AS US warships, warplanes, and troops deploy into positions from which they can strike at Afghanistan, and as Washington works to line up its allies, it might be useful to consider what kind of military action could succeed in Afghanistan.
Certainly Afghanistan has been the graveyard of numerous armies in history, from the British Army of the Indus in 1842 to the Soviet Fifth Army of the 1980s. The Afghans are legendary fighters, renowned marksmen and guerrillas with a mastery of their rugged mountains and blistering deserts. So what are the lessons an American-led alliance, gearing up for a fight in Afghanistan today, need to know?
The Afghans defeated the Soviet Union in the 1980s for three major reasons. First, the Soviet Union never articulated a clear and limited war goal. It was drawn into Afghanistan after the tiny People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) staged a surprisingly successful coup in April 1978, which in turn sparked a national rebellion that the PDPA was ill-prepared to handle. Also, the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 ushered in an era of reform that included more openness of expression, and criticism of the Afghan adventure revealed a nation with no heart for a long and bloody struggle against a far-away and unknown people.
The Afghans, on the other hand, were prepared to bleed and suffer to offset the tremendous technological superiority enjoyed by the Soviets.
By the time they withdrew in 1989, more than 15,000 Soviet troops had lost their lives, and thousands more had been scarred by their experiences. By comparison, more than a million Afghans had been killed, six million had been driven into exile, thousands of villages had been turned into rubble and millions of mines scattered through the country.
The physical toll on its nation and infrastructure altered profoundly Afghanistan culture and society and, among other consequences, made possible the rise of the Taliban.
Nonetheless, despite the Afghans' enormous determination to fight, they would have been defeated had they not received massive support from the US, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other anti-Soviet states.
At great cost to its national stability, Pakistan opened its doors not only to millions of Afghan refugees, but also got involved in supporting the Afghan Mujahedin with training, logistics, and even combat operational support.
The US, Saudi Arabia, and other countries provided more than $10 billion worth of weapons and supplies, as well as billions more in relief support for the Afghan refugees and direct aid to Pakistan. This support kept the amorphous, Hydra-headed resistance movement alive through the mid-1980s, when Soviet combined arms operations and complete air superiority proved quite effective at destroying Afghan Mujahedin units on the ground.
So the lessons to Washington are these: the war goals must be limited and clear, occupation of Afghanistan for its own sake must not be a goal, and the countries of the world in general and those neighbouring Afghanistan in particular must support US-led action.
A strategy constructed with these goals in mind can be the basis for a successful war. However, as the generals will remind us, a good overall strategy must be bolstered by good tactics and operational sophistication for optimal results. And again, there are three important and inter-related tactical lessons to be learned from the experiences of the Soviet and British armies in the Afghan mountains.
First, neither the Soviets nor the British before them mastered the Afghan terrain, the dominant feature of which is the rugged, mountains of the Hindu Kush, whose peaks range 15,000-20,000 feet in height, and the nearly impenetrable mountainous plateau of the Hazarajat, smack in the centre of the country.
These mountain ranges, combined with the vast desolate deserts in Afghanistan's west and southwest provide Afghan fighters with a very significant home-field advantage. Not only are the mountains pockmarked with cave complexes, many artificially expanded during the previous two decades of war, but their sheer steepness and size are hard to get used to for those who have not grown up hiking them.
Western troops, however well-trained and physically fit, must adjust to the Afghan terrain to master it and take it away from their adversaries. It is not impossible, but it is an arduous process requiring tough and determined men and helped little by technological superiority.
Such men will have to be prepared to go where tanks, armoured personnel carriers, helicopters, and planes cannot go, to root out Taliban soldiers and al-Qa'ida militants in high mountain caves.
I know from experience in Afghanistan that it is easier to stay on the few roads and mountain passes, or to hunker down in the cities and towns, but to achieve the goals set out by President Bush in his war speech on Thursday night, the easy route will not be enough.
A second tactical necessity is to cut off the Taliban's sanctuary, either by overcoming their mastery of the terrain or by preventing their flight into neighbouring countries. Both the British in the 19th century and the USSR during the 1980s found this to be a problem.
Although President Bush has already indicated that this is a global problem, with individuals and organisations affiliated with al-Qa'ida having operated in some 60 countries, the important tactical consideration for the near future remains local.
The Taliban leadership comes from Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, the Pushtuns, who overlap the border with Pakistan and are the largest ethnic group in that country's North-West Frontier Province.
Pakistan's leader, General Pervez Musharraf, has indicated his willingness to stand with the US, which means an abrupt 180 degree turn in his previous policy of open support for the Taliban as they attempted to finish off their remaining military opposition in northern Afghanistan. But Musharraf has hundreds of thousands of Pakistani Islamic militants of his own to contend with, and nowhere are they as strong as along the Pakistan-Afghan border.
Although Pakistan has closed that border at official crossing points, the barren and jagged terrain, ethnic affinity of the population straddling the border, and centuries-long tradition of smuggling make it impossible to close it completely.
Moreover, much of the border runs along Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where government control is tenuous at best and tribal law still prevails. It is here the Taliban and Osama bin Laden enjoy their greatest support in Pakistan.
Tactical conditions are somewhat easier in the FATA than in much of Afghanistan, but if the Taliban or al-Qa'ida leaders take refuge in the tribal belt of Pakistan, rooting them out without sparking an anti-American uprising of Pakistan's heavily armed militants may be difficult. For similar reasons, staging US or Western forces in those areas, which would otherwise provide perfect platforms for operations into the areas of Afghanistan where the Taliban are most likely to hide, would be difficult politically.
Finally, due to the difficulties imposed by the terrain and the sanctuary it provided, neither the Soviet nor British armies ever developed appropriate tactics for local conditions. Both fought as Western regular armies have so often against non-Western opponents fighting a guerrilla war, by occupying the towns and cities and sallying forth into the countryside on periodic search-and-destroy missions.
In addition, the 20th-century advances in military technology made it possible for the Soviets to compound their tactical errors with an air war strategy that left much of Afghanistan in ruins.
If the US bides its time and builds its coalition before striking, most of the Taliban will have melted away and the hard-core leadership will not, for the most part, be found in the cities.
A war of high-technology against Afghanistan must not be a war against the piles of rubble that are now Afghanistan's cities, where the vast majority of the population are miserable, hungry, and jobless, facing yet again another harsh and uncertain winter.
After more than two decades of high-intensity war, there are precious few hard targets left in Afghanistan. Moreover, whatever initial support the Taliban may have had among the general population, following their emergence in 1994-1995, has been dissipated by their harsh rule and failure to improve people's lives.
Successful tactics would limit casualties among innocent Afghans by using air power to pound the isolated cave complexes where the Taliban and al-Qa'ida leaders will hide, followed by special operations forces taking possession of the sites.
Western troops will need to go into Afghan cities to dismantle the Taliban leadership left there, but those troops must avoid war on the civilian population and must come as the spearhead of a massive international aid effort to rebuild Afghanistan's destroyed infrastructure and society.
That will be the mark of not only a tactically successful campaign to win the war against terrorism in Afghanistan, but also a wise, if long overdue, strategy to win the peace there.
Larry P Goodson is Associate Professor of International Studies at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts; he is the author of Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban