Over Tora Bora (part two)

"Afghanistan is a land-locked country approximately the size of Texas with a population of around 24 million. The massive mountain ranges and remote valleys in the north and east contrasted with the near desert-like conditions of the plains to the south and west. Road and rail networks were minimal and in disrepair. The rough terrain would challenge any U.S. military effort, especially moving large numbers of conventional troops. Because bombing and cruise-missile attacks, which could be launched quite soon, would probably not be decisive, and because a ground invasion might be decisive, but could not begin for some time, even conventional staff officers realized that an unconventional option could fill the gap between the conventional courses of action."

-- United States Special Operations Command History, 1987-2007

Continuing the United States Special Operations Command account of the battle at Tora Bora, part one here.

The United States undeniably felt a need for speed following the September 11 attacks, and executed an Unconventional Warfare (UW) plan to meet that need.

The UW plan called for SF Operational Detachments Alpha (ODAs), augmented with tactical air control party (TACP) members, to land deep in hostile territory, contact members of the Northern Alliance (NA), coordinate their activities in a series of offensive operations, call U.S. airpower to bear against Taliban and AQ forces, and help overthrow the government of Afghanistan.

But the "unconventional option" that "could fill the gap" between conventional air attacks and arrival of conventional ("boots on ground") forces proved more successful than even many optimistic planners would anticipate - by mid-November Kabul had fallen. But many Taliban and al Qaeda forces fled for the sanctuary of the Tora Bora Mountains. At this point, "American troop levels in Afghanistan were far from robust in late November 2001... At the time, the U.S. Marines had established a small forward base at Rhino, south of Kandahar, and only a reinforced company of the 10th Mountain Division was at Bagram and Mazar-e Sharif."

More on the road to Tora Bora from from part one:

Thus, a general consensus emerged within CENTCOM that despite its obvious limitations, the only feasible option remained the existing template: employment of small SOF teams to coordinate airpower in support of Afghan militia.

The story concludes below.

The plan was to send the Afghan forces into the Tora Bora Mountains to assault AQ positions located in well-protected canyons, with the ODA in observation posts. The latest intelligence placed senior AQ leaders, including UBL, squarely in Tora Bora. Directing joint fires and various groups of Afghans toward AQ positions, COBRA 25 hoped to either capture or destroy UBL and his AQ followers.

The detachment moved south out of Jalalabad to General Ali's headquarters in the vicinity of Pachir Agam on 6 December and completed plans to establish OPs along the high ground northwest and northeast of the canyon. The ODA established an OP on the canyon's eastern ridgeline on 7 December with seven personnel and immediately began directing air support. The detachment called the position COBRA 25A. The detachment then established a second OP, COBRA 25B, with six personnel on the northwestern side of the canyon Bora on 8 December. Small Afghan security elements accompanied each split teams to protect them while they called air strikes. COBRA 25B relieved a "Jawbreaker" element that had been in position calling air strikes for five days. The split teams then coordinated their air strikes, bottling AQ into its defensive positions and preventing it from moving north.

As COBRA 25 established its surveillance positions, CENTCOM committed an additional SOF Task Force, TF 11, to the fight at Tora Bora. On 8 December, TF 11 assumed command and control of the battle. Lacking the restrictions imposed upon the ODA, TF 11 planned to move its elements farther south in concert with Ali's troop movements and along his front line trace. TF 11 could commit a larger number of U.S. SOF personnel, and even employ a small British contingent. Still, the TF 11 force package would total only 50 SOF personnel, and added to the 13 personnel from COBRA 25, the SOF contingent would be up against a much larger force in a mountainous area approximately 9.5 kilometers wide and 10 kilometers long.

Along with General Ali, TF 11's ground force commander conducted his initial reconnaissance of the Tora Bora area on 8 December. He caught a glimpse of just how well-defended the AQ fortifications were during this reconnaissance. After entering the northeastern portion of the main battle area, the reconnaissance party received accurate small arms and mortar fire. Fortunately, the party took no casualties. The TF 11 commander also discovered that General Ali's forces maintained no real front line trace, but rather clusters of troops in the Agam Valley that were scattered willy-nilly.

The restrictions placed on COBRA 25 prevented them from observing activity in the center and south of the battle area. The TF 11 commander planned on inserting several OPs forward of OPs 25A and 25B during hours of darkness of 10 December, and augment both 25A and 25B OPs with two TF 11 operators each.

In the late afternoon on 10 December, however, General Ali requested that several SOF personnel accompany him to the front to direct CAS in support of a planned frontal assault. With only a five-minute notice, the SOF commander sent two SOF and one translator to support the general and show that Americans would face the same dangers his men did. At approximately 1600 local, Afghan troops reported that they had not only spotted UBL but had him surrounded, and asked for additional help. Changing mission from planning to execution, the TF 11 commander directed his task force (33 soldiers) to move quickly to the front to support Ali. With darkness rapidly approaching, the SOF element spent at least a half-hour convincing Ali's rear echelon to provide guides to the front. Guides secured, the SOF element loaded into six Toyota pick-ups to begin its 10 kilometer trek at approximately 1730 local. Midway en route while traversing a steep, one vehicle trail, the Americans ran into a convoy of Ali and his men departing the battlespace. As the Afghan forces passed by, Ali promised the TF commander that he would turn his convoy around at the bottom of the hill to continue the pursuit of UBL. Neither Ali nor his forces would return that night.

In the meantime, the two SOF operators who had accompanied Ali began receiving effective fire from multiple AQ positions in the northeast quadrant of the battlespace. Upon receiving fire, the remaining Afghan soldiers fled the battlefield, leaving the two special operators and their translator both stranded and potentially surrounded. These SOF personnel radioed their evasion codeword and began moving under enemy fire toward friendly positions. Fortunately, the SOF evaders had communications with the TF 11 soldiers in 25A OP; they sent word to the task force, now mounted and roughly two-thirds of its way to the front.

(Click for larger version)

As the evaders attempted to clear the danger areas, the men of TF 11 tried to locate any Afghan OP with eyes on the AQ front line and UBL specifically. No such position existed. The Afghan guides who accompanied the SOF personnel grew extremely nervous as the party approached known AQ positions and refused to go farther. Faced with the improbable circumstance of Ali's return, much less pinpointing UBL's position at night, the QRF turned its attention to recovering the evaders. After moving several kilometers under cover of darkness, attempting to ascertain friend from foe, and negotiating through "friendly" checkpoints without requisite dollars for the required levy to pass, the evaders finally linked up with their parent element. All returned to base to reassess the situation and plan for subsequent insertion the following day.

Despite what in retrospect may have seemed a comedy of errors, the events of 10 December proved to be the decisive ones of the operation at Tora Bora. The decision to augment COBRA 25A with two TF 11 personnel proved very beneficial. Having observed and recorded the events unfolding at the AQ strongpoint, to include Ali's retreat and the SOF evasion, the TF 11 soldiers successfully identified AQ mortar positions and heavy machine guns. Upon the departure of friendly personnel the night of 10 December, these two soldiers, along with the COBRA 25A JTAC, called air strikes for 17 continual hours on 10-11 December, knocking out principal AQ positions. The decisive point in the battle for Tora Bora, the actions on 10-11 December, caused AQ elements to retreat to alternate positions and enabled the Afghan militia to capture key terrain in the vicinity of UBL's potential location the following day.

Events of 10 December also led TF 11 to revise its plan. It had originally intended to employ several small OPs while keeping the bulk of its forces at General Ali's headquarters to provide a quick reaction force (QRF). The purpose of the QRF was to respond either to sightings of UBL or to employ forces to assist Ali in exploiting an advance. After his experiences of 9-10 December, the task force commander determined that he needed more forces forward to establish a front and thus entice Ali to hold terrain. Additionally, he and his men believed that there would be nothing "quick" about any response from a rearward position, given the difficulties they had encountered and their lack of any rotary wing lift.

Thus, on the afternoon of 11 December, TF 11 elements began their treks into the Tora Bora Mountains. The task force planned to insert at least four OPs in a northern arc and move them gradually forward as they directed joint fires onto AQ positions. Two mission support sites (MSSs) would deploy just behind the OPs to provide local, dismounted QRF and logistics support and to liaise with General Ali's forces. For the most part, the movements proved slow and hazardous. After a short trip in the ubiquitous pickup trucks, the various TF 11 teams unloaded and moved forward on foot with burros carrying their packs. Moving into mountains where the altitude varied from 10,000 to 12,000 feet, they progressed slowly over rocky and narrow paths.

From the 11th - 14th of December, the TF 11 teams continually rained fire onto enemy positions as the Afghan forces of Hazarat Ali began moving into the canyons. The teams hit targets of opportunity, to include the suspected locations of UBL, all the while attempting to avoid fratricide in the absence of any semblance of a front line trace. On the afternoon of 11 December, in a Byzantine twist, Ali's erstwhile compatriot turned rival, General Zaman, engaged in negotiations with AQ elements for a conditional surrender. CENTCOM refused to support the action, but the negotiation caused TF 11 to pause bombing for several hours to avoid fratricide. For each evening through the 14th, Ali and Zaman's forces departed from the terrain that they had seized to seek shelter and eat. Ramadan had commenced, and Eastern Alliance forces observed religious requirements to fast during daylight hours. The TF 11 operators were frequently the only individuals occupying terrain from the combined effort, save a nominal Afghan security detail. Despite the challenges, each day the various TF 11 observation posts would also move forward to call for more accurate fire and support the movement of Ali's forces. Each night, as the enemy forces would light their campfires to keep warm, the teams used their thermal imagers and optics to bring in bombs and fire missions from a variety of aircraft, including AC-130 gunships. Having obviated the need for OPs 25B and 25A, the task force commander pulled both elements on the early mornings of 13 and 14 December respectively. By 14 December, the task force commander convinced Ali and his men to occupy overnight the terrain that they had captured. The noose around AQ tightened consistently through 17 December, and the enemy pocket shrank accordingly. By 17 December, Ali declared victory. The general consensus remained that the surviving AQ forces had either fled to Pakistan or melted into the local population. TF 11 forces departed the battlefield on 19 December, but without knowing whether they had killed UBL and destroyed AQ in Afghanistan.

The enemy had fought stubbornly; yet, their fortifications proved no match for the tons of ordnance, coordinated by SOF in OPs. Estimates of AQ dead from the battle were hard to determine. TF 11's ground force commander estimated roughly 250. What has since been determined with reasonable certainty was that UBL was indeed in the vicinity of Tora Bora in December 2001. All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9-14 December. The fact that SOF came as close to capturing or killing UBL as U.S. forces have to date makes Tora Bora a controversial fight. Given the commitment of fewer than 100 American personnel, U.S. forces proved unable to block egress routes from Tora Bora south into Pakistan, the route that UBL most likely took. Regardless, the defeat for AQ at Tora Bora, coupled with the later defeat during Operation ANACONDA, ensured that neither AQ, nor the Taliban would mass forces to challenge American troops in the field until 2006. SOF elements proved once again that combining airpower in support of a surrogate force could result in a decisive defeat of a well-fortified and numerically superior enemy force, no matter how disciplined.

With the capture of Kabul and Kandahar and the destruction of organized resistance in Tora Bora, Afghanistan was now in effect liberated. It had taken fewer than 60 days of concentrated military operations and only a few hundred soldiers to seize the country from the Taliban and its terrorist allies. On 11 December 2001 Hamid Karzai was sworn in as Prime Minister of the interim government.

Postscript: John Kerry wasn't the only candidate to turn the failure to capture Osama bin Laden into a presidential campaign slogan. Four years after his failed run, Barack Obama promised Americans that "We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority."

I certainly hope we do. But if not, whatever does happen in Afghanistan we now have Senator Kerry's official report concluding that it's Bush's fault.