Posted on 11/06/2001 6:20:42 AM PST by ARCADIA
Your statement doesn't really fit with Hersh's article or the one above. Personally, I agree with your assessment of the raid. They came in, didn't find what they were looking for, took some fire and got out. Not much to hang a story on.
Evidently, that isn't sufficient for Mr. Hersh. This minor raid has now become a "debacle" that has forced us to reappraise our entire approach to the war. The diversionary feint by the Rangers at the airfield now becomes a "morale building PR stunt" for green troops. It's painfully obvious from his remarks that Hersh is, at best, an idiot who doesn't understand the subject matter he's allegedly covering. At worst, he's a liar with an axe to grind.
THERE IS NO WAY TAHT THOSE BYGONE DAYS OF REPORTING WERE SO DAMNED EASY.
LOL. Well, anyone from back home would have understood me perfectly ;)
It's important to remember that, officially, there is NO Delta Force. SOP is to deny all existence of DF, the most open any Pentagon person CAN be (breaking operational secrecy is considered high treason and, if successfully tracked back, can result in execution) about it is to "admit" that "if" some of the news reports are true it is "likely" that America has a "group" which is very "similar" to what is often "described" outside the military as "Delta Force". So as soon as you see some one bandying about "Pentagon sources" and talking about the "capabilities" and "home base" of Delta Force what you clearly have is somebody making things up. Nobody is going to break OpSec on DF, the potential price is way too high (maybe years later like the Somalia situation, though most folks are still calling that as purely Rangers); all things DF will be officially credited to other units, any reporter that is crediting stuff to DF is writing stories based on his own assumptions and is telling us a lot more about himself than Afghanistan.
Well, if we can't do it in 13 days, we'll never be able to do it. We should just give up and go home now, before this becomes a QUAGMIRE HAUNTED BY THE SPECTER OF VIETNAM </sarcasm>
This is what I think happened --
9/11 was terrible and the public was expecting a response, but OBL is hard to get logistically. Lack of nearby airfields, caves, landmines, etc. So they decided to begin bombing to "show we are doing something." Then grumblings were heard that the bombing was not going to do the trick. So they came up with a minor raid they could film for the folks back home. The enemy's response convinced everyone that the special forces were lucky to get out alive. The shadow of Somalia>
The official line was that everything was Okay. The special forces can operate with impunity. But of course, this was not true. Special force types know this and they are getting their story out.
IMHO, I don't think the Administration knows what to do. If "the coalition" falls apart, then the economy tanks. If Saudi Arabia destabilizes, the economy tanks. If OBL gets a nuke, the US will have to respond and then all bets are off. ETC ETC.
We are in a phony war, now. Where everyone is trying to keep "the new world order" together and not knock over anye dominoes. Right now, they don't have a strategy for this situation.
Perhaps because this mission achieved its objectives successfully.
Personally, I think the Administration is trying to find a way out this without lots of casualties. All the blood lust I hear from people these days. They don't even realize the implications of their talk.
It's going to be bloody and it's going to bad, real bad. I hope they can find a way out, but I don't think so. Sometimes only a military solution does the trick.
These people want to kill us.
According to DEBKAfile’s military sources, the qualified optimism marking U.S. military assessments last week dimmed as the results of the US Special Forces raid came in. The operation’s key objective, aside from the destruction of ammunition dumps in the northern environs of Kandahar, was to find out if the Taliban still packed any real fighting punch after two weeks of constant aerial bombings and attacks on transportation routes and vehicles by small, intelligence-gathering special units from the United States, Britain and France. Those results were less than encouraging. Despite official assurances that they went off without a hitch, several independent military sources reported the US troops took a number of casualties – some from friendly fire. Some of the raiders appear to have mistakenly opened fire on other Western ground and air forces in the area, accounting for the stubborn insistence by the Taliban that its forces caused the Americans a number of losses. The Taliban education minister, for example, said Afghan soldiers killed between 20 and 25 US troops. The Americans also were shaken by the fighting ability of the Taliban and the heavy fire their fighters directed at the assault force. DEBKAfile’s military sources say that, immediately after the Taliban high command spotted US forces landing, it set up an artillery barrage aimed on the landing zone, rushed tanks carrying infantry to the area and opened up with anti-aircraft fire, which proved ineffective. Two weeks of intensive bombers and missile strikes against military camps, command headquarters, airfields, helicopter landing pads, fuel and ammunition dumps and military convoys, failed to bring the Taliban war machine to collapse. Furthermore, morale remainedl high and the Taliban’s heavy weaponry remained intact. Intelligence information suggests that the Taliban were able to keep most of their fighting strength and heavy arms safe and hidden in mountain caves. US military chiefs had banked on the four main Afghan cities of Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Herat, falling into US hands with Taliban bases three weeks before the onset of heavy winter snows. That estimate has been revised. Now, the United States will have to do one of two things: pour fresh forces into the campaign, diverting them from other regions such as the Middle East, or else postpone the ground assault on the cities until the end of winter – or not before April.
It's time to turn the USAF back into the USAAF.
In October the administration figured out they could make everybody a little bit happy. Start bombing, this was well known to be a necessary first step for any kind of ground action, special ops or main force invasion, and it's really never too early to achieve air supremacy and blow things up.
But then people started to complain that this was Clinton style: all bombs no resolve. Meanwhile we'd had some leaked but unconfirmed report that special ops were tooling around the country, targeting things for bombing and probably (just through random chance principle) engaging the enemy once in a while. So you want to let people know this isn't a pure air campaign, what's a good way to do it: gun camera footage, we get it from every engagement these days for tactical analysis by the generals let's, kick some out, since it's all lowlight green it has no long range view, no risk of people recognizing mountain ranges and blowing OpSec wide open so what the heck.
So they release the footage, it gets about 15 seconds of positive press and then 24 hours later the anti-American press starts talking about what a "disaster" that operation was and blah blah blah. And now people are saying the military should release more footage to disprove it, what for? We now know that unless the footage includes Iwo Jima style flag raisings (which aren't going to be happening, SpecOps don't raise flags) the lefty press is going to say it was a disaster with high American casualties, ambushed by the Taliban on and on and on.
And we know the lefty press things is bogus. For one simple logical reason. We know SpecOps stuff is beamed out and recorded for analysis, the law of averages says that since we have had people in country for around a month there HAVE to have been some ecounters with the enemy, body bags haven't been coming back and the Taliban haven't been dragging our men's bodies through the streets so it's a safe assumption that we've been at least moderately successful in these encounters. So we know there is footage of successful encounters with the enemy, and we also know the newsies are going to reduce the footage down to 15 seconds which, between our editing and theirs, will mean nothing will get broadcast the really shows the size of the engagement. So why, knowing all these things, would they release footage from a failed operation? That's stupid, there's no reason for it. Hell, for that matter why even release real footage, grab something from a training excercise, nobody is going to be able to tell the difference, the footage is just us shooting guns and somebody returning fire, doesn't look all that different than when TLC did a thing on Ranger training a couple of years ago.
Which is exactly why we must do this. Japan was the in the same situation in 1941. We had to defeat them, then teach them to play nice and not hate us. We didn't remove their culture (much) or their religion, but we taught them to respect us and trade with us.
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