Rules of engagement

The U.S. soldier lying in the tall elephant grass saw the team of saboteurs through a Starlight scope, which enabled him to see in the dark of night. "Four Zero Six," he whispered into his radio headset, using the numerical call sign of his company commander. "I see them. They're digging a hole under the road."

"Don't stand up and fire," cut in the soldier's battalion commander, John B. Keeley, who was listening to the radio exchange from a command post plopped onto a stretch of flat farmland in South Vietnam's Delta. "A VC ambush squad may be in the grass behind you. Stay put. Call you back."

If the American soldiers didn't act soon, within a few minutes the Vietcong sappers would put a tube of fuel-soaked fertilizer into the hole they were digging under Route 4, the vital road linking Saigon to its rice bowl. When they detonated the mixture with a grenade, the explosion would blow a giant hole in the road Keeley had been ordered to keep open.

How to kill the sappers without getting his six GIs lying in the grass nearby killed? Keeley, commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 60th Infantry on this tense night in 1968, decided to call artillery down on the Vietcong saboteurs after ordering his men to slither away from the road.

But the rules of engagement for that part of the country required a South Vietnamese official to approve the artillery strike. Keeley's fire-control officer couldn't get that permission when he called the Tactical Operations Center. Keeley, with seconds ticking away in his head, appealed to the higher-ranking province chief, and asked him to approve the strike. Permission denied. Why? Keeley would never know.

The company commander, listening to Keeley's futile appeals, expected to hear an explosion any second as the Vietcong detonated their bomb. To stop them, the commander ordered a soldier to charge the Vietcong with a steamroller. This ploy scared away the Vietcong before they could ruin the road, saved the lives of the six American troopers hiding in the grass, and did not break the rules of engagement. Mission accomplished--barely.

More often than not, it was these kinds of rules that left commanders such as Keeley feeling frustrated, angry, and bitter night after night, day after day, in Vietnam.

I have kept up with Keeley in the 34 years since I saw him in action in the Delta. He was one of many officers in Vietnam who dared to speak their frustrations into my tape recorder while I was covering the war for The Washington Post. I asked him what plea he would make to those now drafting rules of engagement for American military officers who will soon be responsible for giving help to another foreign army--the Afghan one.

"Make the rules broad and flexible so the commander on the ground can do what he thinks is best," Keeley replied. "This was not the case in Vietnam. And everybody was the worse off because of it." I have never met any officer who commanded troops in Vietnam who didn't share this view.

The experience of those officers has fresh relevance today as U.S. officials ponder how much help the American military should give, and in what ways, to the new Afghan army. Army Special Forces started training that army this week and expect to stick at it for the next two years.

President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have said they are counting on the Afghan army, not the American one, to keep the peace in Afghanistan now that the big military operations against the Taliban have all but concluded. However, the Bush administration has also said it intends to maintain a U.S. military "presence" in the region.

This presence, to keep Afghanistan from tearing itself apart again, will have to be some kind of quick-reaction force that can come to the rescue of the Afghan army, under clear and flexible rules of engagement.

Can this be done without repeating the colossal mistakes made during the Vietnam War, when Washington took over the host country's military? Retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an unconventional-war expert and consultant to the Rumsfeld Pentagon, thinks so. He told National Journal that a quick-reaction force of only about 2,000 highly mobile troops--backed up by helicopter gunships, A-10 attack planes, and light artillery--should be enough. He would station one battalion in southern Afghanistan, perhaps at Kandahar, another in the northern part of the country, and a headquarters unit to coordinate action in the capital city of Kabul.

What the strike force could do on the ground when the calls for help come in, how it would interact with the hundreds of warriors now working for the CIA in Afghanistan, and what role the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Air Force would play are all details being thrashed out. Clear rules of engagement must be part of the answers to those and other questions for this latest U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to end well.

An Afghan army of from 15,000 to 20,000 troops should be big enough to keep peace without scaring neighbors such as Iran, Anderson said. Unlike in Somalia, "I can see an end state in Afghanistan" where the country is secure without having American boots on the ground. "I don't see quagmire," he said. That outcome would hearten the latter-day Keeleys in today's officer corps.