Customer Reviews

Afghanistan Cave Complexes 1979-2004: "Mountain strongholds of the Mujahideen, Taliban & Al Qaeda" (Fortress)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book gives you one of the only printed looks into this highly dangerous form of warfare. Some of the underground "sanctuaries" covered are primitive caves (Natural and man-made), water irrigation systems/wells (Karez), hides, caches and on to highly complex underground dwellings like Zawhar Kili, located three miles from the Pakistan border, which are underground villages, complete with repair shops, public relations office, garage and hotel for visiting journalists. This book goes into detailed tactics employed by the U.S. military ground forces, much of it very remnant of what the Tunnel Rats used against the Viet Cong and looks back at what the Russians failed to do 25 years ago: flush out, hunt and kill the enemy. The book also goes into detail on many of the modern weapons being employed currently to reduce the Taliban and al Qaeda's hideouts to rubble. The book is highly illustrated with diagrams, maps and photos, although the photo quality at times are not that good and very grainy. This book is highly recommended for any Grunt heading over to Afghanistan for a crash course in tunnel warfare. Over all it many not be a great book but again there is no other title out their on the subject. Bottom line, this book will make any old NAM Tunnel Rat out their proud to see their heritage continue!

Only an under-reported war in a desolate region of the world gives this book value to the average reader and the general public. Other than books and articles published of Soviet/Russian Army experiences that are defensive of their tactics and defeat, this is one of the first popular publications on the subject widely available to the American public. Previous Russian authors downplay current American successes in technology and tactics - while at the same time explaining away Russian failures using similar methodologies. While the book has value for it's unique publication - it tries to be a definitive work on the subject and disappoints the serious reader.

As a computer combat simulations manager and modeler for the US Army, the only value of this publication for me - lies in its 3 dimensional maps of cave complexes. Being able to put these generic maps on the computer allows our combat planners to wargame different ways of defeating and destroying these complexes.

One cannot take political sides as does this book and still be a dispassionate provider of information! Political comments on our national leadership are out of place in a publication such as this. The Russians are still miffed at our successes in Afghanistan (such as they are)- and Russian sources used as background in this book show through very transparently.

Modern technology, weaponry and tactics are put up against cave dwelling enemies whose defensive stance goes back to the beginning of time. Even with a full arsenal of high tech weaponry - our soldiers - "boots on the ground" still must do similar search and destroy missions as did their tunnel rat counterparts in Vietnam and our WWII soldiers on Okinawa.

This is a region of the world that holds a fatal attraction to Western Civilization. Modern armies of Colonial Great Britian, the Soviet Union and the United States Coalition have either been defeated or been treated roughly by the local warriors. Tora Bora was the US 10th Mountain Division's baptism of fire - and they finished the battle with no decisive outcome in the contest - with bin Laden escaping in the confusion. American superiority in logistics saved the day for an American Force given poor intelligence, and surviving an initial ambush. American troops - working at extreme altitudes saved weight by ditching their rear trauma plates on their Interceptor Vests - and suffered a high rate of back wounds when caught in a Tora Bora crossfire.

As experienced for 11 years by the Soviet/Russian Army, followed by the American Coalition Army from 2002 forward - high altitude in combination with a mountainous, barren, rough landscape - channeled military operations and logistics through very predictable roads, tunnels and airports - all static targets for what Ralph Peters calls the 21st Century Warrior Class - highly armed and un-uniformed transnational fighters fighting western military forces assymetrically - their strengths to our most obvious logistic road and airport bound weaknesses.

Call them the Mujahideen, Taliban or Al Qaeda, or whoever comes after - the topography and altitude determine all basis of current military operations in Afghanistan. The cave complexes are geographic sanctuaries - very much like the Black Hills of the Dakota's in the 1890's to our outlaws and renegade Indians. Easy places to hide - hard for heavily armed - logistics burdened Western Armies to get to and defeat.

With friendly sanctuaries in Pakistan and it's Baluchistani provences; treacherous warlords; a narco producing and trafficing hub, smuggling and lawlessness - the United States Coalition has a full plate - no matter how or who calls the military game. Throughout history - the native Pushtans have always had a military advantage over occupying armies.

As entertainment and an introduction to our most obscure front on the war on terror - the book has some value. Reviews of weapons systems and DOD pictures show the book's target audience needs such introductory material. The superficial treatment and "fluff" of the filler part of the book aims more at the casual civilian reader than at any military audience - but fails to give a proper perspective. Afghanistan has tortured itself for a thousand years - and our presence has now been noted into their history.

The internet has better tunnel pictures available from many sources (including some returning veterans working at our site!). The US military has already published lessons learned on weapons, equipment and tactics from the "early on", Afghan experience. It is disappointing the author failed to include this data. Winning or losing this war will not be by body count as the book surmizes. He who collects the most warlords "wins".

We will never be the ones who write Afghan history. Hopefully - we'll be better thought of militarily than by those who wrote this book!

Contrary to another review posted here, this is an excellent work for describing the role and use of cave complexes in Afghanistan. The previous reviewer seems to feel that being critical of Rumsfeld's policy detracts from the content. The author is only presenting the situation as we know it today, including some of the misguided policies of the Sec of War. Although we may learn much more about what these cave complexes are like after the war, we will have a good view of what we thought and knew during the war when we look back at this book years from now. Some may be disappointed in how crude and unsophisticated these positions are after the media built them up before US troops went in.

This book gives a good deal of information on the history of Afghanistan and a very good bibliography. It also has an informative section on some of the weapons employed by our troops. There are plenty of photographs and nice 3-d paintings to make this boo invaluable to anyone interested in the current war in that country.

A very interesting book, very well illustrated with diagrams and photographs. Not a definitive work by any means but considering that it's only 64 pages (including bibliography and index) it provides good information on the type of warfare encountered by the Soviets and early on by the U.S. I consider it a necessary addition to my GWOT collection.

The preceding reviews on this book seem to straddle the line between the unnecessarily harsh and undeserved devotion.
This book, as I understand it, is more of a guide for historians and scale modelers than a critical military analysis or historical record.
I appreciate the work that author Mir Bahmanyar has both written and compiled. The renderings by Ian Palmer deserve credit for aiding in the basic visual understanding of complexes found in the region.
I would never expect any book with less than 70 pages to provide the material some reviewers seem to demand.
Additionally, this book should not be considered a substitute for military manuals, to do so would starve operational personnel in the theater of volumes of additional classified information.
Good book, great information in BRIEF, valuable pictures and supplemental research material.
Review every book you read, Authors deserve your opinions!

It is extremely risky to write about an ongoing conflict, since many details remain either classified or obscure, but Osprey has waded into Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) with Afghanistan Cave Complexes 1979-2004. The author, a former enlisted US Army Ranger in the 1980s, relies primarily upon the earlier works of Lester Grau on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, newspaper accounts, and US DoD press releases. This volume has its pluses: immediate relevancy, all color photographs and coverage of a conflict that has become a "forgotten war." However, this volume is ultimately a synthesis product that relies too heavily on one source (Grau), lacks objectivity and fails to get a good handle on its subject. Readers expecting an in-depth look at the fighting around Tora Bora in 2001 are going to be disappointed and readers expecting to really gain an appreciate for the Soviet experience in Afghanistan should just read Lester Grau.

Afghanistan Cave Complexes 1979-2004 begins with a short introduction to Afghanistan and a chronology of the key military events in this period. The section on design and development notes that most of the Afghan caves are natural, but offers few details on the manmade variety (who made them, when, how). The following section, on weapons systems at war, lists a variety of US aircraft and munitions used in OEF. The section on offensive operations discusses Soviet procedures against the karez irrigation system and US tunnel/cave clearing procedures. The section on defensive operations discusses mujahidin, Taliban and Al-Qaeda tactics for defending cave complexes. On the other hand, the author provides a fairly extensive bibliography for such a recent subject, including numerous websites.

In a military sense, the author does not have a good handle on the significance of these cave complexes, although he clearly implies that they have been a major asset for the enemy against the Soviets and Americans. Unlike the Maginot Line or the West Wall, the cave complexes were built to protect logistic bases and enemy troops, not as actual fighting positions. The enemy in Afghanistan has been primarily a guerrilla force and fixed fortifications do not mesh well with this type of force. As Grau notes in his studies, the base complexes were a dubious asset at best since they robbed the insurgents of their key strengths - mobility and invisibility - and tied down many insurgents in protecting a fixed base, instead of attacking Soviet or American bases. Furthermore, this author fails to note that the cave complexes were never very secret and both the Soviets and Americans were soon aware of them and proceeded to bomb the heck out of them. Indeed, the cave complexes ended up being "bomb magnets" that caused heavier mujahidin casualties than if they had dispersed. Although difficult, both the Soviets and Americans proved that they could move into and seize these complexes.

Unlike Grau's works, this author appears to embrace media-derived biases. Given what's here, it's not clear if this author did any of his own thinking or analysis. It is clear that readers will gain a false impression of what is currently going on in Afghanistan if they accept this author's polemics. Early on, the author states, "the initiative was lost," that "Afghanistan is less safe" now and that "disgruntled Afghan warlords dominate the country." OK, this author apparently is very selective in his newsgathering, because he apparently missed reconstruction projects like the opening of the Kabul-Kandahar highway, political successes like the recent elections and the on-going disarmament program that has muzzled the warlords. The fact that the Taliban threatened to disrupt the Afghan elections and failed showed just who has the initiative. Unlike the war against the Soviets, the Afghan people do not want the Taliban back, which greatly reduces the ability of that insurgency to expand. Later on, the author claims that, "over the last two years [the Taliban] have regained much of their lost territories." Huh? I don't know of a single village or city in Afghanistan flying their flag, and when they do show up in the rural areas, it is to rob villagers of supplies. While the Afghan Government and Coalition forces do not claim to control the entire country, they have the ability to rapidly respond to Taliban resurgence anywhere within Afghanistan and crush it. The author's claim that "little has changed" in Afghanistan is ludicrous, and an insult to a people that are enjoying their first taste of democracy.

The author really goes off the deep end when he addresses the Battlefield Operating Systems (BOS) and US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The author states, "the implementation of the misguided 'Rumsfeldian theory of war,' the reduction of regular forces in favor of technology and an over-reliance on airpower, have placed severe restrictions on the battlefield commanders as seen in the failures at Tora Bora, Operation Anaconda and...Operation Iraqi Freedom....In none of these operations...have US forces been able to maximize the potential of combined arms. This has led to higher casualty rates and protracted campaigns." First, the author fails to appreciate the logistic and political constraints that imposed significant limitations upon the initial US ground force commitment in Afghanistan. When the US moved against Tora Bora, Kabul airport had just been opened and the logistic infrastructure in the region was extremely primitive - it is doubtful that a full division-size force could have been adequately supported in the Tora Bora area at that time. The author's understanding of US military doctrine and operations in OEF and OIF is faulty, since both operations were marked by excellent use of combined arms. Higher casualties due to Rumsfeld? The US seized Kabul, crushed Taliban military power and evicted their regime from all major population centers all within two months and at the cost of fewer than 50 US combat deaths. True, UBL was not caught, but OEF was overwhelmingly successful and at very light cost. The author's anti-Rumsfeld bias betrays an unwillingness to examine ground truth in Afghanistan.

This book is a collection of articles and information from other mainstream books on the topic. It relies heavily on the writings (including one entire chapter) of Lester Grau and Ahmad Jalali. The rest of the information you can google for.

Far better to read what Lester Grau actually wrote. I really didn't find anything of value in this book except for American Cave clearing techniques.

This is a quote from the very end of the book written in 2003:

"Afghanistan has endured decades of war and has seen a whole generation of children grow up with mines and death. Three years into the invasion of Afghanistan by Coalition forces, few things have changed, although hundreds of caves have been destroyed. Mujahideen are still developing cave systems. Ethnic and political strife are as intense as ever. The president of the country uses U.S. bodyguards and the opium crop has dramatically risen since the ouster of the Taliban. The Soviets were unable to defeat the Mujahideen who moved in and out of Pakistan. The U.S. undoubtedly is hoping that an aggressive Pakistan can close off this kind of access, allowing Coalition forces to destroy the remaining TAQ militias."

Seems to me the author got this one right and considering it is a very small book packs a lot of valuable information into its few pages. The bibliography is also outstanding. Criticism of Rumsfeld has been proven correct as well. The pictures are current at the time of writing and are great. To this date it is still an excellent primer.

A reviewer wrote: The author really goes off the deep end when he addresses the Battlefield Operating Systems (BOS) and US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The author states, "the implementation of the misguided 'Rumsfeldian theory of war,' the reduction of regular forces in favor of technology and an over-reliance on airpower, have placed severe restrictions on the battlefield commanders as seen in the failures at Tora Bora, Operation Anaconda and...Operation Iraqi Freedom....In none of these operations...have US forces been able to maximize the potential of combined arms. This has led to higher casualty rates and protracted campaigns."
Well the author is completely correct and the reviewer completely wrong as the assertions put forth have been clearly supported by others over the past number of years including military professionals. It is a very fine book indeed and made the various military reading lists for a reason.