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© St. Petersburg Times, published January 25, 2002
WASHINGTON -- U.S. ground troops will remain in Afghanistan at least into the summer to press their manhunt, attack any Taliban and al-Qaida resistance and help the country's transition to a more permanent government, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday.
Rumsfeld offered no specific estimate of how long U.S. forces would stay in Afghanistan and surrounding countries, but he made clear it could take several months or more.
Tracking down the elusive Taliban and al-Qaida holdouts is likely to keep U.S. forces in the Central Asian nation in significant numbers, he said.
"That takes presence. You can't do that from Chicago," Rumsfeld said.
"You can be sure we're not going to stay there a second longer than we have to, but we also feel an obligation to be a responsible nation and a participant in this process and help them navigate through what has to be an enormously difficult thing to do," he said.
The United States has about 4,000 troops in Afghanistan and many hundreds more in neighboring Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Smaller numbers are in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and thousands are aboard Navy ships patrolling the Arabian Sea to block any sea route of escape for Osama bin Laden.
In a clear sign that the war in Afghanistan is far from over, U.S. commandos raided two compounds early Thursday, hoping to capture al-Qaida leaders but instead clashing with Taliban fighters in a gun battle that left an estimated 15 Afghans dead and one American wounded.
The assault, the first serious ground engagement in nearly three weeks in Afghanistan, marks what the Pentagon described as the first of a series of actions aimed at rooting out suspected terrorists on the run from U.S. forces.
"As we find them, we're engaging in direct action," Rumsfeld said. "We're doing it systematically, and I think you can expect that it will continue for some period of time."
The U.S. commandos managed to capture 27 fighters. But many others, possibly al-Qaida members, fled, and about 15 were killed in the firefight.
One Army Special Forces soldier suffered a slight wound to the ankle due to gunfire and was evacuated to a hospital in a neighboring country. The soldier, whose name was not released, was the first American battlefield casualty since Army Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Chapman was killed Jan. 4 in an ambush in eastern Afghanistan.
The captives were brought to an airbase outside Kandahar where they were questioned to determine their identity and rank. They joined some 270 other al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners being held there, some awaiting transport to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the Pentagon is struggling to make room for more detainees from the war on terror.
The raid targeted two compounds within sight of each other in a mountainous region about 60 miles north of Kandahar in south-central Afghanistan. The compounds, mainly above-ground structures, are near the village of Hazar Qadam in the Oruzgan province, an area not previously mentioned by the Pentagon as a haven for al-Qaida and Taliban.
Several hundred of the U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan have formed into teams roaming the country looking for possible terrorist hideouts, according to a senior defense official. Some remained in the area near the compounds looking for other strongholds.
Other U.S. forces, including the newly-arrived soldiers of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, are grouped into rapid-reaction forces that can move quickly out of their bases to assault remote sites.
In an effort to keep intelligence out of enemy hands, U.S. warplanes Thursday dropped two precision-guided bombs on the helicopter that crashed in Afghanistan over the weekend.
As fighting continued in Afghanistan, warplanes struck on another front. After reports that coalition planes had been fired upon by surface-to-air and other missiles while patrolling in the "no-fly" zone of southern Iraq, bombers from the U.S.-led Operation Southern Watch struck radar and other sites in Iraq on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.
The last coalition strikes in Iraq hit antiaircraft artillery sites Dec. 27.