Senate Report: "Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed To Get Bin Laden And Why It Matters Today"

Just a tidbit of information regarding the mismanagement of our military.

None of this is new. It just sheds a little more light on the details.

From the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Report:

But the Al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer

than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan

allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were

rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block

the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan.

The vast array of American military power, from sniper

teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the

Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose

to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin

Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal

his escape routes. On or around December 16, two days after writing

his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked

unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated

tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.

The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden

or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald

Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects

of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation

Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned

that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an

anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing

the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell

doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence

by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations

troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan

opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence

officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching

more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan.

There were enough U.S. troops in or near Afghanistan to execute

the classic sweep-and-block maneuver required to attack bin Laden

and try to prevent his escape. It would have been a dangerous fight

across treacherous terrain, and the injection of more U.S. troops

and the resulting casualties would have contradicted the risk-averse,

‘‘light footprint’’ model formulated by Rumsfeld and Franks.

But commanders on the scene and elsewhere in Afghanistan argued

that the risks were worth the reward.

After bin Laden’s escape, some military and intelligence analysts

and the press criticized the Pentagon’s failure to mount a full-scale

attack despite the tough rhetoric by President Bush. Franks, Vice

President Dick Cheney and others defended the decision, arguing

that the intelligence was inconclusive about the Al Qaeda leader’s

location. But the review of existing literature, unclassified government

records and interviews with central participants underlying

this report removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that

Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.

For example, the CIA and Delta Force commanders who spent

three weeks at Tora Bora as well as other intelligence and military

sources are certain he was there. Franks’ second-in-command during

the war, retired Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, wrote in his autobiography

that bin Laden was ‘‘definitely there when we hit the

caves’’—a statement he retracted when the failure became a political

issue. Most authoritatively, the official history of the U.S. Special

Operations Command determined that bin Laden was at Tora

Bora. ‘‘All source reporting corroborated his presence on several

days from 9-14 December,’’ said a declassified version of the history,

which was based on accounts of commanders and intelligence

officials and published without fanfare two years ago.