(updated below)
In Afghanistan the U.S. military launches about a dozen kill or capture raids each night.
These are supposed to take out leading Taliban person but, as they are based on dubious intelligence, often go wrong and hit peaceful people or even people associated with the Afghan government. Additional people get killed in the protests against such raids.
There is an obvious strategy to counter such raids or at least to make them more difficult. Traps could be laid that would provoke night raids and allow to hit the raiding force as hard as possible. I have wondered for a while if/when such were happening.
Laying a trap should be easy to do. A tip-off to the Afghan secret service NDS about an imminent Taliban leader meeting, some suspect geo-locatable mobile phone calls from and to Pakistan from a secluded compound and a few cars or motorcycle aggregating at that place at night should be enough to get the military's interest. Then hide, wait for the choppers and take them out.
I suspect that this might well have been such a trap:
Insurgents shot down a NATO Chinook helicopter during an overnight operation in eastern Afghanistan, killing at least 37 people on board, a coalition military official said on Saturday.
Afghan military officials put the death toll at 38, including 31 Americans and seven Afghan commandos.
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The helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in the Tangi valley of the Wardak Province just west of Kabul, the coalition official said. The Taliban claimed credit for the attack.
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A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, said insurgents shot down the helicopter around 11 p.m. Friday as it was launching an operation on a house where the militants were gathering in the Tangi Joyee region of the district of Saidabad in the eastern part of the province. Eight militants were killed in the fight that continued after the helicopter fell, he said.
A few of such incidents, initiated all over the country, might make the U.S. military much more reluctant to launch more raids.
Update (1:00pm) :
As it turns out my hunch was right and this incident was very likely a trap:
The Taliban claimed its fighters had ambushed Western troops after being tipped off to an imminent night raid in the district. The crash site is located in Wardak's Tangi valley, where the insurgents are extremely active.
The Wardak police chief, Gen. Abdul Qayuum Baqizoi, said the American strike was aimed at a meeting of insurgent figures in the district, which is considered a perilous one.
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The Taliban statement, from spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, was unusually specific in some of its details, …
The "meeting of insurgent figures" was likely a trap as described above. The unusual detailed statement from the Taliban, and the fact that they were the first to come out with the news today, shows that the attack was actually planned in advance and the propaganda pre-prepared. The Taliban claim of having been "tipped off" is dubious. It will make U.S. military more suspicious of their Afghan co-fighters and may have been inserted just to create that effect.
But from a propaganda standpoint this will have the biggest effect:
The operators from SEAL Team Six were flown by a crew of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
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One source says the team was thought to include 22 SEALs, three Air Force air controllers, seven Afghan Army troops, a dog and his handler, and a civilian interpreter, plus the helicopter crew.The sources thought this was the largest single loss of life ever for SEAL Team Six, known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group.
It were operators from SEAL Team Six, aka DevGru, that killed Osama Bin Laden.
To now have killed a big number of them is a huge victory for the Taliban and their associated groups.