Taliban breached NATO base in deadly clash

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By Carlotta Gall and Eric Schmitt - International Herald Tribune

taliban_fighters_attending_funeral-2.jpgJuly 15, 2008-The Taliban insurgents who attacked a remote American-run outpost near the Pakistan border on Sunday numbered nearly 200 fighters, almost three times the size of the allied force, and some breached the NATO compound in a coordinated assault that took the defenders by surprise, Western officials said Monday.

The attackers were driven back in a pitched four-hour battle, and appeared to suffer scores of dead and wounded of their own, but the toll they inflicted was sobering. The base and a nearby observation post were manned by just 45 American troops and 25 Afghan soldiers, two senior allied officials said, asking for anonymity while an investigation is under way.

With 9 Americans dead and at least 15 injured, that means that one in five of the American defenders was killed and nearly half the remainder were wounded. Four Afghan soldiers were also injured.

American and Afghan forces started building the makeshift base just last week and its defenses were not fully in place, said one senior allied official. In some places, troops were using their vehicles as barriers against insurgents.

It was the first time insurgents had partly breached any of the three dozen outposts that American and Afghan forces operate jointly across the country, according to a Western official who insisted on anonymity in providing details of the operation.

The surprise attack underscored the vulnerability of American 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 about 32,000 troops in Afghanistan, about one-fifth the total in Iraq, even though Afghanistan is half-again as large as Iraq.

American commanders and NATO military officials said the assault also reflected new boldness among insurgents who have benefited from new bases in neighboring Pakistan.

It underscored the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, where war casualties have jumped this year, and where American commanders have said repeatedly that their force is undermanned.

The fact that the base, on the western side of Kunar Province, was manned by just 70 soldiers was first reported Monday by The Los Angeles Times. The death toll amounted to the worst single loss for the American military in Afghanistan since June 2005 and one of the worst since the Taliban and their Al Qaeda associates were routed in late 2001.

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

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

American warplanes, attack helicopters and long-range artillery were urgently summoned to help repel the militants.

But the insurgents made it so far that a few of their corpses were found inside the base’s earthen barriers, and others were lying around it, Tamim Nuristani, the former governor of the region said after talking to officials in the district.

The attack was unusually bold. Taliban guerrillas and other militants in Afghanistan rarely attack better-armed allied forces head on, preferring suicide bombs and hit-and-run ambushes against foot patrols and convoys. But they have made occasional attempts to overrun a lightly manned or otherwise vulnerable outpost.

“Quite clearly they wanted to overrun the outpost,” the Western official said of the insurgents. “It was a well-planned surprise attack,” he said.

The United States and Afghanistan have been establishing dozens of the military outposts, often in remote areas controlled by Taliban or their allies. “We’re looking at places to stop the flow of insurgents and establish relations with the local tribes,” said a senior American military official.

Allied and American officials said the attack began at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday. Fighters who had infiltrated the hamlet of Wanat overnight and ordered the villagers to leave, opened fire on the outpost from the west and southwest.

At roughly the same time, American officials said, another group began the second prong of attack, firing on the observation post from the east. Some fought through to the main outpost a few hundred yards further.

American ground commanders immediately called in artillery and air strikes from a B-1 bomber, as well as A-10 and F-15E attack planes. Apache helicopter gunships and a remotely piloted Predator aircraft fired Hellfire missiles at the insurgents, military officials said.

Many of the village houses were damaged in the strikes, but there were no civilian casualties because the villagers had left, Nuristani said.

Insurgents have been present in the area for months, including Pakistani militant groups such as Laskhar-e-Taiba, a group that was originally formed to fight in Kashmir, he said.

The American and Afghan army soldiers had moved into the base at Wanat just days before, after abandoning another base higher up a side valley where they had come under repeated attack from insurgents.

“But this even surprised me that so many Taliban were gathered in one place,” he said.

He said some local people may have joined the militants since a group of civilians were killed in American air strikes on July 4 in the same area. “This made the people angry,” he said. “It was the same area, the air strikes happened maybe one kilometer away from the base.”

Nuristani strongly criticized those air strikes, saying that 22 civilians had been killed. The provincial police chief later confirmed that at least 17 civilians were killed. The American military said planes had struck vehicles of insurgents but has announced an investigation. Days after his comments, Nuristani was removed from his post.

He said that the security in the region of Nuristan and northern Kunar provinces is precarious and that insurgents have freedom of movement from the border with Pakistan through 60 miles of Nuristan to the district of Waygal where the base at Wanat lies. “They can bring men, weapons and cars,” he said.

Local people and police have also been battling insurgents in Barg-e-Matal in another part of Nuristan, and complained that they were not getting enough assistance from the central government.

For their part, NATO officials gave little further detail of the attack on Monday. “It has been quiet overnight, the insurgents had been pushed away,” said Captain Mike Finney, a spokesman for the NATO force in Kabul.

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