U.S. Took Time for This Afghan Raid

In planning the current air and ground assault in the eastern Afghan mountains near Gardez, U.S. military strategists drew on the lessons of last year’s disappointing campaign in Tora Bora, a mountainous region near the Khyber Pass.

That battle began in November and ended after weeks of relentless airstrikes had killed hundreds of suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. But hundreds--if not thousands--escaped, possibly including Osama bin Laden.

This time, defense officials and military analysts say, the Pentagon is doing it differently.

Before the air assault that began Saturday morning, U.S. soldiers were deployed to block the roads, making sure that no one left the region. U.S. diplomats quietly worked with Pakistani officials to ensure that Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan was sealed more thoroughly. Instead of relying on Afghan forces with sometimes competing interests, war planners put hundreds more American boots on the ground, taking weeks to train U.S. and Afghan forces.

The difference, military strategists say, is time. The region had been under increasingly intense surveillance since early January after reports of a growing mass of pro-Taliban forces surfaced, an Afghan Interior Ministry official said.

“This has been in the planning for a few weeks, quite a few weeks,” a senior U.S. defense official said. In Tora Bora, “we didn’t know the terrain very well, and we didn’t have quite enough help from the locals. . . . But here, you had time to set it up, you had time to surveil, you had time to think about it.”

A week before hundreds of American soldiers descended on what Pentagon officials now describe as the last major redoubt of Al Qaeda fighters, U.S. officers attending a party in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar for warlord Gul Agha Shirzai murmured about “the big push up north.”

As they walked back to their base, a line of Humvees and equipment used by special operations soldiers and the Army’s 101st Airborne Division was quietly rolling out to be loaded onto C-17 and C-130 cargo planes in the dead of night. Thermobaric bombs, devastating cave-penetrating explosive devices never before tested in battle, were being shipped from the United States.

Over the last two months, in fact, special operations soldiers have been arriving in the villages and mountains of Paktia province and the city of Khowst, to the southeast. Local Afghan commanders and defense officials said U.S. Special Forces soldiers trained at least one group of 500 Afghans for a search in the rugged, isolated mountains several hours’ drive south of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul.

The campaign required coordination with special operations and support soldiers from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway, the U.S. Central Command, which is running the war, disclosed Sunday. To achieve that coordination, U.S. commanders took a stronger hand in managing the campaign still dominated by the 1,500 soldiers of three Afghan warlords--Kamal Khan Zadran, Zakim Khan and Gen. Zia.

The ensuing battle has emerged as the fiercest since December, when a combination of U.S. air power, Afghan ground forces and U.S. special operations soldiers defeated the Taliban at its last major stronghold in Kandahar. A senior defense official described the target region as a haven for several hundred fighters--discounting estimates of up to 5,000--who have regrouped to form the last major pocket of Al Qaeda and Taliban holdouts in the country.

“These guys were either going to dig in and fight and finish it or they were going to scatter and run. So we had to prepare the size of force--the weaponeering, the tactics--to account for either,” the defense official said.

“Now we’ve been down in the area,” he added. “We’ve established some relationships with locals. We’ve learned the terrain very well. We have a better picture of how they move about.”

Defense officials have declined to describe the Tora Bora campaign as rife with mistakes but have acknowledged that U.S. forces did not understand the porous terrain. The Afghan soldiers who dominated the anti-Taliban forces in the campaign often led cave-by-cave searches reluctantly, appearing more interested in looting than finding Bin Laden, one analyst said. Although the Gardez-area campaign reverted largely to an air campaign on Sunday--the result, Afghan commanders said, of intense opposition from well-armed pro-Taliban fighters--there are hundreds more Americans on the battleground, including both Special Forces and, for the first time, regular Army soldiers from the 101st Airborne, based in Kandahar.

“The Defense Department has done a remarkably good job of learning on the fly,” Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, said Sunday. “In Tora Bora, there were high hopes that the Afghans would in fact do more for us than they actually did, which is why you’re now seeing more U.S. forces on the ground.”

The Pentagon has also dug deeper into its arsenal to ship 2,000-pound thermobaric explosives to Afghanistan. The bombs, used at least twice over the weekend, send the explosive pressure of the bomb deep into cave and tunnel complexes.

Another failing in Tora Bora came in coordinating with Pakistan, analysts said. The United States relied almost exclusively on Pakistani soldiers to seal the border, by some accounts allowing thousands of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters to cross to safety in Pakistan after doing little more than removing their trademark black turbans. Some reports suggested that Pakistani intelligence officials loyal to the Taliban aided the fugitives. This time, U.S. soldiers have reportedly blocked all roads out of the region and coordinated much more closely with Pakistan to guard the border.

“We relied on the Pakistanis to do that at Tora Bora, and that was a mistake. They didn’t do it,” said Col. Timothy Eads, a retired Army special operations officer. “From what I understand, U.S. forces sealed the border this time.”

Notably, the suspected pro-Taliban forces are believed not to have fled before the current attack, suggesting that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf may have purged from his intelligence service the pro-Taliban elements who might have tipped off the opposition.

“We clearly hit them before they could move all their key people and supplies out of the area,” Peters said.