November 7, 2001	Wednesday	Shaba’an 20, 1422

WASHINGTON, Nov 6: The Pentagon’s only publicly-announced commando raid on Taliban positions, hailed as a success and beamed around the world in grainy video pictures only hours after it took place on Oct 20, actually went badly wrong, seriously injuring American soldiers, sources in Pakistan said on Monday.

The debacle, which saw US Delta Force soldiers come under intense fire from the Taliban, prompted a review of special forces operations in Afghanistan and seems to have led to a delay in similar behind-the-lines operations.

The ferocity of the Taliban resistance caught US commandos unawares and showed that 13 days of bombing had failed to break the Taliban’s organizational morale. It has sparked a debate in the Pentagon on the advisability of such daring missions in the absence of clear intelligence.

Soon after the Oct 20 raid, the US appeared to switch its military strategy, throwing its weight fully behind the Northern Alliance, relying on the opposition movement to provide ground troops for the campaign.

The day after the raid the Pentagon hailed the operation as a success which proved that US forces could strike anywhere at any time and in a manner of their choosing.

However, details provided to the London-based Guardian newspaper by sources in Pakistan and the US, together with American press reports, have present quite a different picture.

A raid led by Delta Force commandos on a Kandahar compound of the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, ran into heavy resistance, causing serious casualties and forcing a retreat. One US soldier’s foot was blown off.

A simultaneous raid by army rangers on a Kandahar airstrip was carried out only after forward troops had checked that the area was clear. It was mainly for the benefit of the cameras, and to boost the rangers’ morale.

The fierce Taliban response to the Delta Force raid led to a review of similar planned operations, and led to questioning of the leadership of the war’s US commander, General Tommy Franks.

According to an authoritative and independent source in constant touch with Kandahar, Delta Force commandos, the most secretive and elite in the US army, searched Mullah Omar’s compound but found it had been stripped of anything that might provide useful intelligence. As they emerged they came under intense fire, forcing them to retreat.

The Taliban later retrieved “an American foot” from the scene, still in its boot.

“There was a lot of blood,” the source said. “The Taliban had expected an attack and had taken everything of value out of the compound. They were ready and waiting. They were only too delighted when the Americans arrived. It was not as if Mullah Omar was going to leave a note inside saying: ‘Osama is hiding here’.”

During the raid one of the Chinook helicopters was badly damaged. The Taliban later showed off a section of its landing gear and said they had shot the helicopter down. The account provided was consistent with an article published on Monday in the New Yorker magazine.

The author, Seymour Hersh, said that 12 Delta commandos were wounded, three of them seriously. He quoted a US military officer as saying that the Delta assault found itself in “a tactical firefight and the Taliban had the advantage”.

The commandos were forced to retreat to waiting helicopters and abandon one of the objectives of the raid - the insertion of an undercover team into the area, the New Yorker article said.

Delta Force is a primarily anti-terrorist unit based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Its very existence is never formally discussed, nor are casualties. They are trained to attack with stealth in small teams, but the Kandahar raid was an extensive, noisy production, involving a back-up force of 200 rangers, AC- 130 gunships and 100 commandos.

At the same time, a company of rangers parachuted on to a Kandahar airfield in an operation portrayed the next day in dramatic television footage. But in his article, Hersh said that before the drop, an army pathfinder team had checked that the airfield was free of Taliban forces.

The raid was for the benefit of the cameras and to give young rangers with no combat experience some much needed confidence.

The last joint rangers-Delta Force operation, in Somalia in 1993, ended in disaster with the shooting down of two helicopters and the deaths of 18 American soldiers. On Oct 20, the speed and intensity of the Taliban response at Mullah Omar’s compound “scared the crap out of everyone”, a senior officer told the New Yorker, which reported that the setback had triggered an inquiry into how such commando raids were planned and executed by Central Command.

CIVILIAN GRUMBLING: Since military operations against the Taliban began on Oct 7, there has been grumbling among the Pentagon’s civilian leadership that Gen Franks, an artillery officer, is too hidebound and too steeped in US military doctrine and its reliance on overwhelming firepower, to lead a special forces campaign requiring guile and stealth.

Some senior officials want special forces operations to be run directly from the Pentagon. Gen Franks and the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Gen Richard Myers, both denied that the Taliban had inflicted casualties on US forces.

Gen Franks said that there were injuries during the operation, but that “we had no one wounded by enemy fire”.

The failure of the Oct 20 raid prompted senior British officers, to emphasize the importance of good intelligence. They made it clear they did not yet have it, and the postmortem following the raid has delayed repeat operations. “We need proper, joined-up, serious operations,” a British defence source said.

However, with better intelligence, further raids by small groups of special forces are now on the cards once more, almost certainly involving British special forces. British military planners also advised the US that a better option would be to set up a forward operating base inside Afghanistan.

But that, they said, would have to wait. “The US will have to bomb their way into that position,” a British defence source said.

Meanwhile, the US strategy is now to focus firepower on assisting the Northern Alliance and other opposition groups to make advances against the Taliban. The Northern Alliance is said to be poised for major offensives on Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif after carpet-bombing by US B-52s have pummelled the Taliban lines. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.