Taliban attacks US soldiers with Afghan officer's help: report

New York, Nov 4 (PTI) An internal review by the U.S.
army has found that a senior Afghan police officer and a
political leader helped Taliban militants carry out an attack
in which nine American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, a
media report said Tuesday.

Afghan and the U.S. forces had started building the
makeshift base just five days before the attack on July 13,
and villagers repeatedly warned the American troops that
militants were plotting a strike, the report found.

The warnings did not include details and the troops
never anticipated such a large and well-coordinated attack,
the New York Times reported.

The assault involved some 200 fighters, nearly three
times the number of Americans and Afghans defending the site.

As evidence of collusion between the district police
chief and the Taliban, the Times says, the report cited large
stocks of weapons and ammunition that were found in the police
barracks in the adjacent village of Wanat after the attackers
were repelled.

The stocks were more than the local 20-officer force
would be likely to need, and many of the weapons were dirty
and appeared to have been used recently. The police officers
were found dressed in "crisp, clean new uniforms," the report
said, and were acting "as if nothing out of the ordinary had
occurred," the Times added.

The attackers were driven back after a pitched
four-hour battle, in which American artillery, warplanes and
attack helicopters were ultimately called in. Still, the
militants fought in ways that showed imaginative military
training, if not sophisticated weapons, the paper said.

In the midst of the battle, American soldiers were at
times flushed out into the open when they fled what they
thought were grenades, but were in fact rocks thrown by
Taliban attackers, the report said.

The day before the attack, the militants began flowing
water through an irrigation ditch feeding an unused field,
creating background noise that masked the sounds of the
advancing fighters, it added.

The base and a nearby observation post were held by
just 48 American troops and 24 Afghan soldiers. Nine Americans
died and 27 were injured, most in the first 20 minutes of the
fight. Four Afghan soldiers were also wounded.

The intensity of the attack was so fierce, the report
said, that American soldiers shot at insurgents as close as 10
yards away, often until their weapons jammed, and at militants
who shimmied up trees overhanging their positions to shoot at
the Americans.

The attack on the outpost, near Wanat, caused the
worst single loss for the American military in Afghanistan
since June 2005, and one of the worst over all since the
invasion in late 2001.

The military investigating officer, a colonel whose
identity was not disclosed in a redacted copy of the report
provided to The New York Times, recommended that the police
chief and the district governor be replaced, if not arrested.

Meanwhile, Hajji Abdul Halim, deputy governor at the
time of the Wanat attack, and now the acting governor of
nearby Nuristan Province, told the Times that both officials
had been detained briefly and then released. "We suspected
them after the incident, but the American forces released the
district governor after two days of custody," he said in a
telephone interview yesterday. PTI D.S.
RKM