Taliban surprise attack well planned

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban insurgents who attacked a remote U.N.-run outpost near the Pakistan border Sunday that killed nine U.S. soldiers breached the NATO compound in a coordinated assault that took the defenders by surprise, Western officials said Monday.

Moving in darkness before dawn Sunday, some 200 fighters surrounded the newly built base in a remote area near the border without being spotted by the troops inside, said Gen. Mohammad Qasim Jangalbagh, the provincial police chief.

He said people in the adjacent village of Wanat aided the four-hour assault. About 20 local families left their homes in anticipation of the raid, while other tribesmen stayed behind "and helped the insurgents during the fight," Jangalbagh said.

Just last week, U.S. and Afghan forces had started building the makeshift base, 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 rebels apparently detected the vulnerability and moved quickly to exploit it in a predawn assault in which they attacked from two directions, U.S. officials said. It was the first time insurgents had partly breached any of the three dozen outposts that U.S. and Afghan forces operate jointly across the country, according to a Western official who insisted on anonymity.

The surprise attack underscored the vulnerability of U.S. 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 32,000 troops in Afghanistan, one-fifth the number in Iraq, even though Afghanistan is 50 percent larger than Iraq.

U.S. and Afghan soldiers inside the base were hit by flying fragments from bullets, grenades and mortars that insurgents fired from houses, shops and a mosque in a village within a few hundred yards of the base, several officials said.

At the lightly fortified observation post nearby, U.S. soldiers came under heavy fire from rebels streaming through farmland under the cover of darkness. Most of the U.S. casualties took place there, a senior American military official said.

U.S. warplanes, attack helicopters and long-range artillery were summoned, but the insurgents made it so far that a few of their bodies were found inside the base's earthen barriers and others were lying around it, Tamim Nuristani, a former governor, said after talking to officials in the district.

The assault sent a strong signal to other insurgent groups that "America cannot resist them anymore," he said. The attackers were a mix of Afghan- and Pakistan-based extremists, some with al-Qaida links — a sign, he said, that cooperation is growing between what had been often fractious factions fighting the Western military presence in Afghanistan.

"They are not only Taliban. They were [Pakistan-based] Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Hezb-i-Islami, Taliban and those people who are dissatisfied with the [President Hamid Karzai] government after these recent incidents. They all came together for this one," he said.