US TROOPS AMBUSHED IN KAMDESH….FAILURE OF INTEL
NRO — The Corner
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Kamdesh Attack — It Gets Worse [Andy McCarthy]
Last week, Rich and I discussed the horrific Taliban attack in remote Nuristan province (near the Af/Pak border) in which 8 American soldiers were killed. (See here, here and here.)
About 200 Taliban raided a combat outpost near Kamdesh. The initial reporting from the Washington Post (here) indicated our troops were sitting ducks: in inadequate numbers, they were left in an intolerably perilous and tactically useless situation due to (a) the desire to accommodate the political needs of the Karzai government we are trying to prop up, (b) equipment shortages, and (c) the study of the overall Afghan mission then being undertaken by General McChrystal. As the Post put it:
“In the weeks leading up to the Aug. 20 presidential election, the Afghan government was reluctant to let Americans leave the Nurestan outposts and appear weaker by ceding territory to the Taliban. In early July, Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked senior U.S. officials to dispatch about 100 U.S. soldiers to Barge Matal, a small village in Nurestan. The cargo helicopters required for the mission exacerbated a preexisting shortage, and left frustrated U.S. commanders without the airlift needed to withdraw from the Kamdesh outpost and another that they were planning to close. At the same time, the U.S. military was undertaking a major war assessment by McChrystal’s team, and there was a sense that some troop movement should wait for that process to finish.”
Now comes a report from Bill Gertz in today’s Washington Times that three intelligence reports in the days before the October 3 ambush warned that the Taliban were planning an imminent attack. Gertz says commanders dismissed the reports as “insignificant” because they were not specific and corroborated, and they didn’t stand out from hundreds of other intel reports. Nevertheless, an unidentified U.S. official contends that, as Gertz puts it, “despite the Army’s characterization of the reports as insignificant, some of the reporting was included in finished intelligence that circulated in classified channels throughout the region before the attack. Finished intelligence is material that has been analyzed and determined to be of value.”
Gertz says of the reports and the army’s reaction to them:
“One of the intelligence reports on Kamdesh, released in part to The Times, stated that a new Taliban sub-commander in Kamdesh, named Ghulan Faroq, had been appointed and “charged with attacking COP Keating,” but no date for the attack was given. COP is military shorthand for combat outpost. The report also stated that on or about Sept. 29 or 30, “fighters in Kamdesh received a resupply of B-10 ammunition” suitable for use with Soviet-design B-10 recoilless guns that fire 82 mm mortarlike rounds.
A second report stated that, around Oct. 2 [i.e., the day before the attack], a Taliban meeting took place in Kamdesh and that “a Taliban commander will arrive in Kamdesh soon to conduct attacks against coalition forces.”
The third report stated that around late September, “a Taliban commander planned to conduct simultaneous attacks against coalition bases in Gewardesh, Kamu and Kamdesh regions of Nuristan and that each attack would be perpetrated by 10-15 Taliban fighters in each location…. At the same time as these attacks, another unit would attack Barg-e Matal with up to 150 fighters.”
Despite the information in the intelligence reports, Maj. Taylor insisted that the attack took the 50 U.S. troops and 90 Afghan police officers and soldiers at the combat outposts by surprise.”
Retired General Paul Vallely said the intel should have meant more support at or near the site, and that, at a minimum, the outposts near the border should have been staffed with more Afghan troops. Gertz observes that “despite eight years of U.S. assistance and training [the Afghans] are not deemed capable of running such posts themselves.”
Again, facts are still being gathered. But this sounds very bad.
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