What happened when the Special Forces landed in Afghanistan?

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
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."


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