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02/12/2009 | Costs of War: Tora Bora Backdraft

Shaun Waterman

As Obama unveils his new Afghan strategy this week, it is worth remembering why US forces are still there: If bin Laden had been killed or captured when US-led anti-Taliban fighters had him cornered at Tora Bora in 2001, there would not be 68,000 US troops in the country today, Shaun Waterman writes for ISN Security Watch.

 

Although it was not the worst or the furthest-reaching failure of President George W Bush’s war on terror, letting bin Laden get away was certainly the most obvious.

And a new report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee argues that letting him get away is about what happened after bin Laden predictably fled to Tora Bora at the end of 2001 and was cornered there by 100 US Special Operations Forces and their Afghan allies - relentlessly pounded by US airpower and, according to a will he wrote at the time, prepared to die.

Instead, probably on 16 December, he slipped away across the border, which US leaders had left the poorly organized Pakistani Frontier Corps to guard.

“There were not enough troops to prevent the escape,” says the report, “This failure and its enormous consequences were not inevitable.”

The report comes with a health warning. It was written by the Committee’s Democratic staff, and, as the New York Times noted, “represents unfinished political business on the part of (committee Chairman Massachusetts Senator John) Kerry,” who unsuccessfully “hammered on the failure to catch bin Laden” during his 2004 election contest with Bush.

Nonetheless, although the charge has been leveled before, the Committee’s report marshals more recent on-the-record accounts by officials in Washington and on the ground, and a previously unreported official history by US Special Operations Command, to paint a convincing picture.

The ‘light footprint’ legacy

Then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top US military commander General Tommy Franks were so wedded to their “risk-averse, 'light footprint' model,” says the report, that they held back the 1,000 additional troops that would have enabled a "classic sweep-and-block maneuver" that could have netted bin Laden.

Rumsfeld’s attachment to the principles of his “Revolution in Military Affairs” - even in the face of evidence that it is not working - is well-documented, but the responsibility for this failure goes higher than that.

CIA counterterrorism chief Hank Crumpton personally warned Bush that Afghan forces weren’t up to the job, the report notes. But, “The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army,” deployed right there in the region, “was kept on the sidelines.”

The operation, the report’s authors admit, would have been highly risky - “a dangerous fight across treacherous terrain,” involving “the injection of more U.S. troops and […] resulting casualties.”

“The fact that Special Operations Forces came as close to capturing or killing [bin Laden] as U.S. forces have to date makes Tora Bora a controversial fight,” notes the official history (20 Mb PDF) of the battle produced by US Special Operations Command. “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 [bin Laden] most likely took,” it concludes.

Damage control

When charges that the Bush administration had let bin Laden get away first began to fly during - as the Senate report coyly notes - the 2004 election campaign, the Bush machine sought to control the damage. Franks and others, including most notably then-vice president Richard Cheney, said there had been uncertainty about the intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts.

“We don’t know to this day whether bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote two weeks before the 2004 election. “Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir.”

“Bin Laden was never within our grasp,” he concluded.

And Franks’ deputy, who a year previously had written a book stating that the al-Qaida leader had definitely been at Tora Bora, reversed himself in public to support his old boss’ line during the campaign.

The Senate report says its “review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants […] removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora."

But the Special Operations Command history is even more damning because it shows that US intelligence knew at the time he was there. “[Bin Laden] was indeed in Tora Bora in December 2001. All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9-14 December,” the history notes.

Crumpton’s warnings came in November, when the CIA pin-pointed Tora Bora as bin Laden’s likely refuge, a month or more before his escape. The Senate report collects the many accounts of requests during that month for more troops to finish the job properly - all turned down.

Eerie echoes

There is an eerie echo here of the failed effort made during the Clinton administration to get the military to devise a plan to capture bin Laden after the 1998 embassy bombings - in both cases the ‘footprint’ military planners said the job they were required to do the job was too large.

Because of the blunders of the Bush administration in Afghanistan, and the squandered opportunity they represent, President Barack Obama now faces perhaps the most unenviable task of any president - to pick up and own the consequences of his predecessor’s failure.

 

**Shaun Waterman is a senior writer and analyst for ISN Security Watch. He is a UK journalist based in Washington, DC, covering homeland and national security.

ISN, Center for Security Studies (CSS) (Suiza)

 


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