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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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Australians say Afghan attack was botched
>From Roger Maynard in Sydney
AUSTRALIAN SAS troops say that Operation
Anaconda, the major
offensive against al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan,
was botched and
soldiers found themselves pinned down by enemy
fire for 18 hours
after they launched the assault in March.
In an exclusive account of their narrow escape,
published in
yesterday's Sydney Daily Telegraph, they blamed
much of the problem
on inadequate US air power, poor intelligence and
faulty technology.
Speaking after returning to their headquarters in
Perth, Western
Australia, two officers whose names cannot be
revealed, claimed that
the masterminds of the military offensive had
failed to learn the
lessons of the Russian experience in Afghanistan.
General Tommy Franks, commander-in-chief of the
operation, had said
that the operation was "an unqualified and
absolute success", and US
officials claimed 800 Taleban and al-Qaeda had
been killed. But what
was to have been a two-day operation stretched to
12.
The Australians found themselves embroiled in the
most intense
fighting since Vietnam. They were forced to dig
holes in the earth
with their bare hands to protect themselves from
the gunfire.
"We hadn't moved 100 metres from the choppers
when we started taking
fire," one of them told the newspaper. The
landing zone, it turned
out, was a flat space devoid of cover between
ridges held by the
enemy. Technology was faulty, and even radios
were failing, the paper
reported. US bombing was found wanting, the
Australians said.
American aircraft unloaded only 10 per cent of
the firepower they
were supposed to drop on enemy positions before
the operation began.
Each time the dust settled, the al-Qaeda fighters
would emerge from
their caves and "give the cowering Allied
soldiers the finger".
However, Allied airpower did come good later that
night, when AC-130
Spectre gunships allowed the trapped soldiers to
be evacuated by
Blackhawk helicopters which were able to fly in
under the cover of
darkness.
But it was the ill-fated mission's close
similarity to another failed
military operation, this time during the Russian
war in Afghanistan,
that prompted the SAS view that Allied commanders
had learnt nothing
from history. In a disastrous Russian-led attack
against the
Mujahidin, three helicopters crashed as they
disgorged their troops
on an open plateau during intense cross-fire from
Mujahidin
positions. The circumstances and the location,
retold in a l992 book
called The Bear Trap, proved to be chillingly
similar, leaving the
SAS wondering if the Americans had read it.
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