[R-G] Taliban surprise attack well planned

[Anthony Fenton]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008051839_afghan15.html

July 15, 2008
Taliban surprise attack well planned

By The New York Times and The Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban insurgents who attacked a remote U.N.- 
run outpost near the Pakistan border Sunday that killed nine U.S.  
soldiers breached the NATO compound in a coordinated assault that took  
the defenders by surprise, Western officials said Monday.

Moving in darkness before dawn Sunday, some 200 fighters surrounded  
the newly built base in a remote area near the border without being  
spotted by the troops inside, said Gen. Mohammad Qasim Jangalbagh, the  
provincial police chief.

He said people in the adjacent village of Wanat aided the four-hour  
assault. About 20 local families left their homes in anticipation of  
the raid, while other tribesmen stayed behind "and helped the  
insurgents during the fight," Jangalbagh said.

Just last week, U.S. and Afghan forces had started building the  
makeshift base, and its defenses were not fully in place, one of the  
senior allied officials said. In some places, troops were using their  
vehicles as barriers against insurgents.

The rebels apparently detected the vulnerability and moved quickly to  
exploit it in a predawn assault in which they attacked from two  
directions, U.S. officials said. It was the first time insurgents had  
partly breached any of the three dozen outposts that U.S. and Afghan  
forces operate jointly across the country, according to a Western  
official who insisted on anonymity.

The surprise attack underscored the vulnerability of U.S. forces in  
Afghanistan, which are increasingly stretched thin as they are  
dispatched to far-flung and often isolated mountainous outposts with  
their Afghan allies. The United States now has 32,000 troops in  
Afghanistan, one-fifth the number in Iraq, even though Afghanistan is  
50 percent larger than Iraq.

U.S. and Afghan soldiers inside the base were hit by flying fragments  
from bullets, grenades and mortars that insurgents fired from houses,  
shops and a mosque in a village within a few hundred yards of the  
base, several officials said.

At the lightly fortified observation post nearby, U.S. soldiers came  
under heavy fire from rebels streaming through farmland under the  
cover of darkness. Most of the U.S. casualties took place there, a  
senior American military official said.

U.S. warplanes, attack helicopters and long-range artillery were  
summoned, but the insurgents made it so far that a few of their bodies  
were found inside the base's earthen barriers and others were lying  
around it, Tamim Nuristani, a former governor, said after talking to  
officials in the district.

The assault sent a strong signal to other insurgent groups that  
"America cannot resist them anymore," he said. The attackers were a  
mix of Afghan- and Pakistan-based extremists, some with al-Qaida links  
— a sign, he said, that cooperation is growing between what had been  
often fractious factions fighting the Western military presence in  
Afghanistan.

"They are not only Taliban. They were [Pakistan-based] Lashkar-e- 
Tayyaba, Hezb-i-Islami, Taliban and those people who are dissatisfied  
with the [President Hamid Karzai] government after these recent  
incidents. They all came together for this one," he said.