Posted on: Sunday, March 17, 2002

EDITORIAL
Victory in Afghanistan? Or so much fog of war?

We're learning now in Afghanistan, if we didn't already know, that the term "military intelligence" is a contradiction in terms.

That observation is not meant to insult those soldiers whose duty it is to undertake battlefield assessments, but rather to reflect on the way it is with war, more often than not.

The problem is not confined, of course, to the fog of war, which refers not only to blinding gunsmoke and the controlled panic of soldiers under fire. It also derives from the sometimes unreasonable expectations of the politicians whose causes, noble or not, are deemed to outweigh young lives.

Operation Anaconda, the U.S.-led offensive in Afghanistan's Shah-e-kot Valley, is a case in point. Commanders at first thought they were attacking an estimated 150 to 200 trapped al-Qaida fighters when their helicopters ran into withering fire, with the loss of eight Americans.

Days later, anonymous military officials were claiming 800 of the enemy had been killed. On the record, other officials, clearly in hopes of avoiding comparison with the infamously inflated body counts of Vietnam, said the military doesn't indulge in battlefield tallies.

Reporters visiting the "killing fields" have found little evidence of damage to the enemy, mortal or not. Other sources now say that hundreds of these fighters, many of whom easily slipped in to the battle zone in the early going, have now just as easily slipped away.

Our allies on the ground may not this time have misinformed us, leading to bombing of friendly forces and civilians. But they have attempted to negotiate with the enemy, preferring to let them go to fight another day. They also have been quick to dispute U.S. assessments to Western reporters.

To the apparent surprise of the Pentagon, our partner in the war on terrorism, Pakistan, failed to seal its end of the ring that supposedly had trapped the enemy. And now there are reports that Iran had begun helping al-Qaida members to escape through its territory after President Bush publicly accused Iran of being part of an "axis of evil."

We are left to believe that Operation Anaconda is either a stunning victory, a knockout blow to al-Qaida — or not. And so it is with this confusing, perplexing and unprecedented new kind of war.