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Tue. Oct 26, 2004

Tora Bora Revisionism

The President said something about Tora Bora in a speech yesterday that I simply must rebut. And before people send me more e-mail claiming this site has become just another “Kerry blog,” I’ll point out that [1], I’m not voting for Kerry, and [2], I first wrote disapprovingly on this topic on the second day of 2002, long prior to our current partisan warfare. Not every argument made today is about getting someone elected tomorrow. It just seems that way.

Even when the President speaks:

Now my opponent is throwing out the wild claim that he knows where bin Laden was in the fall of 2001, and that our military passed up the chance to get him in Tora Bora. This is an unjustified criticism of our military commanders in the field. (Applause.) This is the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking. (Applause.) And that’s what we’ve come to expect from Senator Kerry.

In fact, our Commander in Afghanistan, General Tommy Franks—(applause)—recently wrote this about Tora Bora, “The Senator’s understanding of events does not square with reality.” The General said that American Special Forces were actively involved in the search for terrorists in Tora Bora and that intelligence reports at the time placed bin Laden in any of several countries.

The White HOuse: “President’s Remarks in Council Bluffs, Iowa”

Wait a second, “intelligence reports at the time placed bin Laden in any of several countries”? Sorry, Mr. President, but I’m going to have to call “Bullshit” on that one. Over the past three years, many in your own administration have completely contradicted what you now claim.

Including your own Vice President: “And on Nov 29 [2001], Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC’s ‘Primetime Live’ that, according to the reports that were coming in, bin Laden was in Tora Bora. ‘I think he was equipped to go to ground there,’ Mr. Cheney said. ‘He’s got what he believes to be a fairly secure facility. He’s got caves underground; it’s an area he’s familiar with.’”

If it is true as the President now says that “intelligence reports at the time placed bin Laden in any of several countries,” why didn’t anyone tell Dick Cheney before he went on TV and told the world the opposite? Or was this another intelligence failure?

Who isn’t telling us the facts of Tora Bora? The President, today, or the Vice President, at the time it happened? Their statements are diametrically opposed, so one must be false.

As for me, I’m pretty sure which one isn’t true. Because the Bush administration itself admitted as much four months after the fact.

The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.

Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan’s mountainous eastern border. Though there remains a remote chance that he died there, the intelligence community is persuaded that bin Laden slipped away in the first 10 days of December.

After-action reviews, conducted privately inside and outside the military chain of command, describe the episode as a significant defeat for the United States. A common view among those interviewed outside the U.S. Central Command is that Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the war’s operational commander, misjudged the interests of putative Afghan allies and let pass the best chance to capture or kill al Qaeda’s leader. Without professing second thoughts about Tora Bora, Franks has changed his approach fundamentally in subsequent battles, using Americans on the ground as first-line combat units.

Washington Post: “U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight”

Furthermore, entire books have been written on the subject, but the same author also wrote “A day-by-day account of how Osama bin Laden eluded the world’s most powerful military machine” that you can read online at the Christian Science Monitor:

Pir Baksh Bardiwal, the intelligence chief for the Eastern Shura, which controls eastern Afghanistan, says he was astounded that Pentagon planners didn’t consider the most obvious exit routes and put down light US infantry to block them.

“The border with Pakistan was the key, but no one paid any attention to it,” he said, leaning back in his swivel chair with a short list of the Al Qaeda fighters who were later taken prisoner. “And there were plenty of landing areas for helicopters, had the Americans acted decisively. Al Qaeda escaped right out from under their feet.”

Meanwhile, back in Jalalabad, the Afghan warlords enlisted by the US to attack Tora Bora were also cutting deals to help the Al Qaeda fighters escape.

In the shoddy lobby of the Spin Ghar Hotel in downtown Jalalabad on Dec. 3, Haji Hayat Ullah – a member of the Eastern Shura who, according to both Afghan and Pakistani sources had long ties to bin Laden – asked for the “safe passage” for three of his Arab friends.

After a 20-minute discussion with Commander Ali, which was overheard by the Monitor in the empty hotel lobby, a deal was struck for the safe passage of the three Al Qaeda members.

Christian Science Monitor: “How bin Laden got away”

Not long ago I was called an “armchair general” because I’ve made this argument. But in the articles above, the opinions come from people “on the inside,” not some random blogger. For example, “Within weeks, high-ranking British officers were saying privately that American commanders had vetoed a proposal to guard the high-altitude trails, arguing that the risks of a firefight, in deep snow, gusting winds and low-slung clouds, were too high…”

Being an “armchair general” (meaning I’m not a veteran, and therefore apparently have no right to comment on military matters), I’ll admit I have no training in tactics. But I understand strategery.

Bush’s message was “Bin Laden, Dead or Alive.” And soon we found ourselves with strong intelligence we had him and his most rabid followers cornered. At least, that’s what Dick Cheney claimed at the time. It was the best shot at him we’d ever had, or are ever likely to get. And still, with a strong probability the murderer of thousands of Americans was inside, the US military was unable or unwilling to capture or kill Bin Laden when he was confined to an area of less than 12 square miles.

Yes, that’s a harsh indictment. Especially when it follows on the heels of what must be called a brilliant campaign to overthrow the Taliban. And I think that’s the source of much of the criticism I’ve gotten; how can you trash the military that had just overthrown an entire government in mere weeks using much less than a division’s worth of troops on the ground?

I’m not trashing the military. I, too, was awed by their plan and performance in Afghanistan. It was a near-genius blend of technology and tactics that leveraged small mixed forces into Taliban Topplers. Any time you see Marines suddenly descend into the desert hundreds of miles from water, you know people are thinking way outside the box to get the job done.

And perhaps that is why I found the battle at Tora Bora so perplexing. They’d found a formula that was working gangbusters (small groups of Specials Forces allied with Afghan warlords and their militias), but when faced with a new problem and new goal at Tora Bora (not driving them out, but containing/killing them), they tried to apply that same formula to a new problem. And the formula failed them.

The common argument is that we simply did not have the boots on the ground we needed (sound familiar?). After all, we’d just bowled over an entire country that stymied the Soviets for a decade, and we did it in weeks with a relative handful of Special Forces, Rangers, and Marines. There simply wasn’t time to get the necessary troops to Afghanistan.

Hmmm. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon certainly seems to have an ongoing problem with “catastrophic success,” don’t they? Perhaps they need to chat that over the next time they get together to plan the next step of their ongoing “transformation” of the military.

But let’s examine the timeline from the fall of 2001. How many people in uniform did not fully realize by mid-September, 2001, that they might have to pick up and move fast? It’s reasonable to assume that units could and would be prepared to receive orders for departure by the end of September, 2001, as we certainly had boots hit the ground in Afghanistan shortly after the first week in October.

That’s eight weeks. Eight weeks before the action began at Tora Bora. Now, no one expected the 1st Armored Division to spent months shipping tanks to Pakistan and driving them inland. But we have other forces able to deploy far more quickly, like the 10th Mountain (a portion of which made it to Bagram Air base north of Kabul by Dec. 1), and our airborne divisions. And then there’s the Rangers. Remember them? They made a sizable appearance early in October, parachuting in to briefly occupy the desert air strip that the Marines later used as their base. And then they weren’t seen in sizable numbers again in Afghanistan during the main campaign.

So I don’t buy the argument that we couldn’t get troops there in time. The next argument is that some of the forces I’ve listed are not trained to handle a cold hard fight in tough mountain terrain, and none of them were sufficiently acclimated to the 10,000-13,000 foot altitudes where the battle might be fought.

Would it have been a historically difficult effort? Overwhelmingly, yes, but I still argue the 10th Mountain Division was the perfect force for the task. And I know the military doesn’t work this way, but if you’d asked those men if they were willing to take on a “historically difficult” plan for simply the chance to capture or kill the man responsible for the “historically difficult” attack our country had suffered mere weeks beforehand … I think I know what their answer would have been.

Overwhelmingly, yes.

I have great faith in our troops. I believe that given a chance under those difficult circumstances, they would have gotten the job done. I place no blame on them at all. I don’t know where the blame falls, on some commander in theater, on Gen. Tommy Franks, or on civilian leadership at the Pentagon.

I just know where the buck stops. We had the cat in the bag, yet we’re chasing kittens all over the place three years later. The buck stops with the guy who told us he would get Bin Laden, dead or alive. And for nearly three years, long before our current partisan warfare began, I’ve been perfectly comfortable judging the failure at Tora Bora.

No matter what kind of historic revisionism the President wants to spew today.