Military planners 'haunted by Vietnam'

President Bush is facing a conflict between domestic opinion and pressure from the Allies over the commitment of large numbers of American troops to Afghanistan.

Concern at becoming trapped in a military and political quagmire like Vietnam has largely confined American action to the air and to a few hundred special forces troops on the ground.

Washington has refused to discuss the scale of its future commitment or what role its soldiers might have.

Officially, the Pentagon says it does not want to reveal its plans until it is ready to move. Behind the scenes, though, military planners are understood to be obsessed with the lessons of Vietnam, which saw the US entangled for two decades in a war it could not win, sending 50,000 flagdraped coffins back to America and prompting massive anti-war sentiments.

In the past week, the Pentagon has boosted the number of special forces inside Afghanistan to about 300, working with the SAS in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other Taliban and al Qaeda leaders. But it has left the bulk of fighting to the Northern Alliance, which it has provided with weapons and backed with precision air strikes.

The rapid collapse of the Taliban caught Washington by surprise.

"Kabul fell much more quickly than any of us expected,'' a senior member of the Bush administration said.

The White House announced over the weekend that it would be applying "intense pressure" on the Northern Alliance to hold back on forming its own government in Kabul and instead to let the United Nations create a broader coalition.

How long President Bush can apply pressure without troops in sufficient numbers to back him up is not clear. The United States believed it had wrung a promise from the Northern Alliance not to take over Kabul, but hopes of a power-sharing arrangement brokered by the UN are beginning to fade.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the UN told the BBC: "We didn't realise the Taliban were such a house of cards.''

In an interview on American television yesterday, Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of state for defence, outlined US military policy as "getting al Qaeda and getting the Taliban leadership". He described how an American special forces soldier literally rode on horseback with a sword with the Northern Alliance, adding proudly: "No horse cavalry in history before this could call in air strikes from long-range bombers.''

But there has been almost no debate in the US about the need to deploy large numbers of American troops on the ground. Opinion polls show that the American public is prepared to accept casualties but past experience suggests such opinion is fickle. US troops have an unhappy record as peacekeepers, being pulled out rapidly after taking casualties from the Lebanon to Somalia and rarely emerging from their heavily defended compounds in Kosovo.

The dilemma for Washington is what happens if the Northern Alliance decides to push ahead and take control in Kabul. The decision the White House must make within days is whether it will join Britain and other allies in providing muscle for the UN on the ground.