What we learn in the military is that you should counter-assault into an ambush, but in this scenario you're limited by the terrain. The enemy is on all sides of you. They have snipers perched up high, which means they had plunging fire down on the police convoy. This helps explain why the fight went on for so long and why the police were eventually able to get out of there.

Plunging fire is where you're firing from a high elevation down into a lower one, and it's less accurate than other types, particularly grazing fire. The size of your target-the target aspect below-actually shrinks quite a bit, reducing the probability of a lethal hit. Having snipers, the Taliban's mechanic of shooting is actually operating in favor of the police on the ground. The Afghan police that fire up the ravine toward the snipers actually have a little bit of grazing fire, which puts them at an advantage. Otherwise, they're in a pretty compromising position.

You can't assault the hill in the darkness not knowing where the enemy is; you can't do squad-rushes; and the avenue of egress is blocked because the vehicles are bottled-up in the ravine. There are 5 or 6 vehicles destroyed in the convoy, probably at the beginning of the convoy, and maybe even at the end to effectively block any attempts to drive out of the kill zone. You're stuck. So what can you do? You fight it out.

Set up zones of interlocking fields of fire to set up a defense, a "circle the wagons" type of approach, to prevent the Taliban and smugglers from coming down the hill to get you. That's a good fallback. The next best thing is to set up a defensive line. And in this case you'd set up a defensive perimeter because you're being attacked from all sides.

What you need to do is to set up bases of fire on either side of the ravine. Interlock by ordering two squads to run along the left and right sides with their backs against the mountain. The squads will fire across the ravine at the enemy on the other side. Crossfire won't really apply here due to the changes and shifts in elevation. You're going to end up basically shooting over the heads of your own team, and this formation will give you a vantage point from both sides. Still, it's a dicey situation when you're under fire for hours.

Apparently the police convoy had enough ammunition to hold off the bad guys for a long period of time. You're down to the worst-case scenario here, a sort of Custer's Last Stand. In this case the Indians, the Taliban, didn't have enough forces to capitalize on what they'd accomplished. The other bit of good fortune is that the Taliban and smugglers didn't have any heavy weapons or any kind of backup to truly capitalize on the police they trapped. They couldn't really do anything but weather them out.

For the length of the firefight, we've got fairly minor casualties. 18 dead is still a pretty bad thing, but when you look at a total convoy of 150 people, as well as the new chief of police in there, you can be confident we prevented the Taliban and drug smugglers from achieving their primary objective.