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Dated but is about the deaths of the 1er RPIMa commandos...

06/19/06 11:46


NA Ill-Equipped To Face Stronger Taliban

By GREG GRANT


Nearly five years into a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, Taliban insurgents there are regaining strength. Their springtime offensive has launched bolder and bigger attacks by far larger forces than anything seen since 2001, at a time when the U.S. government is trying to reduce its involvement in Afghanistan.
The insurgency’s strength was demonstrated May 20, when a well-organized insurgent force ambushed a 175-man battalion of Afghans supported by French and U.S. advisers in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Two French special forces advisers and 16 Afghan soldiers were killed in a six-hour running gun battle.
The firefight raises questions about the American commitment to train and supply the fledgling Afghan National Army, whose end-strength goal was recently scaled back from 70,000 troops to 50,000. The Afghan soldiers rode in unarmored trucks without heavy weapons, body armor, radios or even sufficient ammunition.
“We’ve tried to produce an army on the cheap,” said Vance Serchuck, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who just returned from Afghanistan and on-site assessment of the Afghan National Army (ANA). “Once you build it, you have to stay and continue making the investment.”
Afghan Assembly Member Khalid Pashtoon said the Afghan Army suffers from severe equipment shortages and an American training effort that emphasizes numbers over quality and has rushed inexperienced soldiers to the battlefield.
“The Taliban love to fight the ANA,” said Pashtoon, who is deputy chairman of the Parliament’s Internal Security Committee. Units in northern Afghanistan, which include substantial numbers of battle-hardened former mujahadin fighters, are exceptions, he said, but in general, “for them [the Taliban], it’s a pleasure to see the ANA.”
Pashtoon said some units in the Kandahar area have suffered from 60 percent desertion. “Volunteers see their fellow soldiers dying for $100 a month; they ask, ‘why?’ and leave.”
He said that the Afghan Army, currently numbering 30,000 troops, is spread too thin, particularly in the southern provinces bordering Pakistan, where fighting in recent months has killed more than 400 insurgents, soldiers and civilians.
With Army patrols limited to the major towns and cities, large groups of Taliban fighters have easily infiltrated into Afghanistan’s rural vastness.
Serchuk said the U.S. government is still living off the success of the first two years of fighting in Afghanistan and hopes to reduce its presence. “The fact that the security situation has gotten worse has not caught up with the ANA building process.”
The Enemy’s Stronghold
In recent months, the former Taliban heartland of Helmand has seen bold attacks on thinly spread coalition troops and Afghan security forces at isolated and widely scattered bases. One of them took place near the village of Kajaki in northern Helmand.
In early May, a 175-man Afghan Army battalion, along with two U.S. soldiers and advisers from France’s elite 1st Marine Parachute Infantry Regiment, was sent to establish an outpost near a river dam a few miles upstream from Kajaki.
Government control had all but disappeared in the area. Insurgent checkpoints along the area’s main highway, Route 611, had made the crumbling single lane of blacktop too dangerous for coalition vehicles.
The impoverished area had become a fertile recruiting ground for the Taliban, who had joined in recent months with armed opium traffickers to wage open war on government security forces and their collaborators, said U.S. Army Capt. Clay Grant, one of two U.S. advisers working with the Afghan battalion. Many people suspected of working with the Americans, including teachers and officials, had been executed.
On May 17, Taliban guerrillas attacked the district police headquarters in Musa Qala, a village some two dozen miles west of Kajaki. Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Kramlich, another of the American advisers, listened to the desperate radio calls from the village police chief, who said his small detachment was surrounded and taking heavy fire.
The following day, the top U.S. officer in Afghanistan released a statement about the skirmish. Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley said insurgents had killed 16 Afghan police, wounded 20 more, and torched the police headquarters. But Freakley also praised the Afghan National Police, saying that they had killed 60 guerrillas and wounded 20 more as they “rapidly responded to drive them out with great success.”
But to Grant, Kramlich and the rest holed up in mud-walled dwellings near Kajaki dam, it was clear that the insurgents retained their fighting force.
The next day, 200 to 300 of the Musa Qala guerrillas arrived in Kajaki, where they told the people to leave or be killed. Hundreds of villagers promptly packed up what belongings they could and fled toward Kandahar.
“We went down to the village to see for ourselves, and it was like a parade, donkeys and carts, the whole village was emptying,” said Kramlich.
The insurgents were now positioned between Grant’s unit and the nearest friendly forces — at Forward Operating Base Robinson, 30 miles to the south. In their cluster of mud huts, the Americans, the French and the Afghan commanders took stock of the situation. With too little firepower to hold off a large attack, they decided to withdraw to Robinson.
Preparing To Evacuate
To help the advisers and the Afghan battalion withdraw, Robinson commanders dispatched troops in five up-armored Hum-vees and five Afghan Army pickup trucks. The plan called for the American and French advisers, along with Afghan soldiers, to meet the convoy halfway and cover its approach to the camp.
But the convoy arrived early. On the morning of May 19, Kramlich said, an Afghan interpreter burst into Grant’s command post and shouted, “Your convoy is under attack!”
The Americans and the French special forces soldiers grabbed their weapons and jumped into their vehicles. When they arrived at the ambush site, three Afghan pickups were already ablaze and the remainder were under heavy fire. As the convoy limped toward the dam compound, the coalition troops recovered two wounded Americans and the body of one Afghan soldier.
Later that day, a medevac chopper flew in for the three and departed.
After dark, guerrillas probed the position, firing from the shadows. A sense of doom pervaded the small force as they prepared to withdraw to Robinson. “We had a feeling they were just waiting for us,” Grant said.
At first light, Grant, Kramlich and 10 other U.S. soldiers climbed into six up-armored Humvees. Two of the vehicles mounted .50-caliber machine guns, the unit’s heaviest weapons.
Seven French special forces advisers rode in three Ford pickups; lacking armor, they draped protective vests over the truck doors. About 175 Afghan soldiers piled into 23 more Fords; they had neither vests nor heavy weapons.
At 5:45 a.m., the long column evacuated the compound. The plan was to withdraw to Robinson overland through the desert, avoiding insurgent-controlled Route 611.
Ambushed
But the column was on the road for only five minutes before machine-gun rounds and rocket-propelled grenades ripped into the convoy, fired from insurgents hidden in roadside buildings and fields, Kramlich said. At an intersection, two U.S. Humvees and two Afghan National Army trucks made the correct turn into the desert onto the planned route. But everyone else missed it — and headed down Route 611.
Kramlich, in the second group, quickly realized the mistake. But the incoming fire was too fierce to stop and turn around, so they continued on. But the Taliban kill zone went on and on, a miles-long gauntlet of machine-gun, AK-47 and RPG rounds.
“It was just continuous fire the whole time,” Kramlich said. “There were little villages all along 611, every time we hit one it would start up again, every little village opened up on us.”
The Afghan soldiers said even women were firing at the column. They’d never heard of that before. The insurgents fired from buildings constructed from thick mud-brick walls, impervious to small arms.
The convoy began to break up further. Some of the Afghan soldiers dismounted and sought higher ground to fight back — as they had been trained to do. “But in that situation that was a bad thing, because they didn’t want to come back to their vehicles,” which were under heavy fire, Kramlich said.
Ten Afghan soldiers became trapped, unable to get back to their trucks — and unable to call the rest of the convoy for help. With just three or four magazines apiece, they soon began to run low on ammunition.
Trying to Regroup
Unaware, Grant and the rest of the convoy continued on.
“There were enemy everywhere,” Grant recalled. “They were on the high ground; it seemed like two or three hundred enemy fighters.”
Radio set in one hand, .50-caliber trigger in the other, the American adviser tried to get everyone off 611 and out of the kill zone. But it was maddeningly difficult to coordinate a convoy whose members spoke at least three native tongues.
Grant did manage to reach someone who could send air support, and soon every available aircraft was on its way to the embattled unit, according to British Air Commodore Mark Swan, who commands coalition aircraft in Afghanistan. Two aircraft were overhead within minutes, and eventually 12 coalition jets, including a B-1 bomber, were on station. But in the chaotic firefight, civilians and fighters were intermixed, and combatants were at times separated by only a few yards. Grant was unable to fix targets for the aircraft, and so they dropped no bombs.
The Humvees’ armor proved a stout defense, but the small-arms fire began to pick apart the unarmored pickups of the French and Afghan troops. A bullet tore through the side door of one French truck, went through the knee of the soldier in the passenger seat and struck and killed the driver. The vehicle flipped over.
Bullets riddled the windshield of another French truck, fatally wounding the driver in the chest. That vehicle also flipped, spilling the colonel who commanded the French detachment.
Within a half-hour of leaving the base, all three French vehicles were disabled, and six Afghan trucks were set ablaze. The dead French soldiers were left behind in the kill zone. So were their trucks, several of which contained the highly sensitive Blue Force Tracker, a digital command-and-control system that shows the location of friendly units.
British Apache attack helicopters would eventually be sent to destroy the gear with Hellfire missiles.
The French colonel and a small group of Afghan soldiers eventually fought their way clear of Route 611 and fled to a hilltop out in the desert, where they held out, their ammunition rapidly dwindling.
Grant and another group of survivors found them there. Still under fire, a French medic joined by Kramlich, a medic by training, did what they could for the large number of wounded. The Afghan soldiers were the toughest troops Kramlich had ever seen.
“Unless you see blood dripping, they won’t come to you and say, ‘I’ve been hit.’ As long as they’re still moving, they won’t say anything,” he said.
For more than an hour, Grant and Kramlich drove between the hilltop and the ambush zone on Route 611, rounding up stragglers. Eventually, the survivors piled into the available vehicles, which limped into the security of Robinson around noon. It was only then that Grant learned that the group of Afghan soldiers had been left behind on Route 611.
Left Behind
Grant dispatched helicopters and at least one Predator drone to the grid coordinates where he thought they might be, but they spotted nothing.
Villagers later reported that the Afghan soldiers fell back into some houses and were quickly surrounded. They fought off their attackers for two to three hours, until their magazines were empty. The Taliban tortured some of them with acid. The bodies were mutilated: eyes gouged out, ears and noses cut off. At least two were beheaded.
Days after the battle, Grant remained bitter. The veteran trainer felt that there was too little effort made to rescue the Afghan troops.
“If there had been reports of 10 Americans or French pinned down, surrounded and running out of ammunition, there would have been a hell of a lot more effort to go looking for them than just some overflights.”
Grant said the Afghan soldiers were ill-equipped and short of ammunition and gear. “They’re always used in the most dangerous roles, but they don’t get any of the credit. They’re used as cannon fodder a lot of times, and it’s not right.”
Kramlich praised the French special forces soldiers, but he said they were too lightly equipped for a toe-to-toe battle with the heavily armed Taliban. “They didn’t have the equipment they needed,” he said. “If they would have been in up-armoreds that day and had crew-served weapons, they would still be here, and would have done much better.”
U.S. officials at Kandahar said the ambush on Route 611 was under investigation and declined to comment. No official statement has been released about the battle.
French special forces soldiers present at the battle were asked to comment, but they were told not to talk to the media.
The week after the ambush, the French special forces at Kandahar were loaned six U.S. up-armored Humvees. The Afghan National Army soldiers continue to drive around in un-armored Ford pick-up trucks. •
Andrew Chuter contributed to this report from London, and Vago Muradian and Pierre Tran from Paris.

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To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway