Turning point: Battle of Tarin Kot 'broke the back' of Taliban
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TARIN KOT, Afghanistan — What may have been the decisive battle in the Afghan war could also qualify as the most obscure.
It was fought in Tarin Kot, a remote, high-desert outpost that senior Taliban commanders regarded as home.
After an opposition force had taken Tarin Kot in the first days of Ramadan without firing a shot, Taliban troops rushed to recapture the town — and ran into a hail of fire that finished them as a fighting force.
Early Nov. 18, the first of perhaps 1,000 Taliban fighters in about 100 double-cab pickups were approaching the outskirts of Tarin Kot when an armada of U.S. fighter jets swarmed to meet them. Over the next six to eight hours, according to witnesses, Taliban truck after Taliban truck was blasted into flames by bombs directed by U.S. special-forces spotters lurking on the ridgeline above.
Scores of Taliban soldiers were blown apart in the beds of the pickups before awareness overcame surprise and they began scrambling from their vehicles.
When it was over, at least 30 charred chassis lay along a road also lined with fresh graves. The trail of destruction ran from the valley just above Tarin Kot to the edge of the Desert Bom.
The Taliban forces who survived the rout fled back to Kandahar, apparently with the fight taken out of them. From that point on, the last major battles of the war would be fought not by Taliban soldiers but by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida fighters, defending their base at the Kandahar airport and the mountain redoubts of Tora Bora.
"We broke the back of the Taliban that day," Capt. Jason Amerine said in an interview this month at a hospital in Germany, where he was recovering from wounds inflicted by an errant U.S. bomb two weeks after the fighting at Tarin Kot. There were no U.S. casualties at Tarin Kot.
In northern Afghanistan, the front lines were often within camera range, but the battle for the south was as remote and isolated as Uruzgan province. The province, in the center of the country, is ringed by mountain ranges that open into deserts. Tarin Kot, its capital, is reached by gravel tracks that in some long stretches disappear into river beds, and in others simply disappear.
Poor even for Afghanistan
People in Tarin Kot are regarded as poverty-stricken even in a nation where per capita income hovers around $800.
An aid worker with experience in the province said he knew of a woman who sent her son to join the Taliban, but not out of the religious fervor that motivated the leaders of the radical movement.
"She sent him to the front lines because there was no bread," said Gavriel Langford of Mercy Corps International. "Imagine, for a mother to do that. It just accentuates the extent of the poverty in Uruzgan."
The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, had made Kandahar the unofficial capital, yet Tarin Kot loomed large enough within the movement to become the primary military target of Hamid Karzai, the Taliban foe and former mujahedeen leader who last month took office as head of Afghanistan's interim government.
"He told me early on that Tarin Kot was the heart of the Taliban, and he said if we could squeeze the heart of the Taliban and crush it, then the Taliban would be through," Amerine said in Germany.
In Uruzgan province, U.S. support arrived in the form of Amerine and seven other members of the Army's 5th Special Forces Group, who joined Karzai's effort in mid-October.
Karzai took Tarin Kot without firing a shot. Instead, he canvassed tribal elders on a satellite telephone provided by the Americans, orchestrating a civil rebellion. The local population drove out the Taliban administration in an uprising that reportedly ended with the body of the mayor hanging in the central square.
No resistance
Three days later, on Nov. 17, Karzai and the Americans rode past the shabby mud shops that make up main street and took up residence at the white concrete governor's house, the most substantial building in town.
"We didn't fight," said Abdul Qayyoum, one of Karzai's senior commanders. "We just arrived."
Shortly after dark, word arrived that Taliban forces had overrun a checkpoint to the south. The report confirmed calls from spies in Kandahar that as many as 1,000 Taliban soldiers were en route and would be approaching Tarin Kot before dawn.
"All the Taliban commanders are from here," said Malim Rahmadullah, a former teacher Karzai has installed as governor of Uruzgan province. "They said, 'We have to take control of these mountains.' They said, 'We should lose Kandahar, not Uruzgan.' "
After midnight, Afghan fighters guided Amerine and his fellow commandos to the ridge above the narrow valley that the road follows just before it reaches Tarin Kot. One of the guides said the Americans carried lasers, which they trained on the Taliban's trucks to direct the bombs. Amerine described only handheld global positioning devices and two-way radios.
The latter let the commandos speak directly to the Air Force and Navy pilots alerted hours earlier.
"We didn't have a shortage of aircraft," Amerine recalled.
A later casualty
The attack was directed by Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Petithory, who later died in the friendly-fire incident that injured Amerine. He said Petithory talked in the jets, describing the terrain unfolding below the pilots and the movement of the targets.
When the bombs hit — which they did with accuracy, to judge by the scarcity of craters — the pickups exploded in fireballs that reduced some to shards and left the frames of others scorched but intact.
At least a dozen trucks, each carrying an average of 10 men, witnesses said, appeared to have been hit while proceeding toward Tarin Kot. Others had turned tail, and over the hours of bombardment, scores of them were seen scrambling over the hills toward Kandahar. Commanders said the convoy included al-Qaida fighters as well as Pakistani volunteers.
As the Taliban retreated, U.S. pilots apparently hunted the road south. Their gunsights found Taliban trucks and Land Cruisers tucked against rock faces, hidden from the road but still visible from the air.
By every account, the majority of the trucks that had left Kandahar turned back in time. But after such a punishing attack, the Taliban were never so threatening again.
As Karzai's forces proceeded south in the coming days — with the commandos continuing to call in airstrikes where the Taliban mounted resistance — the worst the allies faced on the road to Kandahar was friendly fire: the errant U.S. bomb that killed three Americans and five of their Afghan allies Dec. 5.