Вышла книга про операцию Анаконда (а. к. а. Тора-Бора)
Предлагаю рецензию из газеты.
The War on Terrorism
The Fog of War
Reviewed by Linda Robinson
Sunday, March 27, 2005; Page BW08
NOT A GOOD DAY TO DIE
The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda
By Sean Naylor. Berkley. 425 pp. $25.95
Operation Anaconda was not one of the U.S. military's finest moments. In March 2002, five months into the war in Afghanistan, American commanders decided to mount an attack to root out Afghan and foreign fighters who had holed up in the eastern Shahikot Valley, which was ringed by mountains that reached 12,000 feet. Until then, the war had been fought with a combination of U.S. Special Forces, anti-Taliban Afghan militias and precision-guided air power, but U.S. conventional forces had arrived in Afghanistan and were anxious to get into the fight.
U.S. Central Command decided to put a U.S. Army general, Buster Hagenbeck, in charge, and his staff planned a large battle using conventional, special operations and Afghan forces to attack the valley. The most senior al Qaeda leaders had almost certainly fled into neighboring Pakistan by then, but Special Operations forces who had carried out an early reconnaissance of the valley estimated that a large number of hard-core foreign militants were still hiding there. Until the very eve of the battle, however, American forces believed that the extremists numbered at most 200 and that they were in the valley, not the surrounding mountains. Those two facts, compounded by a welter of mishaps, poor decisions, and unclear lines of authority, would spell disaster for the first days of the biggest battle Americans had fought since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
For Not a Good Day to Die, Army Times reporter Sean Naylor has doggedly pursued the full story of Operation Anaconda from the time he was "embedded" with 101st Airborne Division troops who fought in the battle. For the next two years he strove to interview the many participants in this complex operation, often against the wishes of their commanders. Naylor does an admirable job of exposing the many shortcomings that plagued this chapter of the Afghanistan war, although he does not sort the major from the minor failings or linger over the broader lessons. What the book lacks in analytical heft, however, it more than makes up in drama. Readers without a knowledge of military jargon will find it slower going.
Anaconda got off to an abysmal start when the Afghan militia that was to lead the charge into Shahikot came under fire from an American AC-130 gunship. A Special Forces chief warrant officer was killed, and the militia was thrown into a disarray from which it never really recovered. This particular band of Afghans, unlike other more experienced forces, had been training and fighting with the Special Forces for only a few weeks.
On the heels of that friendly-fire tragedy came another debacle that is the best-known episode of the two-week operation. Navy SEAL commandos assigned to infiltrate the mountaintops around Shahikot came under heavy fire as they attempted to land. One commando fell from the helicopter and was captured and killed as the damaged Chinook limped away. A Ranger rescue force unwittingly landed on the very same spot and was mercilessly chewed up by enemy fire. Ranger Capt. Nathan Self, his men and the Nightstalkers aircrew fought through some of the ghastliest conditions that any Americans have ever braved. The intense fighting led to another fateful decision -- not to risk landing another aircraft to extract casualties until nightfall -- that resulted in another American death.
Much of what happened could be attributed to the inevitable fog of war, especially given the formidable terrain. But the plan and command structure had grievous flaws that should have been detected and corrected. The principal error was the inadequate intelligence about the size and disposition of the enemy: It turned out that there were at least 1,000 well-trained militants dug into the mountainsides, armed with mortars and heavy machine guns. That made a hash of Hagenbeck's plan to chopper in conventional forces to the valley floor where, in broad daylight, both men and machines became sitting ducks for the waiting guns. Because they did not expect such heavy resistance, the conventional troops were not deployed with their artillery sections or a full complement of attack helicopters. Finally, inadequate air support from bombers overhead left the men vulnerable in the first day of the battle.
The basic problems of Anaconda, Naylor concludes, were "CENTCOM's decision to treat the operation as a pickup game and its failure to establish a clear, tight chain of command for the operation; the reliance on aircraft to provide almost all the heavy firepower; and the overriding belief in all higher headquarters that the war was virtually over." Some of these lessons were heeded in the subsequent war in Iraq, where coordination between air and ground forces, and conventional and Special Operations forces, improved. Friction points remain -- specifically the tendency of far-off commanders to use technology to micromanage -- but Naylor overemphasizes the importance of personality, intramural and interservice rivalries. In particular, he places great stock in one Delta Force officer's account and does not provide any countervailing viewpoint by SEAL commanders, whom he apparently was not permitted to interview.
Anaconda raises the broader issue of whether large conventional set-piece battles or Special Forces with precision-guided bombs are the best way to fight the terror wars. The answer is, "It depends." There were options to deal with the Shahikot other than massing forces, but having decided on a frontal attack, sufficient conventional tools should have been brought to bear. Even so, it's impossible to know whether a fully equipped conventional force would have killed more than the 800 enemy tallied, or whether they would have done any better in keeping Osama bin Laden from slipping over the Pakistan border some months earlier, as the author believes. The one certainty is that more U.S. officers now have combat experience than at any time since the Vietnam War, and thus ample opportunity to put these lessons learned into practice. The U.S. military also clearly needs to expand its repertoire to include more nuanced and less kinetic forms of dealing with unconventional, hidden threats. A longer-term effort to win over the Shahikot area's population, for example, could have paid major dividends in intelligence and even local opposition to the foreign presence. Since the U.S. military has not released its own official inquiry and after-action reports, this important book stands as the definitive account of a tragic chapter in that learning experience. •
Linda Robinson is a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and the author of "Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces."
