http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/323/nation/Air_campaign_faulted_for_missed_opportunity+.shtml

PENTAGON FRICTION

Air campaign faulted for missed opportunity

By Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 11/19/2001

WASHINGTON - As many as 10 times over the last six weeks, the Air Force had top Taliban and Al Qaeda members in its cross hairs in Afghanistan but was unable to receive clearance to fire in time to hit them, according to senior Air Force officials.

The officials said the problems stemmed from delays caused by a cumbersome approval process and intense disagreements with the US Central Command, which oversees the war, over how much weight to give to concerns about avoiding civilian casualties.

''We knew we had some of the big boys,'' said an Air Force officer familiar with the execution of the air campaign. ''The process is so slow that by the time we got the clearances, and everybody had put in their two cents, we called it off.''

Adding to these problems has been recurring friction between the military's operations and what amounts to a parallel war being waged by the CIA, which has played a significant combat role in Afghanistan, carrying out its own airstrikes with unmanned aircraft and deploying covert operatives on the ground, officials said.

The effect of the problems, some Air Force officials argued, has been to prolong the war. Despite a week of remarkable success in Afghanistan, they said, US special forces troops are now being forced to go into Afghanistan on the ground to pursue members of the Qaeda terrorist network and Taliban leaders who could have been killed from the air earlier in the campaign.

Although disputes within the US armed forces over tactics have been a characteristic of most if not all wars, Air Force officials say the delays approving targets have been surprising in Afghanistan because President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have made attacking members of Al Qaeda and their Taliban allies the major objective.

At the same time, an official noted, Bush at the outset of the war made ''low collateral damage'' a major criteria in the conduct of the campaign. A reason, administration officials said at the time, was to avoid angering US allies in the Islamic world about the conduct of the war.

One four-star general on active duty attributed some of the problem to micromanagement of the war by Rumsfeld and his senior advisers at the Pentagon. The execution of the war was ''military amateur hour,'' the general said. ''The worst thing is the lack of trust at the senior leadership level.''

But most of the Air Force's frustrations over getting approval for airstrikes appear to be directed at officials at the US Central Command headquarters, which is run by Army General Tommy Franks, the overall commander of the war.

Air Force Lieutenant General Charles Wald, who until earlier this month commanded the air campaign, has complained about the clearance problems directly to Franks more than a dozen times since the war began on Oct. 7, officials said. They said he never received a response.

Wald moved to the Pentagon about 10 days ago to become the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for operations, a transfer that had been delayed to permit him to oversee the opening phase of the air campaign.

A spokesman for Central Command, when asked for reaction to the Air Force complaints, declined to comment.

Some Air Force officials have expressed frustration with the CIA, saying it consistently failed to share information about its activities in Afghanistan. Friction between the CIA and the military is common in wartime, said one senior officer, but in the Afghan conflict it has been exacerbated because the CIA is not only gathering intelligence but also conducting airstrikes using an unmanned aircraft that carries missiles.

Th CIA has been reluctant to inform the military what it is doing in Afghanistan, two Air Force officers said.

But Wald, in his first interview about the air campaign, said Saturday that ''the relationship with the agency is fantastic. I don't see that as a problem.''

The core of the clearance problem, as described by several officials, is that the Central Command, which has its headquarters in Tampa, retained authority to clear hitting sensitive targets, rather than delegate it to commanders of the air campaign, who were based at Prince Sultan Air Base, located 70 miles southeast of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

Air Force officers described Central Command as the bottleneck in the campaign, requiring that almost every significant target involving the Qaeda and Taliban leadership be approved by officials there, or even by more senior officials in Washington.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 2001