Revealed: how bungled US raid came close to disaster

· Delta Force caught in ferocious Taliban ambush

· Debacle prompted review of war tactics

Luke Harding in Quetta, Julian Borger in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor

Tuesday November 6, 2001

The Guardian

The Pentagon's only publicly announced commando raid on Taliban positions, hailed as a success and beamed around the world in video pictures hours later, actually went badly wrong, seriously injuring American soldiers, sources in Pakistan said yesterday.

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 morale. It sparked a debate in the Pentagon on the advisability of such missions in the absence of clear intelligence.

Soon after the October 20 raid, the US switched its military strategy, throwing its weight behind the opposition Northern Alliance and relying on it to provide ground troops for the campaign.

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

But details provided to the Guardian by sources in Pakistan and the US, together with American press reports, present a different picture.

· A raid by Delta Force commandos on a Kandahar compound of the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, ran into heavy resistance, causing serious casualties. One 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 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 elite force 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", still in its boot.

"There was a lot of blood," the source said. "The Taliban had expected an attack. They were ready and waiting."

During the raid a Chinook helicopter was badly damaged. The Taliban later said they had shot it down and showed off a portion of its landing gear.

The account given to the Guardian was consistent with an article in New Yorker magazine yesterday. The author, Seymour Hersh, said 12 Delta commandos were wounded, three seriously. He quoted a US military officer as saying that the team found itself in "a tactical firefight and the Taliban had the advantage".

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

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

"The mission was laid on like General Motors coming to the Afghan war, like we did in Vietnam," Mr Hersh said. At the same time, a company of rangers parachuted on to a Kandahar airfield in an operation portrayed the next day in dramatic TV footage. But in his article, Mr 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.

On October 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.

Since military operations began on October 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 such operations to be run directly from the Pentagon.

Mr Hersh said yesterday he had been used by special forces officers to signal their unhappiness about how the operation was planned.

"The reason I learned about it is [Delta Force] were upset about what happened. This isn't the way you run Delta Force, you can't have this kind of big-scale operation. And so they're sending a message over the fence to the leadership."

Gen Franks and the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, General Richard Myers, both denied that the Taliban had inflicted casualties on US forces. Gen Franks, who is based in Tampa, Florida, said there were injuries during the operation, but "we had no one wounded by enemy fire".

The failure of the October 20 raid prompted senior British officers to emphasise the importance of good intelli gence. They made it clear they did not yet have it, and the post-mortem after the raid has delayed repeat operations.

"We need proper, joined-up, serious operations," a British defence source said.

But with better intelligence, further raids by small groups of special forces are on the cards once more, almost certainly involving British forces.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon confirmed yesterday it was looking at airfields in Tajikistan and other central Asian countries in the search for land bases close to Afghanistan from which to launch air support missions for the Northern Alliance.

The alliance is said to be poised for major offensives on the capital Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif after carpet bombing by US B-52s of the Taliban lines.

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