Lessons of Tora Bora Prompt Greater Use Of American Troops 
  
 
By Vernon Loeb and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 4, 2002; Page A01 


Although still relying heavily on local Afghan forces, U.S. military commanders have adopted a markedly different strategy for the offensive that began last weekend in eastern Afghanistan than they did three months ago in the battle for the caves around Tora Bora, which resulted in many al Qaeda leaders apparently getting away.

The U.S. decision to deploy hundreds of American and other Western military personnel near Gardez is a significantly larger commitment of ground troops than the Tora Bora battle, which featured no more than a few dozen U.S. Special Forces soldiers.

Pakistan is reported to have taken more aggressive steps as well to shut its border in the area and stop al Qaeda or Taliban fighters from escaping.

"This is clearly a change in our tactics," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a defense consultant who still works closely with the U.S. military. "Committing U.S. forces like this means they're sure of the target and that we've got a much more intense stake in the success of the Afghan interim government."

Although the new tactics suggest Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of the Afghanistan war, and other U.S. officials have learned from their mistakes at Tora Bora, the fierce resistance encountered by U.S.-led forces underscores that, five months into the war, Afghanistan remains a formidable setting for the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign.

It also calls into question just how damaged the Taliban and al Qaeda networks are. Anti-U.S. fighters are said to be well-armed with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns, and the intensity of resistance belies suggestions that only minor pockets of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters remain.

It was a point driven home yesterday when residents of three border towns in southern Afghanistan awoke to find their communities littered with leaflets bearing pictures of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Mohammad Omar, head of the ousted Taliban government that sheltered bin Laden. The leaflets praised the two men as "the pride of all Muslims."

Indeed, U.S. officials at the Pentagon and in Afghanistan took pains to avoid suggestions that the fighting at Gardez could be the last stand of al Qaeda and the Taliban. With the Tora Bora battle, some speculated that bin Laden and his fighters had been pinned down and possibly trapped.

"I think we're, in some ways, in a more difficult phase of the conflict in Afghanistan and the war on terror in Afghanistan than we've ever been in because of the failure to control the countryside, the warlords competing, the surrounding nations trying to regain or influence events in Afghanistan," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said yesterday on the CBS News program "Face the Nation."

McCain said U.S. ground troops will be needed at Gardez and elsewhere in Afghanistan to win the war, and that more U.S. casualties could result.

The regrouping of al Qaeda fighters south of Gardez, which is about 60 miles south of Kabul, apparently did not catch U.S. commanders by surprise. Defense officials said a U.S.-led strike had been weeks in the planning and went all the way up to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. They said U.S. intelligence spotted the buildup and gathered extensive information on the size of the force.

"It's clearly the largest land campaign of the war -- and certainly we learn lessons from what happens in different places," one senior defense official said.

"But we designed this operation for this specific target and this specific terrain based on everything we knew, having the opportunity to surveil this location for a few weeks. That's different from taking a pick-up team to Tora Bora."

Another senior defense official said the willingness to put large numbers of U.S. forces on the ground to fight with the Afghans should stand as a sign that Rumsfeld, Franks and other senior officials were serious when they insisted, over and over in recent months, that much remains to be done in Afghanistan.

"We've kept saying, 'The war isn't over, we've got a lot of work to do, there are going to be significant pockets of al Qaeda and Taliban, and when we find them, we're going to go after them,' " the official said.

Even so, the surprisingly robust counterattack launched against the U.S. forces when they began their offensive Saturday -- which left at least one U.S. soldier dead -- suggested that military planners are still not certain of the size and strength of the al Qaeda and Taliban resistance that remains.

"We never really had a good count about how many of them there were to begin with, and exactly how they dispersed has remained somewhat of a mystery," a senior military officer said. "Did they have rally points or a plan to mass somewhere else? We're still trying to determine these things."

Rumsfeld and Franks have a force in place to hunt down remaining al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, with 1,000 troops from the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and an additional 1,700 from the 101st Airborne at Kandahar, officials said.

In addition, U.S. Special Forces troops continue operating all over the country and U.S. warplanes still fly combat patrols over Afghanistan seven days a week.

U.S. commanders have also shown a willingness, since the war began on Oct. 7, to use the most devastating conventional weapons in the U.S. air arsenal to kill as many enemy troops as possible.

The Pentagon last fall continued development of a new 2,000-pound "thermobaric" bomb for use against the cave complexes in which al Qaeda and Taliban fighters have taken refuge -- and dropped two for the first time in last weekend's battle near Gardez.

The bomb has a bunker-penetrating warhead and is designed to send suffocating blasts through caves that kill humans inside through overpressurization. "The force of the blast is what does the killing," one defense official said.

Airstrikes flown over the weekend in support of U.S. ground forces featured AC-130 gunships, capable of firing 1,800 rounds a minute from a 25mm cannon, in addition to B-52 bombers, F-15E strike aircraft and carrier-based Navy jets.

The United States is building a full-service air base in Kyrgyzstan, 400 miles north of the Afghan border. There it plans to base six Marine F/A-18 attack aircraft, in addition to French Mirage fighters, tankers and transport planes, to support sustained combat air operations over northern Afghanistan.

Killebrew said the amount of force deployed by the U.S. Central Command suggests that Franks and other commanders believe senior al Qaeda commanders are still present in Afghanistan.

"It says to me they've got some pretty good intelligence that the people they're going after are high-level al Qaeda people," Killebrew said. "This is an important fight. They're going after the big fish."

In planning last weekend's operation, one defense official said, battle planners considered two distinct possibilities: that al Qaeda soldiers would stand and fight to the end, or that they would immediately try to scatter.

Clearly, "they're fighting," the official said, explaining that the Central Command took steps to be able to adapt to whatever strategy al Qaeda adopted.


© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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