Word: shahs
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...watching as Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters gathered south of Kabul. Code-named Operation Anaconda, the battle plan aimed at this force was a hammer-and-anvil strategy. Friendly Afghans, assisted by U.S. special forces, would flush the enemy from the north and northwest toward three exits of the Shah-i-Kot valley, where American troops waited. To the south, battle positions Heather and Ginger were divided by a hill christened the Whale, while to the east, battle position Eve guarded escape routes over the high mountains to Pakistan. But after two days of fierce combat, the al-Qaeda...
...Intelligence and combat support from local Afghan forces is seldom entirely free of the axe-grinding of local warlords, and Afghan observers believe that may have played a role both in the underestimation of the enemy's strength at Shah-i-Kot and in the performance of the Afghan forces initially deployed. Question marks over the reliability of local Pashtun militias were underscored by the Afghan government's decision midway through the battle to reinforce the allied contingent with 1,000 ethnic Tajik fighters from the Northern Alliance. But despite their solid battlefield performance, the Tajiks' presence has fueled ethnic...
...from the area cite mass distribution of pro-bin Laden pamphlets in the region, urging Afghans to fight the government in Kabul and its U.S. backers. And local warlord rivalries appear to have played a role in determining which warlords sent their troops to fight alongside the Americans at Shah...
...Shah-i-Kot, the U.S. elected to create its own ring of steel, using the U.S. Tenth Mountain Division, the 101st Airborne and an assortment of special forces units sent by European NATO allies, Canada and Australia to cut off lines of retreat. That gave the U.S. a more committed fighting force on the ground, and when the Afghans folded under fire on the western approaches to Shah-i-Kot, U.S. commanders moved their own men into the breach. An operation in which Afghan forces were to have been supported by the U.S. quickly turned into a U.S. operation supported...
...discord suggests that the ongoing campaign in Afghanistan runs the risk of exacerbating ethnic tensions and warlord rivalries, which, in turn, work to the enemy's advantage. Shah-i-Kot has been the biggest battle of the war so far, but it's unlikely to be the last. Locals suspect that a number - U.S. commanders say it's less than 100 - of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters escaped Shah-i-Kot, and the Pentagon has warned that numerous pockets of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters are dotted across southern Afghanistan. And with ethnic tensions on the rise, even...