Friday 14 October 2011

A Closer Look at the Haqqani Anniversary Attack on American-Afghan Outposts

American forces fired 105-millimeter artillery toward an insurgent rocket position near the Pakistan border after being attacked on the 10th anniversary of the Afghan war.
FORWARD OPERATING BASE ORGUN-E, Afghanistan – Last Friday, on the 10th anniversary of the start of the Afghan war, at least several dozen fighters from the Haqqani insurgent network launched a complex attack against multiple American-Afghan outposts near the Pakistan border.
Firing scores of high-explosive rockets and mortar rounds, they struck nearly simultaneously at outposts occupied by the 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, and, using a tactic that has succeeded elsewhere, they tried to breach one of the positions with a suicide truck bomb and a contingent of gunmen on foot.
The significance of the attack was, as is often the case, a matter of uncertainty and dispute. The American-led NATO command framed the Haqqani attack as a failure. In the tactical sense this might be so. For all of the effort, the attackers managed to wound only one American soldier, and his wounds were not serious. American machine guns, artillery, attack helicopters and aircraft, firing munitions throughout much of the day, stopped the advancing fighters short of an outpost they apparently had hoped to overrun.
But as a strategic matter, the attack came with a message some soldiers found startling, if grudgingly so. It showed that even after the Pentagon has had its troop levels at a peak for two full so-called fighting seasons, the insurgents who crisscross between Pakistan and Afghanistan remained able to plan complicated attacks and to mass fighters and weapons against multiple American bases at once. And their rocket and mortar fire was accurate. Many rounds, fired from the distance, struck squarely within the outposts – a feat that suggested a considerable degree of training and skill.
Moreover, though all of the Haqqani firing positions were within Afghanistan, some of them were within hundreds of yards of the border with Pakistan – a fact pointing toward the sanctuary from where, soldiers said, the coordinated assault was likely planned and where the dozens of 107-millimeter rockets fired against the American soldiers were probably acquired.
And then there was this question: What might happen in a similar attack against Afghan outposts without American military presence?
The relative weakness of the Afghan security forces was on full display. This battle was fought with American communications networks and American firepower. The distant Haqqani firing positions and an apparent cluster of Haqqani fighters were stopped or silenced by a suite of modern American weapons systems — helicopter gunships, artillery, attack aircraft and GPS-guided bombs — that the Afghans either do not possess or do not know how to use. One example: Lt. Col. John V. Meyer, the battalion’s commander, said that 14,000 pounds of munitions were dropped from aircraft during the daylong fight.
(At Forward Operating Base Tillman, where the photographer Tyler Hicks and I were present for the fighting, the Afghan soldiers did not participate at all. As the rockets came in and American officers and noncommissioned officers tracked the battle in an operations room, and coordinated and calibrated their return fire from the gun line, the Afghan Army representatives in the room excused themselves, left the room for roughly 30 minutes and returned with plates of food. Beyond that poorly timed display of appetite, they did nothing further that could be observed.)
But for the moment, let’s set the larger analysis aside, and be reminded of something else. It is one of the things that conventional infantry soldiers are often told, and sometimes get to see: that there are moments in war when one or two alert people, properly equipped and willing to act, can determine the local outcome of a fight...
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C.J. Chivers @'NY Times'
(Thanx Son#1!)

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