Terror war: Split in military on use of special forces

With Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pressuring the Pentagon to take an aggressive role in tracking down terrorists, military and intellig...

With Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pressuring the Pentagon to take an aggressive role in tracking down terrorists, military and intelligence officials are engaged in a debate over when and how military units should be deployed for maximum effectiveness.

Under Rumsfeld’s direction, secret commando units known as hunter-killer teams have been ordered to ‘‘kick down the doors’’, as the generals put it, all over the world in search of Al Qaeda members and sympathisers. The approach has succeeded in Iraq, as Special Operations forces have captured Saddam Hussein and other Baathist loyalists. But in other parts of the world, like Afghanistan, these soldiers and their civilian advocates have complained to superiors that the Pentagon’s counterterrorism policy is too inflexible in the use of Special Forces overall.

In fact, these advocates said the US military may have missed chances to capture two of its most-wanted fugitives — Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, and Ayman Zawahiri, deputy to Osama bin Laden — in the past two years due to restrictions on Green Berets in favour of two other components of the Special Operations Command, the Delta Force and SEAL Team Six.

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They said several credible sightings, by CIA and military informants, of Omar entering a mosque in Kandahar were relayed to US forces at Firebase Gecko, where a Green Beret team was ready to deploy. But rather than send in the Green Berets, commanders followed military doctrine and called on the Delta Force, the commando team whose primary mission is to kill and capture targets like Saddam. In the time it took the Delta unit, based hundreds of miles away, to review the information and prepare for the raid, Omar vanished, sources said.

Other informants reported spotting Zawahiri in Gardez, Afghanistan, in 2002. Green Berets five minutes away were ordered to stand down so that SEAL Team Six, another of the hunter-killer teams, could storm the clinic and capture or kill Zawahiri, sources said. But too much time elapsed in the preparations, and Zawahiri escaped. The Special Operations Command declined to comment on the reports.

Special Operations forces refer to a range of soldiers from the Army, Navy and Air Force who are trained for sensitive missions, which frequently involve rescues or assaults on high-value enemy targets. The military’s policy, in practice, mandates using only ‘‘Special Mission Units’’, such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Six, to apprehend or kill certain targeted individuals. It precludes other Special Forces such as Green Berets — who are trained to work with indigenous fighters — from pursuing the most sought-after targets. — (LAT-WP)