HQ$History - United States Special Operations Command

An SF Soldier assists Eastern Alliance Soldiers in supervising al Qaeda Prisoners.
occupying terrain from the combined effort, save
nominal Afghan security details.
Despite the challenges, each day the various
SOTF OPs would also move forward to call for
more accurate fire and support the movement of
Ali’s forces. Each night, as the enemy forces
would light their campfires to keep warm, the
teams used their thermal imagers and optics to
bring in bombs and fire missions from a variety
of aircraft, including AC-130 gunships. Having
obviated the need for OPs 25B and 25A, the task
force commander pulled both elements on the
early mornings of 13 and 14 December, respectively.
By 14 December, the task force commander
convinced Ali and his men to occupy
overnight the terrain that they had captured.
The noose around AQ tightened consistently
through 17 December, and the enemy pocket
shrank accordingly. By 17 December, Ali
declared victory. The general consensus
remained that the surviving AQ forces had
either fled to Pakistan or melted into the local
population. SOTF forces departed the battlefield
on 19 December, but without knowing
whether they had killed UBL and destroyed AQ
in Afghanistan.
The enemy had fought stubbornly; yet, their
fortifications proved no match for the tons of ordnance,
coordinated by SOF in OPs. Estimates of
AQ dead from the battle were hard to determine.
the SOTF’s ground force commander estimated
about 250. What has since been determined
with reasonable certainty was that UBL was
indeed in Tora Bora in December 2001. All
source reporting corroborated his presence on
several days from 9-14 December. The fact that
SOF came as close to capturing or killing UBL
as U.S. forces have to date makes Tora Bora a
controversial fight. Given the commitment of
fewer than 100 American personnel, U.S. forces
proved unable to block egress routes from Tora
Bora south into Pakistan, the route that UBL
most likely took. Regardless, the defeat for AQ
at Tora Bora, coupled with the later defeat during
Operation ANACONDA, ensured that neither
AQ, nor the Taliban would mass forces to
challenge American troops in the field until
2006. SOF elements proved once again that
combining airpower in support of a surrogate
force could result in a decisive defeat of a wellfortified
and numerically superior enemy force,
no matter how disciplined.
With the capture of Kabul and Kandahar
and the destruction of organized resistance in
Tora Bora, Afghanistan was now in effect liberated.
It had taken fewer than 60 days of concentrated
military operations and only a few hundred
soldiers to seize the country from the
Taliban and its terrorist allies. On 11 December
2001 Hamid Karzai was sworn in as Prime
Minister of the interim government.
Operation ANACONDA
But, the success of the SOCCENT UW campaign
did not mean that all Taliban or AQ had
been killed or driven out of Afghanistan. The
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