Words. For Your Consideration...
"Eight years ago this month, Osama bin Laden walked out of the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan and disappeared into Pakistan. U.S. intelligence agencies have no real idea where he is today, but it is clear that the world's most wanted man and the terrorist organization he leads have reemerged as a powerful force behind the increasingly deadly insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
...If we had captured or killed Bin Laden, the world would look very different today. His death or imprisonment would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat, but our failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism. It left the American people more vulnerable, and it inflamed the strife that now threatens to engulf Pakistan and Afghanistan.
...The failure to get Bin Laden was not inevitable. By early December 2001, he and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, were cornered in a complex of caves and tunnels carved into the rugged terrain of eastern Afghanistan, just a few miles from the border with Pakistan. They endured days of relentless bombing by U.S. aircraft, and Bin Laden clearly expected to be overrun any day by American troops and their Afghan allies. According to Steve Coll's excellent book on the Bin Laden family, the Al Qaeda leader wrote his will on Dec. 14.
As a recent report by the majority staff of the Foreign Relations Committee made clear, there is no longer any dispute over whether Bin Laden was at Tora Bora. CIA and Delta Force commanders on the scene told the staff that he was there and described intercepting his voice on radio communications. Most authoritatively, Bin Laden's presence was confirmed by the official history of the U.S. Special Operations Command, which oversees Delta Force, the Green Berets, Navy SEALs and similar special forces. "All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9-14 December," said the unclassified version of the history, which was published with little notice in 2007.
The final assault that Bin Laden feared never came. Fewer than 100 U.S. special operations commandos were at Tora Bora, not enough to defeat the entrenched Al Qaeda fighters. Calls for reinforcements were rejected.
...Military analysts estimate it would have taken only 2,000 or so American troops to accomplish the mission. Most would have been deployed on the southern side of Tora Bora to block escape routes to Pakistan. About 500 would have carried out the final assault from the north. We had enough troops in or near Afghanistan at the time, and they were trained for this type of unconventional fight in rugged terrain.
...[Gen Tommy] Franks and his boss, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, were determined to succeed in Afghanistan with a light footprint. They justified limiting the number of U.S. troops by saying they wanted to avoid stirring up anti-American sentiment and creating a protracted insurgency. Unfortunately, in failing to get Bin Laden, we wound up with exactly what we had hoped to avoid in Afghanistan -- and a virulent insurgency across the border in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed ally."
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