Times, UK

GROUND WAR: America gets its boots dirty in special forces raid

Tony Allen-Mills, Washington

THE Rangers came pouring out of the night, the aircraft that brought them a distant throb. After listening for a fortnight to the heavy blasts of long-range American air force munitions, the Taliban troops defending Kandahar were about to be rattled by a different noise - from the M240G machineguns and shoulder-launched grenades of American special forces.

Less than two hours of rapid-fire pandemonium later, more than 100 Rangers and other special troops were bundling into Black Hawk helicopters and heading south for the Pakistan border. No territory had been seized, no serious effort had been made to engage the enemy in sustained combat, but the hit-and-run blitz sent a powerful signal to Osama Bin Laden and the rulers of Afghanistan.

America is "ready to get its boots dirty" in the war on international terrorism, declared a Pentagon official yesterday.

The attack on the outskirts of Kandahar has transformed the campaign in Afghanistan from a long-range display of high-technology fireworks to a deadlier but potentially more decisive conflict on the ground. American and British special forces are poised to strike deep and hard at enemy positions for weeks if not months to come.

It was at a Pentagon briefing on Thursday that Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, first signalled America was ready to move to the phase of the war that virtually every armchair general had been predicting - the night-stalking menace of Rangers, Green Berets, Delta Force and the SAS.

Last week American air force planes dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets on Afghan towns and villages as part of the psychological operations (psyops) to prepare for the battle ahead. One of the leaflets read: "When you decide to surrender, approach United States forces with your hands in the air."

The leaflets were accompanied by messages to the Taliban broadcast by Commando Solo, a flying psyops radio station that patrols the skies over Afghanistan. "You are condemned," the broadcast warned.

"Our bombs are so accurate we can drop them right through your windows . . . our infantry is trained for any climate and terrain on earth. United States soldiers fire with superior marksmanship. You have only one choice . . . Surrender now and we will let you live."

Rumsfeld shed his habitual reluctance to discuss operational matters. The aircraft and weapons used against the Taliban so far had performed well, he said, but "they cannot really do sufficient damage . . . they can't crawl around on the ground and find people".

One officer said it was no coincidence that Rangers were chosen for the first significant strike - they were also the unit used to lead the D-Day landings on Omaha beach in Normandy in 1944.

Even before the strike on Kandahar, American officials had confirmed that small numbers of commandos were operating clandestinely in southern Afghanistan as part of a drive to split the Taliban.

The soldiers are protecting CIA specialists who are working with members of Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, to bribe or otherwise persuade local Afghan warlords to turn against the Taliban.

British sources said the commandos included a team from the secret and controversial Revolutionary Warfare Wing (RWW) of the SAS, a seldom-deployed force that works with insurgency groups to topple militaristic regimes. Its members are said to include speakers of Pashto, the majority language in southern Afghanistan.

Other military sources said elite Delta Force commandos, CIA agents and members of 22 SAS Regiment were reconnoitring in eastern Afghanistan, in search of Al-Qaeda targets. The commandos are operating in groups of 15-21 men or smaller teams of four to six, with some acting as forward spotters for precision bombing.

Others are advising Afghan rebels attacking Taliban positions in the north. Both President George W Bush and Rumsfeld have pledged increased support for the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban rebels.

The raid on Kandahar is believed to have been launched from the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier whose decks have been cleared to provide a staging post for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the US army's commando helicopter unit.

The helicopters may have refuelled in Pakistan, which last week opened a third base to American troops. A port at Pasni, an airbase at Jacobabad and now a second airbase at Dalbandin, about 30 miles south of the Afghan border, are all being used by American forces. But sources said Washington remained reluctant to station more than a few hundred troops at any of them for fear of exacerbating Islamic militant tension in Islamabad.

Further hit-and-run raids are likely to be launched from the Kitty Hawk, now sailing off the Pakistan coast; many others are expected to be aimed at northern Taliban positions from former Soviet bases in Uzbekistan.

Cheerful diplomatic forays earlier this year by General Tommy Franks, the commander-in-chief of the US army central command, through the former Soviet "stans" - Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan - have helped cement an unprecedented military relationship that may have a decisive bearing on the ground battles ahead. Uzbekistan has become one of the critical launching pads for the American and British special forces who will spearhead assaults on Afghanistan.

At a former Soviet airfield at Khanabad and an army base at Qarshi, more than 2,000 troops from the US 10th Mountain Division are already supporting helicopter-borne special forces operating inside Afghanistan.

It also emerged last week that General Charles Holland, the US special forces commander, would report directly to Bush and Rumsfeld, bypassing central command in Florida. The move was seen as both a measure of the importance of Holland's men to the campaign and a reflection of the war's historical novelty - neither American troops nor their enemy are likely to be seen in daylight.

The overall aim of the ground campaign, officials said last week, is to destabilise the Taliban and generate intelligence about the principal targets in the war - Bin Laden and his cohorts.

Some Washington experts worried last week that the lack of perceptible progress in the hunt for Bin Laden may prove the prelude to a long and unrewarding struggle. "I'm pretty sure they haven't thought this through," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a respected defence think tank. "Six months from now the American footprint in that neck of the woods is going to look a heck of a lot bigger and a heck of a lot more permanent than people are thinking right now."

-- Anonymous, October 20, 2001