, a senior analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, said a closer look at
the photographs reveals that the fighters were probably Korean War-era
MIG-15s, MIG-17s or MIG-19s, not the newer MIG-21s and MIG-23s that Taliban
forces reportedly have.
"Because they're older aircraft and piled up in a row, it looks to
me that the Taliban put them there as a decoy," said Brown, who served
in the Air Force and has been studying military satellite photographs for
four years. "It's a classic deception technique. In the Gulf War,
the Iraqis lined up their junk aircraft, hoping we'd hit them and be distracted
from striking other areas."
He said US military officials may have realised that the aircraft were
decoys but hit them anyway to mislead the Taliban into thinking the US
had been fooled. The strike also provided the military with compelling
photographs that didn,t reveal any sensitive information, he noted.
"It's a balancing act," Brown said. "You want to give out
enough to satisfy the public and the media, but not so much that you give
away any weaknesses."
Cordesman, however, said he suspects that the photos reveal ineptitude
on the part of the Taliban forces.
"They,ve been amazingly negligent in some cases, leaving equipment
in place after something has been struck," Cordesman said. Even damaged
or nonoperational aircraft and vehicles are still useful for providing
spare parts and resupplies, he noted.
A senior Defense Department intelligence official confirmed on Friday that
Taliban troops do not appear to be as resourceful in defending their targets
as Iraqi and Serbian troops were in the Gulf War and the 1999 campaign
to protect the Yugoslav province of Kosovo.
The photos also suggest that the US bombing has been selective and based
on intelligence reports, experts said.
A shot of the destruction to the Mazar-i-Sharif Divisional Regiment Headquarters
in northern Afghanistan indicates that US bombers targeted certain buildings
in the camp but left others untouched, suggesting that US intelligence
officials provided guidance about which facilities to strike, Brown said.
Likewise, US forces don't appear to have bothered to bomb dozens of combat
vehicles parked around the camp, the photographs suggest. Because the vehicles
had not been relocated by Taliban troops after the attack, Brown said,
he believes they might be nonoperational vehicles, parked at the camp as
another decoy.
-
- Copyright © 2001 Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd all rights
reserved http://in.news.yahoo.com/011013/57/16n39.html
|
