They came, they saw - they got shot and ran for thier lives!

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They came, they saw - they got shot and ran for thier lives!
nawaz
11/06/01 at 11:38:57
http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?011112fa_FACT
ESCAPE AND EVASION

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

What happened when the Special Forces landed in
Afghanistan?

Issue of 2001-11-12
Posted 2001-11-02

Early on the morning of Saturday, October 20th, more
than a hundred Army Rangers parachuted into a
Taliban-held airbase sixty miles southwest of
Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. A military
cameraman videotaped the action with the aid of a
night-vision lens, and his grainy, green-tinted
footage of determined commandos and billowing
parachutes dominated the television news that night.
The same morning, a second Special Operations unit,
made up largely of Rangers and a reinforced Delta
Force squadron, struck at a complex outside Kandahar
which included a house used by Mullah Omar, the
Taliban leader.

In a Pentagon briefing later that day, General Richard
B. Myers, of the Air Force, the new chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported that the Special
Operations Forces "were able to deploy, maneuver, and
operate inside Afghanistan without significant
interference from Taliban forces." He stated that the
soldiers did meet resistance at both sites, but
overcame it. "I guess you could characterize it as
light," he said. "For those experiencing it, of
course, it was probably not light." He concluded, "The
mission over all was successful. We accomplished our
objectives."

Myers also told reporters that the commandos were
"refitting and repositioning for potential future
operations against terrorist targets" in Afghanistan.
But at a second briefing, two days later, he refused
to say whether commando operations would continue.
"Some things are going to be visible, some invisible,"
he said.

Myers did not tell the press that, in the wake of a
near-disaster during the assault on Mullah Omar's
complex, the Pentagon was rethinking future Special
Forces operations inside Afghanistan. Delta Force,
which prides itself on stealth, had been
counterattacked by the Taliban, and some of the
Americans had had to fight their way to safety. Twelve
Delta members were wounded, three of them seriously.

Delta Force has long complained about a lack of
creativity in the Army leadership, but the
unexpectedness and the ferocity of the Taliban
response "scared the crap out of everyone," a senior
military officer told me, and triggered a review of
commando tactics and procedures at the United States
Central Command, or CENTCOM, at MacDill Air Force
Base, in Florida, the headquarters for the war in
Afghanistan. "This is no war for Special Operations,"
one officer said—at least, not as orchestrated by
CENTCOM and its commander, General Tommy R. Franks, of
the Army, on October 20th.

There was also disdain among Delta Force soldiers, a
number of senior officers told me, for what they saw
as the staged nature of the other assault, on the
airfield, which had produced such exciting television
footage. "It was sexy stuff, and it looked good," one
general said. But the operation was something less
than the Pentagon suggested. The Rangers' parachute
jump took place only after an Army Pathfinder team—a
specialized unit that usually works behind enemy
lines—had been inserted into the area and had
confirmed that the airfield was clear of Taliban
forces. "It was a television show," one informed
source told me. "The Rangers were not the first in."

Some of the officials I spoke with argued that the
parachute operation had value, even without enemy
contact, in that it could provide "confidence
building" for the young Rangers, many of whom had
joined the Army out of high school and had yet to be
exposed to combat. "The Rangers come in and the
choppers come in and everybody feels good about
themselves," a military man who served alongside the
Special Forces said. Nonetheless, he asked, "Why would
you film it? I'm a big fan of keeping things
secret—and this was being driven by public opinion."

Delta Force, which is based at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina, has a mystique that no other unit of the
Army does. Its mere existence is classified, and,
invariably, its activities are described to the public
only after the fact. "Black Hawk Down," a book by Mark
Bowden about the Special Forces disaster in Mogadishu,
Somalia, in 1993, in which eighteen Rangers and Delta
Force members were killed, took note of Delta's
special status. "They operated strictly in secret,"
Bowden wrote. "You'd meet this guy hanging out at a
bar around Bragg, deeply tanned, biceps rippling, neck
wide as a fireplug, with a giant Casio watch and a
plug of chaw under his lip, and he'd tell you he
worked as a computer programmer for some army contract
agency. They called each other by their nicknames and
eschewed salutes and all the other traditional
trappings of military life. Officers and noncoms in
Delta treated each other as equals. Disdain for normal
displays of army status was the unit's signature. They
simply transcended rank." On combat missions, Bowden
wrote, Delta Force soldiers disliked working with the
younger, far less experienced Rangers.

Referring to the October 20th raid on the Mullah Omar
complex, some Delta members told a colleague that it
was a "total goat fuck"—military slang meaning that
everything that could go wrong did go wrong. According
to a report in the London Observer, the complex
included little more than potholed roads, the brick
house used by Mullah Omar, and a small protective
garrison of thatched huts. The Pentagon had
intelligence reports indicating that the Mullah
sometimes spent the night there; a successful mission
could result in his death or capture and might, at a
minimum, produce valuable intelligence. Delta had
hoped to do what it did best: work a small team of
four to six men on the ground into the target area—the
phrase for such reconnaissance is "snoop and poop"—and
attack with no warning. (One senior intelligence
officer said that a member of Delta Force had told
him, "We take four guys, and if we lose them, that's
what we get paid for.")

CENTCOM's attack plan called, instead, for an enormous
assault on the Mullah's complex. The mission was
initiated by sixteen AC-130 gunships, which poured
thousands of rounds into the surrounding area but
deliberately left the Mullah's house unscathed. The
idea was that any Taliban intelligence materials would
thus be left intact, or that, with a bit of luck, Omar
would perhaps think he was safe and spend the night. A
reinforced company of Rangers—roughly two hundred
soldiers—was flown by helicopter into a nearby area,
to serve as a blocking force in case Delta ran into
heavy resistance. Chinook helicopters, the Army's
largest, then flew to a staging area and disgorged the
reinforced Delta squadron—about a hundred soldiers—and
their six-by-six assault vehicles, with specially
mounted machine guns. The Delta team stormed the
complex, and found little of value: no Mullah and no
significant documents.

"As they came out of the house, the shit hit the fan,"
one senior officer recounted. "It was like an ambush.
The Taliban were firing light arms and either
R.P.G.s"—rocket-propelled grenades—"or mortars." The
chaos was terrifying. A high-ranking officer who has
had access to debriefing reports told me that the
Taliban forces were firing grenades, and that they
seemed to have an unlimited supply. Delta Force, he
added, found itself in "a tactical firefight, and the
Taliban had the advantage." The team immediately began
taking casualties, and evacuated. The soldiers broke
into separate units—one or more groups of four to six
men each and a main force that retreated to the
waiting helicopters. According to established
procedures, the smaller groups were to stay behind to
provide fire cover. Army gunships then arrived on the
scene and swept the compound with heavy fire.

The Delta team was forced to abandon one of its
objectives—the insertion of an undercover team into
the area—and the stay-behind soldiers fled to a
previously determined rendezvous point, under a
contingency plan known as an E. & E., for escape and
evasion. One of the Chinook helicopters smashed its
undercarriage while pulling away from the grenades and
the crossfire, leaving behind a section of the landing
gear. The Taliban later displayed this as a trophy,
claiming, falsely, that a helicopter had been shot
down. (According to the Pentagon, the helicopter had
come "into contact with a barrier.")

The failed 1993 Special Forces attack in Mogadishu,
with its enduring image of a slain American dragged
through the city's streets, had created a furor, and
led to allegations that the soldiers had been sent in
without adequate combat support. The CENTCOM planners
were unquestionably eager to avoid the same mistake,
and their anxiety was perhaps heightened by the fact
that the attacks would be the first of the ground war.
But the resulting operation was criticized by many
with experience in Special Operations as far too noisy
("It would wake the dead," one officer told me) and
far too slow, giving the Taliban time to organize
their resistance. One Delta Force soldier told a
colleague that the planners "think we can perform
fucking magic. We can't. Don't put us in an
environment we weren't prepared for. Next time, we're
going to lose a company."

In the briefings after the raids, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and General Myers gave no indication
of the intensity of the resistance near Mullah Omar's
house. Rumsfeld also chastised the Pentagon press
corps for relying on unnamed military sources in
filing the first reports on the raids before the
commandos had returned. Rumsfeld said, "You can be
certain that I will answer your questions directly
when I can and that we'll do our best to give you as
much information as we can safely provide." He added,
"This is a very open society, and the press knows—you
know—almost as much as exists and almost as soon as it
exists. And the idea that there is some great iceberg
out there that's not known, below water . . . it's
just not true."

In the days that followed, as details of the raids
filtered through the military system, the Pentagon
gave no public hint of the bitter internal debate they
had provoked. There was evidence, however, that
something had gone wrong. On Sunday, October 21st, the
day after the raids, the London Sunday Telegraph
reported that the United States had requested the
immediate assignment to Afghanistan of the entire
regiment of Britain's élite commando units, the
Special Air Service, or S.A.S. American officials told
me that British military authorities assigned to
CENTCOM were urging the Pentagon to forgo its airborne
operations inside Afghanistan and, instead, bring the
war to the Taliban by establishing a large firebase in
Afghanistan. The British position, one officer
explained, was "We should tell the Taliban, 'We're now
part of your grid square' "—that is, in the Taliban's
territory. " 'What are you going to do about it?' "

The after-action arguments over how best to wage a
ground war continued last week, with many of the
senior officers in Delta Force "still outraged," as
one military man described it. The Pentagon could not
tell the American people the details of what really
happened at Kandahar, he added angrily, "because it
doesn't want to appear that it doesn't know what it's
doing." Another senior military officer told me, "This
is the same M.O. that they've used for ten years." He
dismissed CENTCOM's planning for the Afghanistan
mission as "Special Ops 101," and said, "I don't know
where the adult supervision for these operations is.
Franks"— the CENTCOM commander—"is clueless." Of Delta
Force the officer said, "These guys have had a case of
the ass since Mogadishu. They want to do it right and
they train hard. Don't put them on something stupid."
He paused, and said, "We'll get there, but it's going
to get ugly."

A senior official acknowledged that there were serious
problems in the war effort thus far, but said, "It's
like reading a six-hundred-page murder mystery. It's
solved on the last few pages, but you have to read
five hundred and ninety-eight pages to get there."
NS


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