Danger Close

4. Operation Anaconda

After the fall of Kandahar some Taliban and al Qaeda fighters who had come from other nations returned home. Diehards, though, fled to the inaccessible mountain regions on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border . Pakistan has a large Pashtun population in that area, so there was a natural affinity based on tribal identity, and some regions, most notably Waziristan,werenotoriouslyindependentofPakistaniauthority.Afghanistan ’s White Mountains close to the Pakistan border were also a natural redoubt. The difficult terrain, coupled with innumerable cave and tunnel complexes, made for natural defenses. Many tunnels were quite ancient, but many had also been expanded and improved in modern times by mining firms and military organizations. Two primary tunnel-cave complexes were most notorious—Tora Bora and Milawa—and the new Afghanistan government and its coalition allies assumed the Taliban and al Qaeda would make their last stand there. Afghan and coalition leaders wasted little time after the fall of Kandahar in focusing their attention on these mountain enclaves. On  December , the day after the city fell, the new Afghan government launched an assault on Tora Bora that drove the enemy out of the tunnels and caves, but just what it accomplished in concrete terms is still subject to debate. One thing is clear: the campaign, which lasted roughly a week and a half, did not destroy the enemy as an organized force. Weeks of bombing and bloody assaults by Afghan forces obviously inflicted a number of casualties and deprived the Taliban of significant stores and ammunition, but the prey slipped through the snare. One widely cited reason was that sympathetic troops and commanders among the Afghan and Pakistani blocking forces let the enemy escape, so the assaults simply pushed the quarry deeper into the mountains and across the border into Pakistan. Another factor, though, was that the Afghan generals followed their previous tactic of alternating assaults with negotiating sessions aimed 4. Operation Anaconda 58 Danger Close at getting the Taliban to surrender. While U.S. leaders claimed this repeated easing of pressure bought the enemy time and allowed them to slip through the pursuers’ fingers, Afghan military leaders countered that the Taliban wanted to surrender, but that the Americans wouldn’t accept the terms proposed. Either way, the enemy escaped, and over the ensuing weeks regrouped farther south. Combing through caves and tunnels afterward turned up treasure troves of information about other al Qaeda operations and planned terrorist attacks, but it also illustrated the determination of the enemy—they had huge stockpiles of food, supplies, and ammunition, and entire families were living with their family members fighting for al Qaeda and the Taliban. Remnants of the enemy began to congregate in the Shah-i-Kot Valley roughly sixty miles southwest of Tora Bora. Over the course of several weeks in February a plan to deal decisively with this buildup began to emerge. Known as Operation Anaconda, the plan came together in piecemeal fashion and didn’t emerge in its final form until days before it kicked off on  March . The continual changes, coupled with the unique circumstances in Afghanistan made Anaconda the most controversial campaign of the entire war. Perhaps the most consequential effect of the war’s unusual circumstances on this operation concerns its personnel and how they came to be included. The unit most often associated with Anaconda is the th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York, but to call Anaconda a th Mountain operation is a misnomer. Elements of th Mountain had been brought into theater to provide airfield security in Uzbekistan, but because U.S. officials did not want military forces to give the appearance of being an occupying army, they set a strict cap on the number of troops th Mountain could bring. Only selected units of the division actually deployed, and only a portion of the division staff went with them. In one of the most critical decisions on who should go and who should stay, the division commander, Maj. Gen. Franklin L. “Buster” Hagenbeck, opted not to bring any of the TACPs attached to his unit, officer or enlisted. The th Air Support Operations Group commander, Col. Mike Longoria, responsible for providing TACP support for the entire theater, felt strongly that this was a mistake. In fact, unable to change the army’s mind on this point, Longoria claims to have bent the rules to make sure th Mountain would have what he knew they would eventually need. “I bailed them out because I sent...