The enemy slips away

"It's a frustrating war," said an Allied commander as his troops toiled through the baking hot uplands of southern Afghanistan last week.

"The reason it's so frustrating and aggravating is because the enemy is not fighting," said Lt Col Patrick L Fetterman of the US 101st Airborne. "So any time we go out, he fades away. It's just like Vietnam. Any time he finds a weak spot, he flows like water."

The British effort in the mission in the Afghan mountains, Operation Condor, seems to lurch from frustration to farce. The CNN headline yesterday summed up the matter tersely: "Condor Swoop: No Enemy Found Yet."

The Allied mission is not following the script. The Allied force based at Bagram airfield has been chasing shadows. At least CNN and Colonel Fetterman seem prepared to admit it.

Yesterday Geoff Hoon said he had every confidence in the Royal Marine Commander Brigadier Lane. Today we learn that Lane is to be "short-toured" and to leave his job next month. The row between the British military and the media in Bagram and in Kabul suggests that something is going very wrong.

Tiffs are to be expected in the rough and tumble of media-military relations today. But the degree to which the spokesmen for the Government and the military have gone in for vilifying reporters (your correspondent included) suggests a serious degree of jangling nerves and sweaty palms at the top. Shooting the messenger is the last resort of the spin doctor.

As in Vietnam, the American policy is now "search and destroy", to find bases of the elusive enemy, and wreck them beyond use. Search-and-destroy did not work in the jungles of Vietnam and along the Mekong Delta because the American forces could not take and hold the ground they attacked - and the enemy just came back in greater strength, once the Air Cavalry had moved on.

If the confusing news from Bagram and Khost raises ghosts of Vietnam for the Americans, it should recall shades of the Crimean War (1854-57) for the British. Like some of our troops at Bagram, huge numbers of the Crimean army got badly sick, and the confusion over the mission brought the first proper media reporting of modern warfare, and much of it was critical.

Neither the British nor the American governments and military commands have been able to give a clear account of what the next phase of operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda should be. They have not been able to give a clear picture of who the enemy are, where they are and what are the risks of further major terrorist attacks.

The first problem is inside Afghanistan itself. "We just don't know who is friend or foe," a senior member of the British Defence Staff said last week. "A friend one minute may well be your foe the next." It takes years to establish-deep human intelligence in the tribal communities of Afghanistan, and British human intelligence in the region was cut under Mrs Thatcher.

So far the Royal Marines have not had any significant exchange of fire with Taliban or al Qaeda. Most al Qaeda fighters have gone across the border into Waziristan and the North West tribal areas, and some are even thought to have made it back home to Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The story of the Taliban is rather different. Many appear to have gone back to their villages. At least 20,000 Taliban fighters are still at large, judging from the casualty figures from the fighting last year. This week their charismatic leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has resurfaced and could be preparing a major autumn offensive. No one is going to fight pitched battles in the present soaring temperatures of 120 degrees in the mountains. This means we could be facing another major bout of guerrilla war this autumn just as a new constitutional government under Hamid Karzai gets under way in Kabul.

The biggest immediate worry for the American and British Allied forces in southern Afghanistan is that Taliban and al Qaeda could now be rebuilding their forces in safe havens along the Pakistan border - rather as the Vietcong did in Cambodia and Laos. This gives the lie to British claims that "al Qaeda is all but beaten".

British defence sources say that General Musharraf of Pakistan still has little control in these areas. Though he has reformed the top leadership of Pakistan's powerful intelligence service, the ISI, many of the lower ranking officers and NCOs who aided, abetted and even helped create the Taliban, are still serving. The upsurge of fighting in Kashmir has fuelled support for the militants of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohamed, clients and cousins of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Last week India and Pakistan appeared heading towards war over Kashmir - only the horrible summer heat along the border and the Line of Control, and the onset of the monsoon seemed to prevent it. British defence chiefs do not rule out a real possibility of war in Kashmir or Punjab this autumn - which adds another horrible dimension to the current crisis. "Neither side seems to understand the theology of nuclear deterrence," said one British chief. If Pakistan faced defeat, its generals would want to use the bomb.

The most alarming threat has appeared from a quite different quarter. Last week Colonel Randall Larsen, one of the architects of America's Homeland Security policies, told an audience in London that there would be a terrorist attack in Europe or America soon and it would be "much bigger than September 11".

He said he believed the attack would be by a biological agent, easy to release and devastating over a small downtown area. A small phial of bacteria, he said "would easily have killed 10,000 in the World Trade Center."

Coincidentally, after months of silence, a propaganda tape has appeared purporting to come from Osama bin Laden and threatening further and bigger attacks on America and its allies. Colonel Larsen said that America did not have the agencies to cope with such a threat, and it would take time to build them.

"We are now in the era of cyber and biological weapons - weapons that can replicate and multiply," he warned. The war in southern Afghanistan may be dying out in a few running guerrilla battles - and to that extent Brigadier Lane may have a point. But the campaign against the new forms of terrorism is just beginning and is expected by some to last decades.

Combating the new threat is going to take a lot more than 1,700 well-trained, fit and overburdened Royal Marines running across the empty mountain passes of southern Afghanistan. It will mean a complete rethink of what we mean by security and defence, and how we fund and run them.