It’s an old saw that armies always do a great job of fighting the last war. Nine days after America first began bombing Afghanistan, it looks as though the adage applies to the war on terrorism: thus far, the Pentagon has done a magnificent job of copying what it did in the Gulf War. It’s all there: focus on the air campaign, deference to an Arab coalition, and unwillingness to eliminate the head of the Taliban. (Saddam Hussein, anyone?)

The latest evidence of a parallel comes from Seymour Hersh in the most recent issue of the New Yorker. Hersh reports that US military intelligence had located Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and failed to take him out. When CIA officials spotted Omar via a Predator spy-drone, they had to go through at least two bureaucratic layers before General Tommy Franks, who as commander-in-chief of the US Army Central Command (CENTCOM) oversees the Afghan operation, rejected it on the advice of — get this — his legal adviser. " Instead, the Predator was authorized to fire a missile in front of the building [where Omar was hiding] — ‘bounce it off the front door,’ one officer said, ‘and see who comes out, and take a picture.’ "

Haven’t these people learned anything? Osama bin Laden has built his whole operation on the premise that Americans are terrified to take — or inflict — casualties. Is he right? Our top military commanders seem to be trapped in a pre–September 11 mentality, yet almost no one else (except for a handful of antiwar demonstrators) thinks this is another Vietnam. More than 6000 Americans have been killed, and the public wants victory. This means that some of our generals will have to unlearn the political and diplomatic niceties that prevailed in the era before the terrorist attacks. They must grow accustomed to killing the enemy, not bouncing missiles off his " front door. " They must also get used to forgoing air-only campaigns. We have to get in on the ground and get dirty. In other words, we have to call in the special forces.

Of course, the Pentagon brass aren’t the only ones who must be convinced of this. Opinionmakers like Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, who did a good job acting as de facto apologist for the Pentagon on CNBC’s Hardball on October 16, will also have to come around. Thomas went out of his way to trash the idea that special-operations forces could do the job in Afghanistan, and he justified continuing the US air campaign this way: " The history of special forces is not great.... If you look at what they’ve actually done in trying to catch Aidid ... for instance, in Somalia, they were unable to do it. " Of course, the regular military — generals who love set-piece armies and fancy toys — have been somewhat suspicious of special forces ever since the Eisenhower administration. It took President Kennedy to realize that the Army Special Forces(colloquially known as the Green Berets), which operate in small units or teams, would make a valuable weapon in the war against communism.

As for Thomas’s assertion about Somalia, he fails to tell the rest of the story. The officers in charge of the raid that resulted in the deaths of 18 Americans — with some of their corpses dragged through the streets — were raring to go back and finish the job against the warlord Aidid. But the military brass balked, fearing permanent damage to their careers if there were yet more casualties. Some of the Somalis, it so happens, were reportedly trained by bin Laden operatives. The streets of Mogadishu taught bin Laden where US military weakness lies.

What makes all this even more tragic is that the Pentagon refused to learn the lessons of Mogadishu — a battle that seems all too relevant today. Recently interviewed on National Public Radio, journalist Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (Penguin, 1999), the definitive account of the conflict, said he was the first American to sit down and study what had gone on there. The Pentagon, Bowden said, had never seriously scrutinized it. If those leaders had done so, they might have been less ineffectual now, and more prepared to take out the likes of Mullah Omar.

Issue Date: October 18 - 25, 2001