Pentagon on Deadly Helmand Firefight: ‘This Was Clearly a Combat Situation’
(CNSNews.com) – A Pentagon spokesman conceded Thursday that an incident in which a Green Beret was killed and two others wounded in Afghanistan this week constituted “a combat situation,” but reiterated that the role of the Special Forces operators was one of training, advising and assisting their Afghan counterparts.
“This was clearly a combat situation,” press secretary Peter Cook told a briefing.
He said the mission of the U.S. Special Forces troops “is to assist the Afghan forces – to train, advise and assist. They can accompany, they play a support role. But they are there, able to defend themselves, and at risk – as we have seen painfully in this particular instance.”
Green Beret Staff Sgt. Matthew McClintock was killed in action in the Marjah district of Helmand province on Tuesday, as a result of “wounds suffered when the enemy attacked his unit with small arms fire.”
Two others were wounded, and subsequently evacuated. Cook said a medevac helicopter grounded after a rotor blade hit a wall had been recovered and taken to Kandahar.
Cook several times during the briefing acknowledged that the clash between U.S. and Afghan forces and the Taliban during what he described as a clearing operation was “combat” – a word he had not used during a briefing two days earlier.
“This was clearly a combat situation, in which U.S. forces that were accompanying Afghan forces – who were in the lead – found themselves in a very difficult, dangerous situation. That is crystal clear.”
Cook emphasized that U.S. forces in Afghanistan were at risk, but that the role they are playing in Helmand is a “back-up” one to the Afghans.
“Their role is to assist, again, to provide their unique training and advice to the Afghan forces. And as they confront an objective it is the Afghan forces that take on the objective, and the U.S. forces assume, if you will, a support position, an overwatch position,” Cook said.
“This was a circumstance in which they, as I understand it, came under fire, and the incident took place, and Staff Sgt. McClintock lost his life, unfortunately.”
The U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan ended at the end of 2014. Some 9,800 U.S. troops remain in the country as part of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, the successor to Operation Enduring Freedom.
Freedom’s Sentinel’s twin components are to “train, advise and assist” Afghan security forces in support of the international Resolute Support mission, and to carry out counterterrorism operations.
‘Administration’s notoriously restrictive rules of engagement’
Earlier Thursday Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), a retired Navy SEAL commander, joined eight Republican colleagues in sending a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter [1] requesting a congressional briefing on the incident in which McClintock lost his life.
Zinke said he had heard claims from Special Forces sources that attempts to evacuate the U.S. troops in Marjah were “delayed due to bureaucratic hurdles and the administration’s notoriously restrictive rules of engagement.”
He asked Carter about reports that deployment of a Quick Reaction Force was intentionally delayed, and that air support from an AC-130 gunship in the area was “not authorized out of concerns for collateral damage.”
Asked about the claims, Cook said there was “no indication that we’re aware of that there was any delay whatsoever.”
“There was an effort to respond as quickly as possible to this particular situation given the ongoing fighting that was taking place,” he said.
Cook pointed out there was gunfire in the area, and that the safety of the members of the Quick Response Force had obviously to be taken into account.
“We feel confident based on what we know right now that there was no delay and that there was every effort made by the commanders to try to address this situation in appropriate fashion.”
In a statement, Zinke said McClintock, his family and unit deserved to know the truth “and we need to make sure this does not happen again.”
“I’ve commanded some of the finest Special Forces our nation has seen, and to think that these guys were abandoned by Washington while they were under enemy fire is unthinkable and frankly against everything the U.S. military stands for,” he said.
“If there was a decision to delay the QRF or call off air strikes on enemy combatants after the ground commanders ordered it, due to overly-restrictive rules of engagement or political pressure, to me that is a clear dereliction of duty.”
“Despite the fact the Obama administration continually tells the news media the U.S. is not in combat in Afghanistan, it is very clear we are,” Zinke said, noting that six U.S. airmen had been killed in a suicide bombing last month [2] at the Bagram air base, in the deadliest such incident in Afghanistan in more than three years.
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