Base defenses were not ready for Taliban attack

NY Times:

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 they 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 held by just 45 American troops and 25 Afghan soldiers, two senior allied officials said, asking for anonymity while an investigation is under way.

With nine 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 wounded.

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

The militants apparently detected the vulnerability and moved quickly to exploit it in a predawn assault in which they attacked from two directions, American officials said.

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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 number in Iraq, even though Afghanistan is half-again as large as Iraq.

American commanders and NATO military officials said the assault had also reflected boldness among insurgents who had 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 staffed 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 Qaeda associates were routed in late 2001.

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I think the Times overstates the problems in Afghanistan. They make the mistake of relying on the violence metric rather than look at real estate and competing casualty figures. US and NATO forces are moving out into real estate once controlled by the Taliban and challenging them on their turf so there is going to be move action. For example the Marines at Farmsir have killed around 400 Taliban while losing only two or three troops.

The troops in this case were in an area that had not been previously occupied. Unfortunately they had not finished their field fortifications and they paid a heavy price for that failure. They also failed to set up listening post along the Taliban avenues of approach. This allowed the Taliban to mass troops in the nearby town without discovery. Normally a movement of that size should have been detected and destroyed by air assets before an attack.

Part of their problem is that the terrain in the area lends itself to infiltration because of the heavily wooded hillsides that come to within a mile of the base. If you are not watching these avenues of approach you are very likely to be surprised.