In early February, US commanders in Afghanistan thought they had finally cornered al Qaeda. Since the fall of Kabul in November, American forces had played a game of cat and mouse with guerrillas in the southern mountains, unable to bring them to battle. Now intelligence showed al Qaeda units had gathered in strength in the Shahikot valley, a steep-sided gorge close to the Pakistani border. Best of all, from the point of view of US commander Major General Franklin "Buster" Hagenbeck, the decisive battle would go to the army, rather than their rivals, the Marine Corps. The Marines had taken combat honours the previous year, with an assault on Kandahar. Now it was the army's turn.
The build-up took weeks. This was the legacy of Washington's decision, early in the war, not to commit mainstream ground troops to the war in Afghanistan. The policy was only overturned when it became clear that, following the capture of Kabul, the Taleban and al Qaeda remained a threat. But it would take many weeks to fly in infantry units, supplies and their heavy equipment.
The plan was simple: Afghan units, backed by US air power, would attack from the eastern ridgeline while US forces would land at seven points to the west. The Afghans would seize the ridge, driving al Qaeda across the valley and up the western slope-straight into the guns of the waiting Americans (the operation was named Anaconda, after the giant snake that wraps itself around its prey). Throughout the preparations, al Qaeda forces stayed obligingly in place. But Hagenbeck had other problems. His own division, the 10th Mountain, would lead the assault, yet despite its name, its troops lacked the fitness for high altitude fighting. Another problem was the lack of artillery. Artillery was seen as "old war" in an army now in thrall to the possibilities of high-tech gear. In the Gulf and Kosovo, air power had achieved decisive victories at little cost to friendly forces (the US-led coalition won the Kosovo war without a single combat death). In the early days of the Afghan war, US jets had blasted Taleban positions on the flat open plains. But now the terrain was different.
Al Qaeda and the Taleban units among them had chosen their valley well. Shahikot, which runs north-south, is enclosed by two steep-sided ridges peppered with caves, which are ideal hiding places. The Americans planned to sit tight while the Afghans acted as "beaters," pushing their prey towards them. But Afghan forces had a bad record in providing support. When, in December, al Qaeda units-reportedly including Osama bin Laden-had gathered at the cave complex at Tora Bora, local Afghan forces were employed to throw a cordon around the area while US air power bombarded the caves. Instead, the Afghans either took bribes or just decided to stay alive by failing to keep their cordon, and al Qaeda slipped away.
Still, the same strategy was planned for Operation Anaconda. Launched on 2nd March, things went instantly wrong. News of the coming attack, presumably leaked by elements of the mustering Afghan forces, reached al Qaeda and it was they who got in first, launching a hit-and-run attack with mortar shells ("the poor man's artillery") causing panic amongst Afghans. The US called up air strikes, but one bomber hit the Afghan units by mistake, killing several soldiers, one of them from US special forces.
Hagenbeck ordered the operation to continue. The Afghans recovered and launched their assault on the eastern ridgeline. Meanwhile, a massive helicopter force, led by big twin-engined Chinooks, gathered at Bagram airbase. Troops from the 87th regiment of the 10th Mountain division clambered aboard, together with two more regiments from 101st Airborne, parts of a Ranger regiment, special forces soldiers and a complete brigade of headquarters staff.
More than 2,000 troops were lifted 100 miles to seven landing zones along the western ridge. Once again, planning was poor. Astonishingly, the landing zones appear not to have been watched by advanced teams. Possibly no such units were in place because US command feared that to have all the sites under observation would be to risk discovery.
Lack of training was also a problem. The maxim for mountain warfare is always to have height advantage over your enemy. When British Royal Marines arrived in these same mountains two months later they were landed at the highest points possible. The Chinooks used by the British had to hover in fierce winds while the men staggered out onto the tops of icy mountain ridges, sometimes only a few feet wide. The US pilots, however, chose conventional landing zones. As dawn broke, troops poured out, straight into an al Qaeda ambush. The Americans dashed for cover, with volleys of mortar fire crashing down around them. In one landing zone, 28 men were wounded, many saved from death by their Kevlar body armour-one high-tech item that did prove its worth.
Air support was called in. The problem was that the bombers kept running out of bombs or fuel. Lacking a battery of field guns, the Americans had, for long periods, nothing to keep the heads of the enemy down. The air force deployed some devastating weapons. One was the thermobaric bomb, which throws a petroleum cloud out around itself, then ignites, blasting an area the size of a football field. Other bombs were christened "bunker busters" because they can penetrate through solid rock. But both these weapons were far less effective in the corrugated terrain of Afghanistan's mountains. Also, because the Americans were now below their attackers, they had few targets to illuminate with their laser designators. Al Qaeda bazooka crews patrolled the heights, firing anti-tank rockets at the American positions from two or three kilometres.
Accounts of the ensuing chaos were suppressed for weeks afterwards. Then the media were given selective versions that minimised the shock. One of the first people to come up with a different perspective was Dan Plesch, an academic with the Royal United Services Institute in London. Plesch simply trawled through various stories told by individual soldiers to their hometown newspapers across America. "Once you let soldiers out, they begin to talk," he says. "You start to see that they were shot up in a lot of places."
The soldiers' stories reveal a scene of escalating panic. By the end of the first day, medics were rushing from man to man, trying to keep the wounded alive in the freezing dark. A nighttime helicopter evacuation of the wounded was organised, but the choppers came under fire as they approached. The following day, Apache attack helicopters were brought in. Their normal operating range is several kilometres, but they were urged to get in close to rake enemy positions with rocket and machine gun fire. Snowstorms blew up, causing them to fly closer still. Al Qaeda had no proper anti-aircraft weapons, but at these close ranges they used machine gun fire, and even anti-tank rockets, to serious effect. Armour plating saved the crews, but five of the seven helicopters were so badly damaged they had to be withdrawn.
Worse was to come. On day three, the Americans sent two special forces teams down the valley in a pair of Chinooks. Once again, they found a landing zone occupied by al Qaeda units. As one chopper touched down, an anti-tank missile slammed into its nose. It reared up, with one Navy Seal falling out of the back door. His loss was not noticed until the helicopter made an emergency landing a mile away. No covering aircraft had been provided, so the only machine left in the air was an unmanned Predator plane, and US commanders watched, via the Predator's camera, as al Qaeda soldiers closed in on the lone American. Special forces troops mounted a hasty rescue mission without air cover. In the ensuing m?l?e six more soldiers died-with the Seal already executed.
B-52s were used to bomb flat the (empty) village of Shahikot on the valley floor. Hamid Karzai, the new president of Afghanistan, himself the survivor of an errant American bombing mission some months before, sent a second force of Afghan troops south to join the battle. But, finally, US command bit its lip and summoned the Marine Corps. A quick reaction force was flown in, and Vietnam-vintage Cobra helicopters arrived, flying 400 missions to pound the mountainsides. At this point, al Qaeda pulled off one last surprise. They vanished. One moment US units were in the midst of furious firefights, the next their tracer rounds were pouring into empty positions.
In their own, unsuccessful, war in the 1980s, the Soviets battling in these same mountains had nicknamed the Mujahedin "ghosts" for their ability to launch sudden raids, then disappear into the mountain fastness. Mujahedin veterans say the secret is to find a gulley or cave out of sight and hide there until the pursuing forces had passed by. While al Qaeda units contained a high proportion of volunteers from abroad, Afghan volunteers with knowledge of the local terrain were almost certainly among them.
The Americans tried to seal the valley, ordering the first Afghan force to form a blocking position at the southern end of the valley while Karzai's reinforcements probed in from the north. But either because they were unwilling to be sacrificed, or possibly because of the sheer difficulty of sealing such difficult terrain, the Afghans failed to find more than a handful of the 2,000-strong force the Americans estimated they had been facing.
Major fighting ended on 9th March, with eight American soldiers dead. The valley was declared secure on 13th March. By then the misinformation campaign had kicked in. Already, on 7th March, General Hagenbeck had declared his tally of wounded as 48, though Dan Plesch puts the figure at about 70. And with the valley in American hands, the battle was declared a victory: "This is nothing if not an incredible success," US army spokesman Major Bryan Hilferty told the Washington Post on 13th March. "We've taken out a hardcore centre of the al Qaeda leadership." Not to be outdone, the Pentagon weighed in, announcing a "body count" of 700 enemy dead. At the time, the actual known body count stood at three al Qaeda dead. As US troops scoured the terrain, the count climbed, but not into the hundreds.
Defending the estimate, Pentagon officials later said that many of the enemy were vaporised by air strikes, or killed deep within their caves, a rather self-defeating argument since, by definition, such deaths must remain unknown. A British Royal Marines unit which patrolled through the area in the spring said that "once you matched the body parts" they counted between 50 and 60 enemy dead.
With the White House keen to build support for a fresh war-against Iraq-orders came down via central command for no more Anacondas. Hagenbeck was told to tread with caution. He shied away from future operations, causing much acrimony with the Royal Marines who arrived a month later.
Al Qaeda also learned its lesson. Never again would it concentrate its units in the same place. From then on, through the spring and summer, its troops worked in penny-packets. Allied intelligence found them darting in and out of Pakistan. When the Royal Marines arrived, there were no base camps to find.
Meanwhile, the US army managed to take a swipe at their Marine Corps rivals. The official US army newspaper gave a lengthy account of the battle, listing not just the main participating units, but even detachments from the US navy and allied Australian, Canadian and Norwegian units. But no Marines. "This rivalry matters," says Plesch, "because it substantially hinders the effectiveness of operations."
The Marine Corps had the last laugh, however. In July, a major amphibious invasion exercise, costing $250m, was launched on the Californian coast, simulating an American invasion of an unnamed Gulf state. In command of the "enemy" forces was a retired US Marine Corps general, Paul Van Riper. Using the full bag of unconventional tactics, Van Riper gouged into the invasion fleet using speed boats packed with explosives, then took a heavy toll of the invasion force with rebel raiding parties who communicated by motorbike to avoid US signals interceptions. The disaster was a bloodless one, of course, but afterwards Van Riper told the Sunday Times: "There is a real lack of intellectual thinking about the problems that confront the military."
It is tempting, from all of this, to conclude that the US army, weaned on expectations of high-tech superiority, is heading for trouble. Tempting, but presumptuous. Only a tiny fraction of US fighting power was used in Anaconda. And, as with the Californian "invasion" debacle, it may be that commanders learn from their mistakes. Every peacetime army needs a few clumsy slips before it finds its feet. Nevertheless, Anaconda's multiple failures point to two sources of anxiety: the lack of proper infantry training (for the very units who will be expected to fight their way into Iraq); and the willingness of US commanders to distort casualty figures when a more realistic assessment would serve them better.
This is a sign not so much of a failure among top brass, as a lack of political leadership. More than ten years ago, London and Washington were confident enough of public support for war on Iraq to warn of the possibility of high allied casualties. Those fears proved groundless, but the fact that warnings were made showed commanders on the ground that, come what may, political support would remain firm. The build-up to what may be a new war in Iraq has seen a deafening silence from both sides of the Atlantic on the subject of estimated casualties.
This silence may be missed by the public, but it does not go unnoticed by the generals, now engaged in a game of second guessing political support for their battle plans. The probability remains that US forces can sweep into Iraq, using air power to blast the Iraqi army and then, once Baghdad is surrounded, stand back while Saddam Hussein is toppled by his own people.
There is a reasonable chance, though, that Iraq's army will choose to fight, clinging like al Qaeda to the one piece of terrain that gives it an advantage-a city jammed with frightened civilians. If this does happen, and if Washington is serious about bringing about "regime change," then America has a problem. The US army will have to use its inexperienced infantry to blast a path into Baghdad, and the body bags will start to pile up. It would be good to know that politicians and generals are prepared for this outcome.
