Up until March 2002, Operation Enduring Freedom was a model of a new kind of war. The mission was to involve the largest group of conventional ground forces of the war, so in February the SOF troops handed tactical control of Anaconda off to the regular Army, under the name Combined Joint Task Force Mountain.įlaws in the plan perhaps began with the handoff. Special operations forces started planning. It seemed like a golden opportunity to continue pursuit of al Qaeda leaders and fighters as the new provisional government in Afghanistan consolidated. Myers, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2002, in his 2009 book, Eyes on the Horizon. Now, the “enemy had massed for the second time,” wrote Air Force Gen. The operation was conceived weeks after the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001 saw Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda forces slip away from a mountain redoubt. It would push retreating fighters into a blocking element so that they, too, could be stopped and defeated, to prevent large numbers of the enemy from melting away such as had happened the previous year at Tora Bora. David Marck Jr.)Īnaconda had been designed as an Afghan-led, US-supported operation to encircle, trap, and destroy a growing Taliban force. Soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division dig into fighting positions after a day of responding to enemy fire during Operation Anaconda.
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