Fw: What happened when the Special Forces landed in Afghanistan? - Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

 The New Yorker                                             November 12,
2001

 Fact annals of national security escape and evasion:

       What happened when the Special Forces landed in Afghanistan?

       By Seymour M. Hersh

 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 elite
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."
 --