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New Yorker
November 12, 2001

Annals of Security

Escape And Evasion

What happened when the Special Forces landed in Afghanistan?

By Seymour M. Hersh

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 wa