[Senate Prints 111-35]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
111th Congress S. Prt.
1st Session COMMITTEE PRINT 111-35
_______________________________________________________________________
TORA BORA REVISITED:
HOW WE FAILED TO GET BIN LADEN
AND WHY IT MATTERS TODAY
__________
A Report To Members
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
John F. Kerry, Chairman
One Hundred Eleventh Congress
First Session
November 30, 2009
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana
RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin BOB CORKER, Tennessee
BARBARA BOXER, California JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia
ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey JAMES E. RISCH, Idaho
BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland JIM DeMINT, South Carolina
ROBERT P. CASEY, Jr., Pennsylvania JOHN BARRASSO, Wyoming
JIM WEBB, Virginia ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi
JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma
EDWARD E. KAUFMAN, Delaware
KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York
David McKean, Staff Director
Kenneth A. Myers, Jr., Republican Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Letter of Transmittal.......................................... v
Executive Summary.............................................. 1
1. Flight to Tora Bora......................................... 3
The Sheikh Arrives........................................... 5
Other Voices, Same Conclusion................................ 7
``A Controversial Fight''.................................... 9
2. The Afghan Model: A Flawed Masterpiece or Just Flawed?...... 10
A Shift in Attention and Resources........................... 12
``We're Going to Lose Our Prey''............................. 13
Flight from Tora Bora........................................ 13
3. An Alternative Plan......................................... 15
Troops Were Ready to Go...................................... 17
The Price of Failure......................................... 19
Endnotes....................................................... 21
Appendixes
Appendix I.--``A Flawed Masterpiece,'' Michael E. O'Hanlon,
Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002.............................. 25
Appendix II.--United States Special Operations Command History,
6th Edition.................................................... 33
(iii)
LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
----------
United States Senate,
Committee on Foreign Relations,
Washington, DC, November 30, 2009.
Dear Colleague: This report by the committee majority staff
is part of our continuing examination of the conflict in
Afghanistan. When we went to war less than a month after the
attacks of September 11, the objective was to destroy Al Qaeda
and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, and other
senior figures in the terrorist group and the Taliban, which
had hosted them. Today, more than eight years later, we find
ourselves fighting an increasingly lethal insurgency in
Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan that is led by many of
those same extremists. Our inability to finish the job in late
2001 has contributed to a conflict today that endangers not
just our troops and those of our allies, but the stability of a
volatile and vital region. This report relies on new and
existing information to explore the consequences of the failure
to eliminate bin Laden and other extremist leaders in the hope
that we can learn from the mistakes of the past.
Sincerely,
John F. Kerry,
Chairman.
TORA BORA REVISITED:
HOW WE FAILED TO GET BIN LADEN
AND WHY IT MATTERS TODAY
----------
Executive Summary
On October 7, 2001, U.S. aircraft began bombing the
training bases and strongholds of Al Qaeda and the ruling
Taliban across Afghanistan. The leaders who sent murderers to
attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon less than a
month earlier and the rogue government that provided them
sanctuary were running for their lives. President George W.
Bush's expression of America's desire to get Osama bin Laden
``dead or alive'' seemed about to come true.
Two months later, American civilian and military leaders
celebrated what they viewed as a lasting victory with the
selection of Hamid Karzai as the country's new hand-picked
leader. The war had been conceived as a swift campaign with a
single objective: defeat the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda by
capturing or killing bin Laden and other key leaders. A unique
combination of airpower, Central Intelligence Agency and
special operations forces teams and indigenous allies had swept
the Taliban from power and ousted Al Qaeda from its safe haven
while keeping American deaths to a minimum. But even in the
initial glow, there were concerns: The mission had failed to
capture or kill bin Laden.
Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight
years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist
threat. But the decisions that opened the door for his escape
to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic
figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and
inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job
represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course
of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international
terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to
terrorism, laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan
insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering
Pakistan. Al Qaeda shifted its locus across the border into
Pakistan, where it has trained extremists linked to numerous
plots, including the July 2005 transit bombings in London and
two recent aborted attacks involving people living in the
United States. The terrorist group's resurgence in Pakistan has
coincided with the rising violence orchestrated in Afghanistan
by the Taliban, whose leaders also escaped only to re-emerge to
direct today's increasingly lethal Afghan insurgency.
This failure and its enormous consequences were not
inevitable. By early December 2001, Bin Laden's world had
shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a
mountainous section of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora.
Cornered in some of the most forbidding terrain on earth, he
and several hundred of his men, the largest concentration of Al
Qaeda fighters of the war, endured relentless pounding by
American aircraft, as many as 100 air strikes a day. One
15,000-pound bomb, so huge it had to be rolled out the back of
a C-130 cargo plane, shook the mountains for miles. It seemed
only a matter of time before U.S. troops and their Afghan
allies overran the remnants of Al Qaeda hunkered down in the
thin, cold air at 14,000 feet.
Bin Laden expected to die. His last will and testament,
written on December 14, reflected his fatalism. ``Allah
commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we
make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a
whole,'' he wrote, according to a copy of the will that
surfaced later and is regarded as authentic. ``Allah bears
witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah
has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated
every cell in my heart, `and fight the pagans all together as
they fight you all together.' How many times did I wake up to
find myself reciting this holy verse!'' He instructed his wives
not to remarry and apologized to his children for devoting
himself to jihad.
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.
The reasons behind the failure to capture or kill Osama bin
Laden and its lasting consequences are examined over three
sections in this report. The first section traces bin Laden's
path from southern Afghanistan to the mountains of Tora Bora
and lays out new and previous evidence that he was there. The
second explores new information behind the decision not to
launch an assault. The final section examines the military
options that might have led to his capture or death at Tora
Bora and the ongoing impact of the failure to bring him back
``dead or alive.''
1. Flight to Tora Bora
Whether Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora in late 2001
has been the topic of heated debate since he escaped
Afghanistan to the tribal belt of Pakistan. The
evidence is convincing that the Al Qaeda leader was in
the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in that critical
period. The information comes from U.S. military
officers at Tora Bora, from detainees who were in the
camps with bin Laden, from the senior CIA officer in
Afghanistan at the time, and from the official history
of the special operations forces. Based on that
evidence, it is clear that the Al Qaeda leader was
within reach of U.S. troops three months after the
attacks on New York and Washington.
In the middle of August 2001, two Pakistani nuclear
scientists sat down in a mud-walled compound on the outskirts
of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, the spiritual and tactical
headquarters of Taliban fundamentalists who controlled most of
the country. Seated with them were bin Laden and Ayman al-
Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who was his chief deputy and
strategist. The four men spent two days discussing Al Qaeda's
determination to obtain nuclear weapons before bin Laden and
Zawahiri abruptly excused themselves and left the compound.
Before departing, bin Laden promised the Pakistanis that
something momentous was going to happen soon.
American intelligence had already picked up indications
that something momentous was coming. George Tenet, who was
Director of Central Intelligence at the time, later testified
before the 9/11 Commission that the ``system was blinking red''
from July 2001 until the actual attacks. The first reports of
possible attacks on the United States had been picked up in
June and the warnings increased steadily from then on. On July
12, Tenet went to Capitol Hill to provide a top-secret briefing
for Senators about the rising threat of an imminent attack.
Only a handful of Senators turned up in S-407, the secure
conference room in the Capitol, to hear the CIA Director warn
that he was extremely worried that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were
preparing an attack on U.S. soil. Tenet told them the attack
was not a question of if, but when.
Less than a month later, on August 6, President Bush's
daily briefing repeated the warning under the ominous headline
``Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in U.S.'' The text described
previous plots carried out by Al Qaeda against American targets
overseas and said the FBI had uncovered ``patterns of
suspicious activity in this country consistent with
preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks,
including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New
York.'' At the time, President Bush later told the 9/11
Commission that he regarded the warning as historical in
nature. The Commission's voluminous report said its
investigators ``found no indication of any further discussion
before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of
the possibility of a threat of an Al Qaeda attack in the United
States.''
Bin Laden's movements in the days surrounding September 11
remain sketchy. Some facts have emerged from reputable
journalists, U.S. military and intelligence sources and Afghans
who said they saw the Al Qaeda leader at various points along
his path to Tora Bora. He was spotted in Khost in eastern
Afghanistan around September 11. On November 8, he and Zawahiri
met in Kabul with Hamid Mir, a respected Pakistani journalist.
By then, U.S. special operations forces and Northern Alliance
troops were closing in on the Afghan capital. The Al Qaeda
leaders had risked the trip to attend a memorial service
honoring the Uzbek militant leader Juma Khan Namangani, who had
been killed in a U.S. airstrike. Before Kabul fell, bin Laden
and Zawahiri traveled 5 hours east to the ancient trading
center of Jalalabad. From there, by all reliable accounts, they
went to ground at Tora Bora, one of bin Laden's old haunts from
the days of fighting the Soviets in the 1980s.
Tora Bora is a district about 30 miles southeast of
Jalalabad. Rather than a single place, the name covers a
fortress-like section of the White Mountains that stretches
about six miles long and six miles wide across a collection of
narrow valleys, snow-covered ridgelines and jagged peaks
reaching 14,000 feet. During the 1980s, when he was fighting
the Soviets in Afghanistan, bin Laden turned the site into a
formidable stronghold. He built a rough road from Jalalabad and
brought in heavy equipment to fortify the natural caves and dig
new ones. He supervised the excavation of connecting tunnels so
fighters could move unseen between locations in the fights
against Soviet troops.
After the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989, bin Laden
left Afghanistan and eventually set up the operations of his
fledgling terrorist organization in the northeastern African
nation of Sudan. After pressure from the United States, Sudan
expelled bin Laden in 1996 and he flew with his wives and
children to Jalalabad on a chartered jet. Upon his return to
Afghanistan, bin Laden began expanding the fortress at Tora
Bora, building base camps at higher elevations for himself, his
wives and numerous children, and other senior Al Qaeda figures.
Some rooms were reported to be concealed 350 feet inside the
granite peaks. The mountainsides leading to those upper reaches
were steep and pitted with well-built bunkers cloaked in
camouflage. In the years that followed, Bin Laden got to know
the surrounding geography well from spending hours on long
hikes with his children. His familiarity with the worn trails
used over the centuries by traders and smugglers to traverse
the few miles into Pakistan would serve him well.
The United States rightly anticipated that bin Laden would
make his last stand at Tora Bora. The precise dates of his
arrival and departure are hard to pin down, but it's clear that
U.S. intelligence picked up his trail well before he got there.
The CIA had evidence that bin Laden was headed for the mountain
redoubt by early November, according to Tenet, the former CIA
Director. Outside experts like Peter Bergen, the last American
to interview bin Laden, estimate that he arrived by the end of
November, along with 1,000 to 1,500 hardened fighters and
bodyguards. In a television interview on November 29, 2001,
Vice President Cheney said he believed the Al Qaeda leader was
in the general area of Tora Bora. ``He's got a large number of
fighters with him probably, a fairly secure personal security
force that he has some degree of confidence in, and he'll have
to try to leave, that is, he may depart for other territory,
but that's not quite as easy as it would have been a few months
ago,'' Cheney said.
The Sheikh Arrives
Bin Laden's presence was more than conjecture. A major with
the Army's Delta Force, who is now retired and uses the pen
name Dalton Fury, was the senior U.S. military officer at Tora
Bora, commanding about 90 special operations troops and support
personnel. He and his fellow commandos from the elite and
secretive Delta Force arrived in early December, setting up
headquarters in a former schoolhouse near the mountains
alongside a handful of CIA operatives who were already there.
The Americans were there to direct airstrikes on Tora Bora and
work with Afghan militias assembled by two local warlords who
had been paid by the CIA to help flush out bin Laden and the Al
Qaeda contingent. The Delta Force soldiers were disguised to
blend in with the Afghan militia, wearing local clothing,
growing bushy beards and sometimes carrying the same types of
weapons.
Fury recounted his experiences in a book, Kill Bin Laden,
which was published in 2008. He expanded on them in interviews
with committee staff. Both the book and the interviews left no
doubt that Fury's team knew bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora
and that he was eager to go get him. In the interviews, he
explained that Al Qaeda fighters arrayed in the mountains used
unsecure radios, which meant their communications were easily
intercepted by his team and by a sophisticated listening post a
few miles from the mountain. As a result, the Delta Force and
CIA operatives had real-time eavesdropping capabilities on Al
Qaeda almost from their arrival, allowing them to track
movements and gauge the effectiveness of the bombing. Even more
valuable, a few days after arriving, one of the CIA operatives
picked up a radio from a dead Al Qaeda fighter. The radio gave
the Americans a clear channel into the group's communications
on the mountain. Bin Laden's voice was often picked up, along
with frequent comments about the presence of the man referred
to by his followers as ``the sheikh.''
Fury, who still uses his pen name to protect his identity,
said there was no doubt the voice on the radios was bin Laden.
``The CIA had a guy with them called Jalal and he was the
foremost expert on bin Laden's voice,'' he said. ``He worked on
bin Laden's voice for seven years and he knew him better than
anyone else in the West. To him, it was very clear that bin
Laden was there on the mountain.''
Another special operations expert who speaks fluent Arabic
and heard the intercepted communications in real time in
Afghanistan told the committee staff that it was clearly bin
Laden's voice. He had studied the Al Qaeda leader's speech
pattern and word choices before the war and he said he
considered the communications a perfect match.
Afghan villagers who were providing food and other supplies
for the Al Qaeda fighters at Tora Bora also confirmed bin
Laden's presence. Fury said some of the villagers were paid by
the CIA for information about precise locations of clusters of
fighters that could be targeted for bombing runs. The locals
also provided fragmentary information on bin Laden's movements
within the Al Qaeda compound, though the outsiders never got
near the sheikh. The cooperating villagers were given
rudimentary global positioning devices and told to push a
button at any spot where they saw significant numbers of
fighters or arms caches. When the locals turned in the devices
to collect their payments, the GPS coordinates recorded by
pushing the buttons were immediately passed along to targeting
officers, who programmed the coordinates into bombing runs.
For several days in early December, Fury's special ops
troops moved up the mountains in pairs with fighters from the
Afghan militias. The Americans used GPS devices and laser range
finders to pinpoint caves and pockets of enemy fighters for the
bombers. The Delta Force units were unable to hold any high
ground because the Afghans insisted on retreating to their base
at the bottom of the mountains each night, leaving the
Americans alone inside Al Qaeda territory. Still, it was clear
from what they could see and what they were hearing in the
intercepted conversations that relentless bombing was taking
its toll.
On December 9, a C-130 cargo plane dropped a 15,000-pound
bomb, known as a Daisy Cutter, on the Tora Bora complex. The
weapon had not been used since Vietnam, and there were early
fears that its impact had not been as great as expected. But
later reports confirmed that the bomb struck with massive
force. A captured Al Qaeda fighter who was there later told
American interrogators that men deep in caves had been
vaporized in what he called ``a hideous explosion.'' That day
and others, Fury described intercepting radio communications in
which Al Qaeda fighters called for the ``red truck to move
wounded'' and frantic pleas from a fighter to his commander,
saying ``cave too hot, can't reach others.''
At one point, the Americans listened on the radio as bin
Laden exhorted his men to keep fighting, though he apologized
``for getting them trapped and pounded by American
airstrikes.'' On December 11, Fury said bin Laden was heard on
the radio telling his men that he had let them down and it was
okay to surrender. Fury hoped the battle was over, but he would
soon determine that it was part of an elaborate ruse to allow
Al Qaeda fighters to slip out of Tora Bora for Pakistan.
Fury is adamant that bin Laden was at Tora Bora until mid-
December. ``There is no doubt that bin Laden was in Tora Bora
during the fighting,'' he wrote in Kill Bin Laden. ``From
alleged sightings to the radio intercepts to news reports from
various countries, it was repeatedly confirmed that he was
there.''
Other Voices, Same Conclusion
Fury was not alone in his conviction. In some cases,
confirmation that bin Laden was at Tora Bora has come from
detainees at Guantanamo Bay. A ``summary of evidence'' prepared
by the Pentagon for the trial of an unnamed detainee says
flatly that the man ``assisted in the escape of Osama bin Laden
from Tora Bora.'' The detainee was described as one of bin
Laden's commanders in the fight against the Soviets. The
document, which was released to the Associated Press in 2005
through a Freedom of Information request, was the first
definitive statement by the Pentagon that the mastermind of 9/
11 was at Tora Bora during the American bombing before slipping
away into Pakistan.
Another confirmation came from the senior CIA paramilitary
commander in Afghanistan at the time. Gary Berntsen was working
at the CIA's counterterrorist center in October 2001 when his
boss summoned him to the front office and told him, ``Gary, I
want you killing the enemy immediately.'' Berntsen left the
next day for Afghanistan, where he assumed leadership of the
CIA's paramilitary operation against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
His primary target was bin Laden, and he was confident that the
Al Qaeda leader would make his last stand at Tora Bora. His
suspicions were confirmed when he learned bin Laden's voice had
been intercepted there.
From the outset, Berntsen says he was skeptical about
relying on Afghan militias ``cobbled together at the last
minute'' to capture or kill the man who ordered the 9/11
attacks. ``I'd made it clear in my reports that our Afghan
allies were hardly anxious to get at al Qaeda in Tora Bora,''
he wrote in his own book, Jawbreaker, which was published in
late 2005. He also knew that the special operations troops and
CIA operatives on the scene were not enough to stop bin Laden
from escaping across the mountain passes. In the book, Berntsen
uses exclamation points to vent his fears that the most wanted
man in the world was about to slip out of our grasp.
``We needed U.S. soldiers on the ground!'' he wrote. ``I'd
sent my request for 800 U.S. Army Rangers and was still waiting
for a response. I repeated to anyone at headquarters who would
listen: We need Rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden
and his men is slipping away!!''
At one point, Berntsen recalled an argument at a CIA
guesthouse in Kabul with Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the commander
of U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan at the time.
Berntsen said he renewed his demand that American troops be
dispatched to Tora Bora immediately. Following orders from
Franks at U.S. Central Command (CentCom) headquarters at
MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, Dailey refused to
deploy U.S. troops, explaining that he feared alienating Afghan
allies.
``I don't give a damn about offending our allies!''
Berntsen shouted. ``I only care about eliminating al Qaeda and
delivering bin Laden's head in a box!''
Dailey said the military's position was firm and Berntsen
replied, ``Screw that!''
For those like Franks, who later maintained that bin Laden
might not have been at Tora Bora, Berntsen is respectfully
scornful. ``We could have ended it all there,'' he said in an
interview.
Berntsen's views were generally shared by Gary Schroen,
another senior CIA operative in Afghanistan. Schroen, who had
spent years cultivating ties to Afghanistan's opposition
elements, bemoaned the reliance on local tribal leaders to go
after bin Laden and guard escape routes. ``Unfortunately, many
of those people proved to be loyal to bin Laden and
sympathizers with the Taliban and they allowed the key guys to
escape,'' Schroen, who retired from the CIA, said in a
television interview in May 2005. He added that he had no doubt
that bin Laden was at Tora Bora.
Franks' second-in-command during the war, General DeLong,
was convinced that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. In his memoir,
Inside CentCom, DeLong described the massive, three-week
bombing campaign aimed at killing Al Qaeda fighters in their
caves at Tora Bora. ``We were hot on Osama bin Laden's trail,''
he wrote. ``He was definitely there when we hit the caves.
Every day during the bombing, Rumsfeld asked me, `Did we get
him? Did we get him?' I would have to answer that we didn't
know.'' The retired general said that intelligence suggested
bin Laden had been wounded during the bombings before he
escaped to Pakistan, a conclusion reached by numerous
journalists, too.
DeLong argued that large numbers of U.S. troops could not
be dispatched because the area surrounding Tora Bora was
controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and other
outsiders. But he recognized that the Pakistani Frontier Corps,
asked to block any escape attempt by bin Laden, was ill-
equipped for the job. ``To make matters worse, this tribal area
was sympathetic to bin Laden,'' he wrote. ``He was the richest
man in the area, and he had funded these people for years.''
The book was published in September 2004, a year after
DeLong retired from the Army. That fall, the failure to capture
or kill bin Laden had become an issue in the presidential
campaign. Franks had retired from the Army in 2003 and he often
defended the events at Tora Bora. On October 19, 2004, he wrote
an opinion article in The New York Times saying that
intelligence on the Al Qaeda leader's location had been
inconclusive. ``We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden
was at Tora Bora in December 2001,'' he wrote. ``Some
intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in
Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir.
Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many
of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin Laden was never
within our grasp.''
Two weeks after the Franks article was published and barely
two months after publication of his own book, DeLong reversed
the conclusion from his autobiography and echoed his former
boss in an opinion article on November 1 in The Wall Street
Journal. After defending the decision to rely heavily on local
militia and the Pakistani Frontier Corps, DeLong wrote:
``Finally, most people fail to realize that it is quite
possible that bin Laden was never in Tora Bora to begin with.
There exists no concrete intel to prove that he was there at
the time.''
DeLong said in an interview with committee staff that the
contradiction between his book and the opinion article was the
result of murky intelligence. ``What I put in the book was what
the intel said at the time,'' he said. ``The intel is not
always right. I read it that he was there. We even heard that
he was injured. Later intel was that he may or may not have
been there. Did anybody have eyeballs on him? No. The intel
stated that he was there at the time, but we got shot in the
face by bad intel many times.''
DeLong amplified the reasons for not sending American
troops after bin Laden. ``The real reason we didn't go in with
U.S. troops was that we hadn't had the election yet,'' he said
in the staff interview, a reference to the installation of
Hamid Karzai as the interim leader of Afghanistan. ``We didn't
want to have U.S. forces fighting before Karzai was in power.
We wanted to create a stable country and that was more
important than going after bin Laden at the time.''
``A Controversial Fight''
Military and intelligence officers at Tora Bora have
provided ample evidence that bin Laden was there. Al Qaeda
detainees have maintained that he was there. And the Pentagon's
own summary of evidence in the case against a former senior
jihadi commander at Guantanamo Bay concluded the detainee
helped bin Laden escape. But the most authoritative and
definitive unclassified government document on bin Laden's
location in December 2001 is the official history of the United
States Special Operations Command.
The Special Operations Command, based alongside CentCom at
MacDill Air Force Base, oversees the special forces of the
Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. The heavy reliance on
special operations forces during the first stages of the Afghan
campaign meant that the command played a central role in
executing the war plan. Its units included the Delta Force team
on the scene at Tora Bora. In preparing the official history of
the command, a team of historians working for the command
interviewed military and intelligence officials from every
branch of the armed forces. The unclassified version of the
history was published in 2007 and includes a lengthy section on
the operations at Tora Bora.
The section opens by saying that bin Laden and a large
contingent of Al Qaeda troops had fled the area around Kabul
for Nangahar Province and its provincial capital, Jalalabad, in
early November. ``Analysts within both the CIA and CentCom
correctly speculated that UBL would make a stand along the
northern peaks of the Spin Ghar Mountains at a place then
called Tora Gora,'' says the history. ``Tora Bora, as it was
redubbed in December, had been a major stronghold of AQ for
years and provided routes into Pakistan.'' The history said bin
Laden had ``undoubtedly'' chosen to make his last stand there
prior to the onset of winter, along with between 500 and 2,000
others, before escaping into Pakistan.
In the concluding passage assessing the battle of Tora
Bora, the historians from the Special Operations Command wrote:
``What has since been determined with reasonable certainty was
that UBL was indeed at Tora Bora in December 2001. All source
reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9-14
December. The fact that SOF (special operations forces) came as
close to capturing or killing UBL as U.S. forces have to date
makes Tora Bora a controversial fight. 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 UBL most likely took.''
Franks declined to respond to any questions about the
discrepancies about bin Laden's location or the conclusion of
the Special Operations Command historians. ``We really don't
have time for this,'' one of his aides, retired Col. Michael T.
Hayes, wrote in an email to the committee staff. ``Focused on
the future, not the past. Gen Franks made his decisions, based
on the intel at the time.''
2. The Afghan Model: A Flawed Masterpiece
Or Just Flawed?
Writing in Foreign Affairs in the spring of 2002, the
military analyst Michael O'Hanlon declared Operation
Enduring Freedom ``a masterpiece of military creativity
and finesse.'' The operation had been designed on the
fly and O'Hanlon praised Rumsfeld, Franks and CIA
Director George Tenet for devising a war plan that
combined limited American power and the Afghan
opposition to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda with only
30 U.S. casualties in the first five months. But
O'Hanlon tempered his praise, calling the plan ``a
flawed masterpiece'' because of the failure to capture
or kill bin Laden and other enemy leaders. The
resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in recent years,
and the turmoil they have wrought in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, raise the question of whether the plan was a
flawed masterpiece--or simply flawed.
The Afghan model required elite teams of American commandos
and CIA paramilitary operatives to form alliances with Afghans
who opposed the Taliban and had the militias to help topple the
religious fundamentalists. Some of these Afghans were
legitimate ethnic and tribal leaders who chafed at the
restrictions of the Taliban and the sanctuary it provided to Al
Qaeda. Others were allies of convenience, Taliban rivals who
held power by force and paid their men by collecting tolls and
taxes on legitimate commerce and trafficking in heroin. By
providing money and weapons, the U.S. forces helped the
warlords destroy their rivals and expand their personal power.
Many later entered the Afghan government and remain influential
figures. The strategy was a short cut to victory that would
have consequences for long-term stability in Afghanistan.
When it came to bin Laden, the special operations forces
relied on two relatively minor warlords from the Jalalabad
area. Haji Hazarat Ali had a fourth-grade education and a
reputation as a bully. He had fought the Soviets as a teenager
in the 1980s and later joined the Taliban for a time. The
other, Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, was a wealthy drug smuggler who
had been persuaded by the United States to return from France.
Ghamsharik also had fought the Soviets, but when the Taliban
came to power, he had gone into exile in France. Together, they
fielded a force of about 2,000 men, but there were questions
from the outset about the competence and loyalties of the
fighters. The two warlords and their men distrusted each other
and both groups appeared to distrust their American allies.
The Delta Force commandos had doubts about the willingness
and ability of the Afghan militias to wage a genuine assault on
Tora Bora almost from the outset. Those concerns were
underscored each time the Afghans insisted on retreating from
the mountains as darkness fell. But the suspicions were
confirmed by events that started on the afternoon of December
11.
Haji Ghamsharik approached Fury and told him that Al Qaeda
fighters wanted to surrender. He said all they needed to end
the siege was a 12-hour ceasefire to allow the fighters to
climb down the mountains and turn in their weapons. Intercepted
radio chatter seemed to confirm that the fighters had lost
their resolve under the relentless bombing and wanted to give
up, but Fury remained suspicious.
``This is the greatest day in the history of Afghanistan,''
Ghamsharik told Fury.
``Why is that?'' asked the dubious American officer.
``Because al Qaeda is no more,'' he said. ``Bin Laden is
finished.''
The Special Operations Command history records that CentCom
refused to back the ceasefire, suspecting a ruse, but it said
the special ops forces agreed reluctantly to an overnight pause
in the bombing to avoid killing the surrendering Al Qaeda
fighters. Ghamsharik negotiated by radio with representatives
of Al Qaeda. He initially told Fury that a large number of
Algerians wanted to surrender. Then he said that he could turn
over the entire Al Qaeda leadership. Fury's suspicions
increased at such a bold promise. By the morning of December
12, no Al Qaeda fighters had appeared and the Delta Force
commander concluded that the whole episode was a hoax.
Intelligence estimates are that as many as 800 Al Qaeda
fighters escaped that night, but bin Laden stuck it out.
Despite the unreliability of his Afghan allies, Fury
refused to give up. He plotted ways to use his 40 Delta Force
soldiers and the handful of other special ops troops under his
command to go after bin Laden on their own. One of the plans
was to go at bin Laden from the one direction he would never
anticipate, the southern side of the mountains. ``We want to
come in on the back door,'' Fury explained later, pointing on a
map to the side of the Tora Bora enclave facing Pakistan. The
peaks there rose to 14,000 feet and the valleys and precipitous
mountain passes were already deep in snow. ``The original plan
that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force
wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the
Pakistan side, over the mountains and come in and get a drop on
bin Laden from behind.'' The audacious assault was nixed
somewhere up the chain of command. Undeterred, Fury suggested
dropping hundreds of landmines along the passes leading to
Pakistan to block bin Laden's escape. ``First guy blows his leg
off, everybody else stops,'' he said. ``That allows aircraft
overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out
there. Okay, there is a big large group of Al Qaeda moving
south. They can engage that.'' That proposal was rejected, too.
About the time Fury was desperately concocting scenarios
for going after bin Laden and getting rejections from up the
chain of command, Franks was well into planning for the next
war--the invasion of Iraq.
A Shift in Attention and Resources
On November 21, 2001, President Bush put his arm on Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld as they were leaving a National Security
Council meeting at the White House. ``I need to see you,'' the
President said. It was 72 days after the 9/11 attacks and just
a week after the fall of Kabul. But Bush already had new plans.
According to Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack, the
President said to Rumsfeld: ``What kind of a war plan do you
have for Iraq? How do you feel about the war plan for Iraq?''
Then the President told Woodward he recalled saying: ``Let's
get started on this. And get Tommy Franks looking at what it
would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we
have to.'' Back at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld convened a meeting of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draft a message for Franks asking
for a new assessment of a war with Iraq. The existing
operations plan had been created in 1998 and it hinged on
assembling the kind of massive international coalition used in
Desert Storm in 1991.
In his memoir, American General, Franks later described
getting the November 21 telephone call from Rumsfeld relaying
the President's orders while he was sitting in his office at
MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. Franks and one of his aides
were working on air support for the Afghan units being
assembled to push into the mountains surrounding Tora Bora.
Rumsfeld said the President wanted options for war with Iraq.
Franks said the existing plan was out of date and that a new
one should include lessons about precision weapons and the use
of special operations forces learned in Afghanistan.
``Okay, Tom,'' Rumsfeld said, according to Franks. ``Please
dust it off and get back to me next week.''
Franks described his reaction to Rumsfeld's orders this
way: ``Son of a bitch. No rest for the weary.''
For critics of the Bush administration's commitment to
Afghanistan, the shift in focus just as Franks and his senior
aides were literally working on plans for the attacks on Tora
Bora represents a dramatic turning point that allowed a
sustained victory in Afghanistan to slip through our fingers.
Almost immediately, intelligence and military planning
resources were transferred to begin planning on the next war in
Iraq. Though Fury, Berntsen and others in the field did not
know what was happening back at CentCom, the drain in resources
and shift in attention would affect them and the future course
of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.
``We're Going to Lose Our Prey''
In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, former CIA
Director Tenet said it was evident from the start that aerial
bombing would not be enough to get bin Laden at Tora Bora.
Troops needed to be in the caves themselves, he wrote, but the
Afghan militiamen were ``distinctly reluctant'' to put
themselves in harm's way and there were not enough Americans on
the scene. He said that senior CIA officials lobbied hard for
inserting U.S. troops. Henry Crumpton, the head of special
operations for the CIA's counterterrorism operation and chief
of its Afghan strategy, made direct requests to Franks.
Crumpton had told him that the back door to Pakistan was open
and urged Franks to move more than 1,000 Marines who had set up
a base near Kandahar to Tora Bora to block escape routes. But
the CentCom commander rejected the idea, saying it would take
weeks to get a large enough U.S. contingent on the scene and
bin Laden might disappear in the meantime.
At the end of November, Crumpton went to the White House to
brief President Bush and Vice President Cheney and repeated the
message that he had delivered to Franks. Crumpton warned the
President that the Afghan campaign's primary goal of capturing
bin Laden was in jeopardy because of the military's reliance on
Afghan militias at Tora Bora. Crumpton showed the President
where Tora Bora was located in the White Mountains and
described the caves and tunnels that riddled the region.
Crumpton questioned whether the Pakistani forces would be able
to seal off the escape routes and pointed out that the promised
Pakistani troops had not arrived yet. In addition, the CIA
officer told the President that the Afghan forces at Tora Bora
were ``tired and cold'' and ``they're just not invested in
getting bin Laden.''
According to author Ron Suskind in The One Percent
Solution, Crumpton sensed that his earlier warnings to Franks
and others at the Pentagon had not been relayed the President.
So Crumpton went further, telling Bush that ``we're going to
lose our prey if we're not careful.'' He recommended that the
Marines or other U.S. troops be rushed to Tora Bora.
``How bad off are these Afghani forces, really?'' asked
Bush. ``Are they up to the job?
``Definitely not, Mr. President,'' Crumpton replied.
``Definitely not.''
Flight from Tora Bora
On December 14, the day bin Laden finished his will, Dalton
Fury finally convinced Ali and his men to stay overnight in one
of the canyons that they had captured during daylight. Over the
next three days, the Afghan militia and their American advisers
moved steadily through the canyons, calling in airstrikes and
taking out lingering pockets of fighters. The resistance seemed
to have vanished, prompting Ali to declare victory on December
17. Most of the Tora Bora complex was abandoned and many of the
caves and tunnels were buried in debris. Only about 20
stragglers were taken prisoner. The consensus was that Al Qaeda
fighters who had survived the fierce bombing had escaped into
Pakistan or melted into the local population. Bin Laden was
nowhere to be found. Two days later, Fury and his Delta Force
colleagues left Tora Bora, hoping that someone would eventually
find bin Laden buried in one of the caves.
There was no body because bin Laden did not die at Tora
Bora. Later U.S. intelligence reports and accounts by
journalists and others said that he and a contingent of
bodyguards departed Tora Bora on December 16. With help from
Afghans and Pakistanis who had been paid in advance, the group
made its way on foot and horseback across the mountain passes
and into Pakistan without encountering any resistance.
The Special Operations Command history noted that there
were not enough U.S. troops to prevent the escape,
acknowledging that the failure to capture or kill bin Laden
made Tora Bora a controversial battle. But Franks argued that
Tora was a success and he praised both the Afghan militias and
the Pakistanis who were supposed to have protected the border.
``I think it was a good operation,'' he said in an interview
for the PBS show Frontline on the first anniversary of the
Afghan war. ``Many people have said, `Well, gosh, you know bin
Laden got away.' I have yet to see anything that proves bin
Laden or whomever was there. That's not to say they weren't,
but I've not seen proof that they were there.''
Bin Laden himself later acknowledged that he was at Tora
Bora, boasting about how he and Zawahiri survived the heavy
bombing along with 300 fighters before escaping. ``The
bombardment was round-the-clock and the warplanes continued to
fly over us day and night,'' he said in an audio tape released
on February 11, 2003. ``Planes poured their lava on us,
particularly after accomplishing their main missions in
Afghanistan.''
In the aftermath of bin Laden's escape, there were
accusations that militiamen working for the two warlords hired
by the CIA to get him had helped the Al Qaeda leader cross into
Pakistan. Michael Scheuer, who spent 15 years working on
Afghanistan at the CIA and at one point headed the agency's bin
Laden task force, was sharply critical of the war plan from the
start because of its reliance on Afghan allies of dubious
loyalty. ``Everyone who was cognizant of how Afghan operations
worked would have told Mr. Tenet that he was nuts,'' Scheuer
said later. ``And as it turned out, he was. ... The people we
bought, the people Mr. Tenet said we would own, let Osama bin
Laden escape from Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan into
Pakistan.''
The American forces never had a clear idea how many Al
Qaeda fighters were arrayed against them. Estimates ranged as
high as 3,000 and as low as 500, but the consensus put the
figure around 1,000--at least until so many escaped during the
fake surrender. Regardless of the exact number of enemy
fighters, assaulting Tora Bora would have been difficult and
probably would have cost many American and Afghan lives. The
Special Operations Command's history offered this tightly
worded assessment: ``With large numbers of well-supplied,
fanatical AQ troops dug into extensive fortified positions,
Tora Bora appeared to be an extremely tough target.''
For Dalton Fury, the reward would have been worth the risk.
``In general, I definitely think it was worth the risk to the
force to assault Tora Bora for Osama bin Laden,'' he told the
committee staff. ``What other target out there, then or now,
could be more important to our nation's struggle in the global
war on terror?''
3. An Alternative Battle Plan
Rather than allowing bin Laden to escape, Franks and
Rumsfeld could have deployed American troops already in
Afghanistan on or near the border with Pakistan to
block the exits while simultaneously sending special
operations forces and their Afghan allies up the
mountains to Tora Bora. The complex mission would have
been risky, but analysis shows that it was well within
the reach and capability of the American military.
In the years following the Vietnam War, the U.S. military
developed a doctrine intended to place new constraints on when
the country went to war and to avoid a repeat of the disastrous
and prolonged conflict in Southeast Asia. In its most
simplistic form, the doctrine focused on applying overwhelming
and disproportionate military force to achieve concrete
political goals. It called for mobilizing the military and
political resources necessary for ending conflicts quickly and
leaving no loose ends. The concept was known informally as the
Powell doctrine, named for General Colin Powell, who outlined
his vision at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
The Afghan model constructed by Rumsfeld and Franks in
response to the attacks on September 11 stood the Powell
doctrine on its head. The new template was designed to deliver
a swift and economical knockout blow through airpower and the
limited application of troops on the ground. Instead of
overwhelming force, the Afghan model depended on airpower and
on highly mobile special operations forces and CIA paramilitary
teams, working in concert with opposition warlords and tribal
leaders. It was designed as unconventional warfare led by
indigenous forces, and Franks put a ceiling of 10,000 on the
number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Despite the valor of the
limited American forces, the doctrine failed to achieve one of
its most concrete political goals--eliminating the leadership
of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The result has turned out to be
nothing close to decisive victory followed by quick withdrawal.
Assembling the size force required to apply overwhelming
force across a country as large and rugged as Afghanistan would
have taken many weeks. The only country in the region likely to
provide the major bases required to prepare an invasion by tens
of thousands of troops was Pakistan, and political
sensitivities there would have made full cooperation both
doubtful and risky for its leadership. The Pakistanis provided
limited bases for U.S. operations in the early stages of
planning and the invasion; the footprint was kept small to
avoid a public outcry. But soldiers and scholars alike have
argued that there were sufficient troops available in
Afghanistan and nearby Uzbekistan to mount a genuine assault on
Osama bin Laden's position at Tora Bora. And they could have
been augmented within about a week by reinforcements from the
Persian Gulf and the United States.
The most detailed description of the assault option was
laid out in an article in the journal Security Studies by Peter
John Paul Krause of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Entitled ``The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S.
Operations at Tora Bora,'' the article described a large-scale
operation called a block and sweep. The plan is simple enough:
One group of American forces would block the likely exit
avenues to Pakistan on the south side of Tora Bora while a
second contingent moved against Al Qaeda's positions from the
north. Simplicity should not be mistaken for sure success:
Variables like weather conditions, the effectiveness of the
remaining Al Qaeda fighters and the ability to close the escape
routes would have made the mission risky. The dangers of
attacking fortified positions manned by hardened fighters would
likely have resulted in significant U.S. casualties.
The assault would not have required thousands of
conventional forces. A large number of troops would have taken
too long to deploy and alerted Al Qaeda to the approaching
attack. ``My opinion is that bin Laden would have left even
earlier as soon as he received word that the U.S. troops were
surrounding him,'' Fury told the committee staff. ``I think he
only stayed as long as he did because he thought the mujahedin
would not aggressively pursue him.''
The preferred choice would have been a small, agile force
capable of deploying quickly and quietly and trained to operate
in difficult terrain against unconventional enemies. The U.S.
military has large numbers of soldiers and Marines who meet
those criteria--Delta Force, Green Berets, Navy Seals, Marine
special operations units and Army Rangers and paratroopers. The
effectiveness of U.S. special operations commandos, even in
small numbers, was demonstrated on December 10. Two U.S.
soldiers were able to get close enough to the Al Qaeda
positions to call in air strikes for 17 straight hours, forcing
enemy fighters to retreat and enabling the Afghan militia to
capture key terrain near bin Laden's suspected location. It was
an example of what a larger U.S. force could have accomplished,
with support from available air power.
The CIA's Berntsen had requested a battalion of Rangers,
about 800 soldiers, and been turned down by CentCom. A
battalion would have been a substantial increase in the U.S.
presence, but it probably would not have been enough to both
assault the stronghold from the north and block the exits on
the south. Krause estimated that as few as 500 troops could
have carried out the initial northern assault, with
reinforcements arriving over the course of the battle. At least
twice as many troops would have been required to execute the
blocking mission on the southern, eastern and western reaches
of Tora Bora. Krause proposed spreading about 1,500 troops to
capture or kill anyone trying to flee. O'Hanlon estimated that
closing off escape routes to Pakistan would have required 1,000
to 3,000 American troops. In all, an initial force of roughly
2,000 to 3,000 troops would have been sufficient to begin the
block-and-sweep mission, with reinforcements following as time
and circumstances allowed.
Troops Were Ready to Go
Assembling the troops to augment the handful of special ops
commandos under Fury's leadership at Tora Bora would have been
a manageable task. Franks had set the ceiling of 10,000 U.S.
troops to maintain a light footprint. Still, within that number
there were enough ready and willing to go after bin Laden. In
late November, about the time U.S. intelligence placed bin
Laden squarely at Tora Bora, more than 1,000 members of the
15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units, among the military's
most mobile arms, established a base southwest of Kandahar,
only a few hours flight away. They were primarily interdicting
traffic and supporting the special operations teams working
with Afghan militias. Another 1,000 troops from the Army's 10th
Mountain Division were split between a base in southern
Uzbekistan and Bagram Air Base, a short helicopter flight from
Tora Bora. The Army troops were engaged mainly in military
police functions, according to reports at the time.
Both forces are trained in unconventional warfare and could
have been redeployed rapidly for an assault. Lt. Col. Paul
Lacamera, commander of a 10th Mountain battalion, later said
that his men had been prepared to deploy anywhere in
Afghanistan since mid-November. ``We weren't just sitting there
digging holes and looking out,'' said Lacamera, whose actions
in a later assault on Al Qaeda forces won him a Silver Star.
``We were training for potential fights because eventually it
was going to come to that.''
The commander of the Marines outside Kandahar, Brig. Gen.
James N. Mattis, told a journalist that his troops could seal
off Tora Bora, but his superiors rejected the plan. Everyone
knew that such an operation would have conflicted with the
Afghan model laid down by Franks and Rumsfeld. But there were
other reasons to hesitate. One former officer told the
committee staff that the inability to get sufficient medical-
evacuation helicopters into the rough terrain was a major
stumbling block for those who considered trying to push for the
assault. He also said there were worries that bad weather would
ground transport helicopters or, worse, knock them out of the
sky.
In addition to the troops in country, a battalion of Army
Rangers was stationed in the Persian Gulf country of Oman, and
200 of them had demonstrated their abilities by parachuting
into an airfield near Kandahar at night in October. In Krause's
analysis, a battalion of about 800 soldiers from the 82nd
Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could have
been deployed to Tora Bora in less than a week, covering the
7,000 miles in C-17 transport aircraft.
No one should underestimate the logistical difficulty and
danger of deploying even specially trained troops into hostile
territory at altitudes of 7,000 to 10,000 feet. Landing zones
for helicopters would likely have come under fire from Al Qaeda
positions and drop zones for paratroopers were few and far
between in the jagged terrain. But Chinook helicopters, the
work horse for rapid deployments, proved capable of carrying
combat troops above 11,000-foot mountain ranges as part of
Operation Anaconda, a similar block-and-sweep mission carried
out in February 2002 in eastern Afghanistan.
Former U.S. military officers said that sending American
troops into Tora Bora was discussed at various times in late
November and early December of 2001. The CIA's Afghan chief,
Hank Crumpton, made specific requests to Franks for U.S. troops
and urged President Bush not to rely on Afghan militias and
Pakistani paramilitary troops to do the job. CentCom went so
far as to develop a plan to put several thousand U.S. troops
into Tora Bora. Commanders estimated that deploying 1,000 to
3,000 American troops would have required several hundred
airlift flights by helicopters over a week or more.
DeLong defended the decision not to deploy large numbers of
American troops. ``We didn't have the lift,'' he told the
committee staff. ``We didn't have the medical capabilities. The
further we went down the road, the easier the decision got. We
wanted Afghanistan to be peaceful for Karzai to take over.
Right or not, that was the thinking behind what we did.''
The Afghan model proved effective in some instances,
particularly when Afghan opposition forces working with
American advisers were arrayed against poorly trained Taliban
foot soldiers. The precision bombs and overwhelming airpower
also played a major role in dispersing the Taliban forces and
opening the way for the rapid takeover of the country, though
critics now say scattering the Taliban simply allowed them to
regroup later. In the early days at Tora Bora, the light
footprint allowed a handful of CIA and special operations
operatives to guide bombs that killed dozens, if not hundreds,
of Al Qaeda fighters. But the model was ineffective when it
came to motivating opposition militiamen of questionable skills
and doubtful resolve to carry the fight to the biggest
concentration of Al Qaeda fighters of the war, particularly
when the jihadis were battling to protect their leader. Fewer
than 100 special operations force soldiers and CIA operatives
were unable to turn the tide against those odds.
Some critics said bin Laden escaped because the United
States relied too heavily on Afghan militias to carry the fight
forward at Tora Bora and on Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier
Corps to block any escape. As Michael O'Hanlon pointed out, our
allies did not have the same incentives to stop bin Laden and
his associates as American troops. Nor did they have the
technology and training to carry out such a difficult mission.
The responsibility for allowing the most wanted man in the
world to virtually disappear into thin air lies with the
American commanders who refused to commit the necessary U.S.
soldiers and Marines to finish the job.
The same shortage of U.S. troops allowed Mullah Mohammed
Omar and other Taliban leaders to escape. A semi-literate
leader who fled Kandahar on a motorbike, Mullah Omar has re-
emerged at the helm of the Taliban-led insurgency, which has
grown more sophisticated and lethal in recent years and now
controls swaths of Afghanistan. The Taliban, which is aligned
with a loose network of other militant groups and maintains
ties to Al Qaeda, has established shadow governments in many of
Afghanistan's provinces and is capable of mounting increasingly
complex attacks on American and NATO forces. Bruce Riedel, a
former CIA officer who helped develop the Obama
administration's Afghan policy, recently referred to the
mullah's return to power ``one of the most remarkable military
comebacks in modern history.''
Ironically, one of the guiding principles of the Afghan
model was to avoid immersing the United States in a protracted
insurgency by sending in too many troops and stirring up anti-
American sentiment. In the end, the unwillingness to bend the
operational plan to deploy the troops required to take
advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to
kill or capture bin Laden paved the way for exactly what we had
hoped to avoid--a protracted insurgency that has cost more
lives than anyone estimates would have been lost in a full-
blown assault on Tora Bora. Further, the dangerous contagion of
rising violence and instability in Afghanistan has spread to
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed ally of the United States which is
now wracked by deadly terrorist bombings as it conducts its own
costly military campaign against a domestic, Taliban-related
insurgency.
The Price of Failure
Osama bin Laden's demise would not have erased the
worldwide threat from extremists. But the failure to kill or
capture him has allowed bin Laden to exert a malign influence
over events in the region and nearly 60 countries where his
followers have established extremist groups. History shows that
terrorist groups are invariably much stronger with their
charismatic leaders than without them, and the ability of bin
Laden and his terrorist organization to recover from the loss
of their Afghan sanctuary reinforces the lesson.
Eight years after its expulsion from Afghanistan, Al Qaeda
has reconstituted itself and bin Laden has survived to inspire
a new generation of extremists who have adopted and adapted the
Al Qaeda doctrine and are now capable of attacking from any
number of places. The impact of this threat is greatest in
Pakistan, where Al Qaeda's continued presence and resources
have emboldened domestic extremists waging an increasingly
bloody insurrection that threatens the stability of the
government and the region. Its training camps also have spawned
new attacks outside the region--militants trained in Pakistan
were tied to the July 2005 transit system bombings in London
and several aborted plots elsewhere in Europe.
Closer to home, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says
two recent suspected plots disrupted by U.S. authorities
involved long-time residents of the United States who had
traveled to Pakistan and trained at bases affiliated with Al
Qaeda. One of the plots involved two Chicago men accused in
late October of planning to attack the Danish newspaper that
published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. In the other, an
Afghan-born man who drove a shuttle bus in Denver was arrested
on suspicion of plans to detonate improvised explosives in the
United States. Court papers said the man had been trained in
weapons and explosives in Pakistan and had made nine pages of
handwritten notes on how to make and handle bombs.
For American taxpayers, the financial costs of the conflict
have been staggering. The first eight years cost an estimated
$243 billion and about $70 billion has been appropriated for
the current fiscal year--a figure that does not include any
increase in troops. But the highest price is being paid on a
daily basis in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where 68,000 American
troops and hundreds of U.S. civilians are engaged in the ninth
year of a protracted conflict and the Afghan people endure a
third decade of violence. So far, about 950 U.S. troops and
nearly 600 allied soldiers have lost their lives in Operation
Enduring Freedom, a conflict in which the outcome remains in
grave doubt in large part because the extremists behind the
violence were not eliminated in 2001.
Notes
executive summary
1. One 15,000-pound bomb: ``Daisy Cutter bomb produced flurry of
intel,'' United Press International, December 12, 2001;
Benjamin Lambeth, Air Power Against Terror: America's
Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom, p 149 (RAND, Santa
Monica, 2005).
2. Bin Laden expected to die: ``Al-Majallah Obtains Bin Laden's
Will,'' Al-Majallah, October 27, 2002.
3. Fewer than 100: Accounts of the small American troop presence and
Tora Bora and the requests for reinforcements are
plentiful. The CIA commander in Afghanistan at the time,
Gary Berntsen, wrote in his book Jawbreaker: The Attack on
Bin Laden and Al Qaeda (Crown, New York, 2005) about his
requests for 800 Army Rangers and his disputes with the
military over its refusal to provide the troops. In his
book, Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of
the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man, (St. Martin's
Press, New York, 2008) Dalton Fury said one of the key
mistakes by U.S. commanders was not committing enough
conventional troops to the battle at Tora Bora and not
using U.S. forces to seal the escape routes. Writing an
article, entitled ``Lost at Tora Bora,'' in The New York
Times Magazine on September 11, 2005, Mary Anne Weaver said
that Brig. Gen. James Mattis, the commander of at least
1,200 Marines at a base outside Kandahar in November 2001,
was convinced his troops could seal off Tora Bora. Michael
E. O'Hanlon said the U.S. Central Command made preparations
for sending several thousand troops to Tora Bora but
rejected the plan in ``A Flawed Masterpiece,'' Foreign
Affairs, Volume 81 No. 3 (March/April 2002) p.57-58.
4. On December 16: Berntsen, pp 307-308. The date of bin Laden's
escape remains imprecise. In his book, Fury concluded that
bin Laden had fled Tora Bora by December 17, when U.S.
troops entered the complex. Peter Bergen, the last American
to interview bin Laden and highly regarded authority on Al
Qaeda, told the committee staff that bin Laden left around
December 14. Other accounts put the date on or around
December 16, the end of Ramadan.
5. Rumsfeld said at the time: O'Hanlon, p 57. For a thorough
discussion of the Afghan model and its reliance on the CIA
and special operations forces, see Henry A. Crumpton,
``Intelligence and War 2001-2002,'' Transforming U.S.
Intelligence (Georgetown University Press, 2005).
6. There were enough: Peter John Paul Krause, ``The Last Good
Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora,''
Security Studies, pp 644-684, Volume 17, 2008. Krause's
well-documented article is the most thorough examination of
the alternatives available to military commanders at Tora
Bora. For a broader overview of the Afghan model, see
Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare:
Implications for Army and Defense Policy (Carlisle
Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War
College, 2003).
7. For example, CIA: Committee staff interview with Fury, October
2009; Berntsen, pp 314-315.
8. Franks' second-in-command: Michael DeLong, Inside CentCom: The
Unvarnished Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
pp 57-58 (Regnery Publishing, Chicago, 2004).
9. ``All source reporting: U.S. Special Operations Command History,
p 101, sixth edition, March 2008 (www.socom.mil/SOCOMHome/
Documents/history6thedition.pdf). The history was first
published in 2007, but the internet link here is to the
most recent edition; the section on Tora Bora is unchanged
from the 2007 version.
10. In the middle of August: Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins,
The Man From Pakistan: The True Story of the World's Most
Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler, pp 263-264 (Twelve Books, New
York, 2007). George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My
Years at the CIA, p 266 (HarperCollins, New York, 2007).
1. flight to tora bora
11. The first reports: The 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of
the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the
United States, pp 259-260.
12. Only a handful of senators: U.S. Senate records and committee
staff interview.
13. Less than a month: The 9/11 Commission Report, pp 261-263.
14. Bin Laden's movements: Hamid Mir, ``Osama claims he has nukes: If
US uses N-arms it will get same response,'' Dawn, November
10, 2001.The article included a photo of Mir with bin
Laden. Hamid Mir, ``How Osama bin Laden escaped death four
times after 9/11,'' The News, September 11, 2007. Philip
Smucker, ``A day-by-day account of how Osama bin Laden
eluded the world's most powerful military machine,'' The
Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2002.
15. After pressure: Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in
the American Century, pp 461-462 (The Penguin Press, New
York, 2008).
16. U.S. intelligence had: Tenet, p 225.
17. Outside experts like: Committee staff interview with Peter
Bergen, October 2009.
18. ``He's got a large: ABC News Prime Time, Diane Sawyer interview
with Vice President Dick Cheney, November 29, 2001.
19. Bin Laden's presence: Fury; staff interviews with Fury and one of
his colleagues who requested anonymity because he is not
authorized to speak about classified matters, October and
November 2009.
20. Fury, who still uses: Staff interview with Fury.
21. Another special: Staff interview with the Delta Force participant
referenced in Note 19.
22. Afghan villagers: Staff interview with Fury. In another staff
interview, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer confirmed
elements of the information, including the agency's use of
push-button GPS devices.
23. On December 9: ``Daisy Cutter bomb produced flurry of intel;''
Lambeth, p 149; Fury, p 153, p 225; Berntsen, p 295.
24. But later reports: Staff interview with the former CIA counter-
terrorism officer who described the interrogation report of
a detainee from Tora Bora.
25. At one point: Staff interview with Fury; various press reports.
26. ``There is no doubt: Fury, p 281, a view he repeated in his staff
interview.
27. A ``summary of: ``U.S. holding man who allegedly helped terror
leader flee Tora Bora,'' Associated Press, March 23, 2005.
28. Another confirmation: Berntsen, p 86.
29. ``We needed U.S. soldiers: Ibid., pp 306-307.
30. ``We could have: Richard Leiby, ``Knocking on Osama's Cave
Door,'' The Washington Post, February 16, 2006.
31. ``Unfortunately, many: NBC News Meet the Press, Tim Russert
interview with Gary Schroen, May 10, 2005.
32. In his memoir: DeLong, pp 56-59.
33. ``To make matters: Ibid.
34. On October 19: Tommy Franks, ``War of Words'', The New York
Times, October 19, 2004.
35. Two weeks after: Michael DeLong, ``Setting the Record Straight on
Tora Bora,'' The Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2004.
36. DeLong said: Committee staff interview with DeLong, October 2009.
37. The section opens: U.S. Special Operations Command History, p 97.
38. In the concluding: Ibid., p 101.
39. Franks declined: E-mail response from Michael T. Hayes,
admin@tommy franks.com, October 27, 2009.
2. the afghan model: a flawed masterpiece or just flawed?
40. Writing in Foreign Affairs: O'Hanlon, pp 47-63.
41. When it came: Weaver, ``Lost at Tora Bora;'' Smucker, ``A day-by-
day account of how Osama bin Laden eluded the world's most
powerful military machine.''
42. Haji Ghamsharik: Fury, pp 217-218.
43. The Special Operations: U.S. Special Operations Command History,
p 100; staff interview with Fury.
44. Despite the unreliability: Staff interview with Fury; CBS New 60
Minutes, ``Elite Officers Recalls Bin Laden Hunt,'' October
5, 2008.
45. According to Bob: Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, p 8 (Simon &
Shuster, New York, 2008).
46. In his memoir: Tommy Franks, American Soldier, p 315 (Regan
Books, New York, 2004).
47. In his memoir: Tenet, pp 226-227.
48. According to author: Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep
Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, pp 58-
59 (Simon & Shuster, New York, 2006).
49. On December 14: Fury, pp 270-275.
50. ``I think it was: PBS Frontline, ``Campaign Against Terror,''
October 2, 2002.
51. Bin Laden himself: Bin Laden audio and translation provided by
the Intel Center at http://www.intelcenter.com.
52. ``Everyone who was: PBS Frontline, ``Campaign Against Terror.''
53. The Special Operations: U.S. Special Operations Command History,
p 97.
54. ``In general: Staff interview with Fury.
3. an alternative plan
55. In the years following: Michael A. Cohen, ``The Powell Doctrine's
Enduring Relevance,'' World Politics Review, July 22, 2009.
56. The most detailed: Krause, ``The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment
of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora.''
57. ``My opinion: Staff interview with Fury.
58. The effectiveness of U.S. special: U.S. Special Operations
Command History, p 100.
59. Krause proposed: Krause, pp 657-661.
60. O'Hanlon estimated: O'Hanlon, p 57.
61. Assembling the troops: Ibid., p 53, 58; Krause, pp 655-657;
various press accounts.
62. Lt. Col. Paul Lacamera: Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda's Great Escape,
p 83 (Potomac Books, Washington DC, 2004).
63. The commander of the Marines: Weaver, ``Lost at Tora Bora.'' The
Pentagon declined to make General Mattis, who remains on
active duty, available to the committee for an interview.
64. One former officer: Staff interview with DeLong.
65. Former U.S. military: Committee staff interviews with former
intelligence and military officers who requested anonymity
because the matter remains classified, October and November
2009.
66. DeLong defended: Staff interview with DeLong.
67. Bruce Riedel: Scott Shane, ``A Dogged Taliban Chief Rebounds,
Vexing U.S.,'' The New York Times, October 11, 2009.
68. Closer to home: David Johnston and Eric Schmitt, ``Small
Terrorism Plots Pose Threat, Officials Say,'' The New York
Times, November 1, 2009.
A P P E N D I X E S
----------
Appendix I.--``A Flawed Masterpiece,'' Michael E. O'Hanlon, Foreign
Affairs, March/April 2002
A Flawed Masterpiece\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ This article originally appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine,
May/June 2002, Volume 81, Number 3. It is reproduced here with
permission. Michael E. O'Hanlon is Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy
Studies at the Brookings Institution. His most recent book is Defense
Policy Choices for the Bush Administration, 2001-2005.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael E. O'Hanlon
__________
assessing the afghan campaign
Throughout most of the twentieth century, the U.S. armed forces
were seen as an overmuscled giant, able to win wars through brute
strength but often lacking in daring and cleverness. This basic
strategy worked during the two world wars, making the United States
relatively tough to challenge. But it failed in Vietnam, produced
mediocre results in Korea, and worked in the Persian Gulf War largely
because the terrain was ideally suited to American strengths.
What a difference a new century makes. Operation Enduring Freedom
has been, for the most part, a masterpiece of military creativity and
finesse. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Central Command
(centcom) head General Tommy Franks, and Director of Central
Intelligence George Tenet devised a plan for using limited but well-
chosen types of American power in conjunction with the Afghan
opposition to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda. Secretary of State Colin
Powell helped persuade Pakistan to sever its ties with the Taliban,
work with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, provide the bases and
overflight rights needed by U.S. forces, and contribute to the general
war effort. Besides pushing his national security team to develop an
innovative and decisive war-fighting strategy, President George W. Bush
rallied the American people behind the war effort and established a
close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, making it far
easier for the United States to work militarily in Central Asia. The
U.S. effort to overthrow the Taliban deprived al Qaeda of its sanctuary
within Afghanistan and left its surviving leaders running for their
lives.\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Bob Woodward and Dan Balz, ``At Camp David, Advise and
Dissent,'' The Washington Post, January 31, 2002, p. A1; Bill Keller,
``The World According to Powell,'' The New York Times Magazine,
November 25, 2001, pp. 61-62.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
At their peak, the U.S. forces involved in the war effort numbered
no more than 60,000 (about half of which were in the Persian Gulf), and
Western allies added no more than 15,000. But the U.S.-led military
campaign has hardly been small in scale. By the end of January, the
United States had flown about 25,000 sorties in the air campaign and
dropped 18,000 bombs, including 10,000 precision munitions. The number
of U.S. sorties exceeded the number of U.S. sorties flown in the 1999
Kosovo war, and the United States dropped more smart bombs on
Afghanistan than NATO dropped on Serbia in 1999. In fact, the total
number of precision munitions expended in Afghanistan amounted to more
than half the number used in Operation Desert Storm. (In addition, more
than 3,000 U.S. and French bombs were dropped on surviving enemy forces
in March during Operation Anaconda, in which some 1,500 Western forces
and 2,000 Afghans launched a major offensive against about 1,000 enemy
troops in the mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan.)
If the U.S. strategy has had many virtues, however, it has also had
flaws. Most important, it has apparently failed to achieve a key war
goal: capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and other top enemy leaders.
Such hunts are inherently difficult, but the prospects for success in
this case were reduced considerably by U.S. reliance on Pakistani
forces and Afghan militias for sealing off enemy escape routes and
conducting cave-to-cave searches during critical periods. If most al
Qaeda leaders stay at large, the United States and other countries will
remain more vulnerable to terrorism than they would be otherwise--
perhaps significantly so.
But on balance, Operation Enduring Freedom has been very
impressive. It may wind up being more notable in the annals of American
military history than anything since Douglas MacArthur's invasion at
Inchon in Korea half a century ago. Even Norman Schwarzkopf's famous
``left hook'' around Iraqi forces in Operation Desert Storm was less
bold; had it been detected, U.S. airpower still could have protected
coalition flanks, and American forces could have outrun Iraqi troops
toward most objectives on the ground. By contrast, Operation Enduring
Freedom's impressive outcome was far from preordained. Too much
American force (e.g., a protracted and punishing strategic air campaign
or an outright ground invasion) risked uniting Afghan tribes and
militias to fight the outside power, angering the Arab world,
destabilizing Pakistan, and spawning more terrorists. Too little force,
or the wrong kind of force, risked outright military failure and a
worsening of Afghanistan's humanitarian crisis--especially given the
limited capabilities of the small militias that made up the anti-
Taliban coalition.
zeroing in
Beginning on October 7, Afghans, Americans, and coalition partners
cooperated to produce a remarkable military victory in Afghanistan. The
winning elements included 15,000 Northern Alliance fighters (primarily
from the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups), 100 combat sorties a day by
U.S. planes, 300-500 Western special operations forces and intelligence
operatives, a few thousand Western ground forces, and thousands of
Pashtun soldiers in southern Afghanistan who came over to the winning
side in November. Together they defeated the Taliban forces, estimated
at 50,000 to 60,000 strong, as well as a few thousand al Qaeda
fighters.
Various Western countries, particularly several NATO allies and
Australia, played important roles as well. A formal NATO role in the
war was neither necessary nor desirable, given the location of the
conflict and the need for a supple and secretive military strategy.
Still, NATO allies stood squarely by America's side, invoking the
alliance's Article V mutual-defense clause after September 11, and
demonstrated that commitment by sending five awacs aircraft to help
patrol U.S. airspace. Forces from the United Kingdom, Australia,
France, and Canada appear to have frequently contributed to the effort
in Afghanistan; forces from Denmark, Norway, and Germany also
participated in Operation Anaconda in March. Allied aircraft flew a
total of some 3,000 sorties on relief, reconnaissance, and other
missions. As noted, France dropped bombs during Operation Anaconda, and
the United Kingdom fired several cruise missiles on the first day of
battle as well. Numerous countries, including the Netherlands, Italy,
and Japan, deployed ships to the Arabian Sea. The cooperation continues
today, as major Western allies constitute the backbone of the un-
authorized stability force in Kabul.
The short war has had several phases. The first began on October 7
and lasted a month; the second ran through November and saw the Taliban
lose control of the country; the third was characterized by intensive
bombing of suspected al Qaeda strongholds in the Tora Bora mountain and
cave complex in December; the fourth began with the inauguration of
Hamid Karzai as interim prime minister and continues to date.
During the first part of the war, Taliban forces lost their large
physical assets such as radar, aircraft, and command-and-control
systems, but they hung on to power in most regions. Most al Qaeda
training camps and headquarters were also destroyed. Although Taliban
forces did not quickly collapse, they were increasingly isolated in
pockets near the major cities. Cut off from each other physically, they
were unable to resupply or reinforce very well and had problems
communicating effectively.
In the first week of the war, U.S. aircraft averaged only 25 combat
sorties a day, but they soon upped that total to around 100. (Some 70
Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired in the early going; a total of
about 100 had been used by December.) The United States comparably
increased the number of airlift, refueling, and other support missions.
U.S. air strikes by b-52 and b-1 bombers operating out of Diego Garcia
typically involved six sorties a day; other land-based aircraft,
primarily f-15es and ac-130 gunships from Oman, flew about as much.
Planes from the three U.S. aircraft carriers based in the Arabian Sea
provided the rest of the combat punch. Reconnaissance and refueling
flights originated from the Persian Gulf region and Diego Garcia. Some
air support and relief missions also came from, or flew over, Central
Asia, where U.S. Army soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division helped
protect airfields.
Most air attacks occurred around Afghanistan's perimeter, because
the rugged central highlands were not a major operating area for the
Taliban or al Qaeda. By the middle of October, most fixed assets worth
striking had already been hit, so combat sorties turned to targeting
Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the field. Aircraft continued to fly at
an altitude of at least 10,000 feet, because the Pentagon was fearful
of antiaircraft artillery, Soviet sa-7 and sa-13 portable antiaircraft
missiles, and some 200-300 Stinger antiaircraft missiles presumed to be
in Taliban or al Qaeda possession. But most precision-guided weapons
are equally effective regardless of their altitude of origin, provided
that good targeting information is available--as it was in this case,
thanks to U.S. troops on the ground.
The first month of the war produced only limited results and had
many defense and strategic analysts worried about the basic course of
the campaign. Some of those critics began, rather intemperately and
unrealistically, to call for a ground invasion; others opposed an
invasion but thought that a substantial intensification of efforts
would prove necessary.
In phase two, beginning in early November, that intensification
occurred. But it was due not so much to an increased number of
airplanes as to an increase in their effectiveness. By then, 80 percent
of U.S. combat sorties could be devoted to directly supporting
opposition forces in the field; by late November, the tally was 90
percent. In addition, the deployment of more unmanned aerial vehicles
and Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (jstars) aircraft
to the region helped the United States maintain continuous
reconnaissance of enemy forces in many places. Most important, the
number of U.S. special operations forces and CIA teams working with
various opposition elements increased greatly. In mid-October, only
three special operations ``A teams,'' each consisting of a dozen
personnel, were in Afghanistan; in mid-November, the tally was 10; by
December 8, it was 17. This change meant the United States could
increasingly call in supplies for the opposition, help it with tactics,
and designate Taliban and al Qaeda targets for U.S. air strikes using
global positioning system (gps) technology and laser range finders. The
Marine Corps also began to provide logistical support for these teams
as the war advanced.
As a result, enemy forces collapsed in northern cities such as
Mazar-i-Sharif and Taloqan over the weekend of November 9-11. Taliban
fighters ran for their lives, provoking their leader, Mullah Muhammad
Omar, to broadcast a demand that his troops stop ``behaving like
chickens.'' Kabul fell soon afterward. By November 16, Pentagon
officials were estimating that the Taliban controlled less than one-
third of the country, in contrast to 85 percent just a week before.
Reports also suggested that Muhammad Atef, a key al Qaeda operative,
was killed by U.S. bombs in mid-November. Kunduz, the last northern
stronghold of enemy forces where several thousand Taliban and al Qaeda
troops apparently remained, fell on November 24-25.
In late November, more than 1,000 U.S. marines of the 15th and 26th
Marine Expeditionary Units established a base about 60 miles southwest
of Kandahar, which the Taliban continued to hold. They deployed there
directly from ships in the Arabian Sea, leapfrogging over Pakistani
territory at night (to minimize political difficulties for the
government of President Pervez Musharraf) and flying 400 miles inland
to what became known as Camp Rhino. Their subsequent resupply needs
were largely met using Pakistani bases. Once deployed, they began to
interdict some road traffic and carry out support missions for special
operations forces.
Meanwhile, Pashtun tribes had begun to oppose the Taliban openly.
By November, they were accepting the help of U.S. special forces, who
had previously been active principally in the north of the country. Two
groups in particular--one led by Hamid Karzai, the other by another
tribal leader, Gul Agha Shirzai--closed in on Kandahar. Mullah Omar
offered to surrender in early December but in the end fled with most of
his fighters, leaving the city open by December 8-9. Pockets of Taliban
and al Qaeda resistance, each with hundreds of fighters or more,
remained in areas near Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, Kandahar, and possibly
elsewhere, but the Taliban no longer held cities or major
transportation routes.
Why this part of the campaign achieved such a rapid and radical
victory remains unclear. Taliban forces presumably could have held out
longer if they had hunkered down in the cities and put weapons near
mosques, hospitals, and homes, making their arsenal hard to attack from
the air. Opposition fighters were too few to defeat them in street-to-
street fighting in most places, and starving out the Taliban would have
required the unthinkable tactic of starving local civilian populations
as well.
Most likely, the Taliban got caught in positions outside major
cities that they could neither easily escape nor defend. Once the
Afghan opposition began to engage the enemy seriously in November and
Taliban forces returned fire, they revealed their positions to American
special operations personnel who could call in devastating air strikes.
Sometimes they were tricked into revealing their locations over the
radio. Even trench lines were poor defenses against 2-ton bombs
delivered within 10 to 15 meters of their targets. Just what Taliban
fighters could have done differently, once stranded in that open
terrain, is unclear. They might have been better advised either to go
on the offensive or to try to escape back into urban settings under
cover of night or poor weather, although many U.S. reconnaissance
assets work well under such conditions. But both approaches would have
been difficult and dangerous, especially for a relatively
unsophisticated military force such as the Taliban.
The third main phase of the war began in early December. By this
time, U.S. intelligence had finally pinpointed much of al Qaeda's
strength near Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. In particular, al
Qaeda forces, including Osama bin Laden, were supposedly holed up in
the mountain redoubts of Tora Bora. Traveling with perhaps 1,000 to
2,000 foreign fighters, most of them fellow Arabs, bin Laden could not
easily evade detection from curious eyes even if he might elude U.S.
overhead reconnaissance. Thus, once Afghan opposition fighters,
together with CIA and special operations forces, were deployed in the
vicinity, U.S. air strikes against the caves could become quite
effective. By mid-December, the fight for Tora Bora was over. Most
significant cave openings were destroyed and virtually all signs of
live al Qaeda fighters disappeared. Sporadic bombing continued in the
area, and it was not until mid-January that a major al Qaeda training
base, Zawar Kili, was destroyed. But most bombing ended by late 2001.
So why did bin Laden and other top al Qaeda leaders apparently get
away? The United States relied too much on Pakistan and its Afghan
allies to close off possible escape routes from the Tora Bora region.
It is not clear that these allies had the same incentives as the United
States to conduct the effort with dogged persistence. Moreover, the
mission was inherently difficult. By mid-December, the Pentagon felt
considerably less sure than it had been of the likely whereabouts of
bin Laden, even though it suspected that he and most of his top
lieutenants were still alive.
Although estimates remain rough, Taliban losses in the war were
considerable. According to New York Times correspondent Nicholas
Kristof, as many as 8,000 to 12,000 were killed--roughly 20 percent of
the Taliban's initial fighting capability. Assuming conservatively at
least two wounded for every person killed, Taliban losses could have
represented half their initial fighting strength, a point at which most
armies have traditionally started to crumble. Another 7,000 or more
were taken prisoner. Kristof's tally also suggests that Afghan civilian
casualties totaled only about 1,000, a mercifully low number despite
several wrongly targeted U.S. bombings and raids during the war.
Although a couple of those U.S. mistakes probably should have been
prevented, they do not change the basic conclusion that the war caused
relatively modest harm to innocents.
U.S. forces had lost about 30 personnel by the middle of March:
about a dozen on the battlefield (8 during Operation Anaconda) and the
rest in and around Afghanistan through accidents. Most were Marine
Corps and Army troops, but other personnel were lost as well, including
a CIA operative. The casualty total was 50 percent greater than those
of the invasions of Grenada and Haiti in the 1980s but less than the
number of troops killed in Somalia in 1992-93.
follow the leader
On the whole, Operation Enduring Freedom has been masterful in both
design and execution. Using specially equipped CIA teams and special
operations forces in tandem with precision-strike aircraft allowed for
accurate and effective bombing of Taliban and al Qaeda positions. U.S.
personnel also contributed immensely to helping the Northern Alliance
tactically and logistically. By early November, the strategy had
produced mass Taliban retreats in the north of the country; it had
probably caused many Taliban casualties as well.
More notably, the U.S. effort helped quickly galvanize Pashtun
forces to organize and fight effectively against the Taliban in the
south, which many analysts had considered a highly risky proposition
and centcom had itself considered far from certain. Had these Pashtun
forces decided that they feared the Northern Alliance and the United
States more than the Taliban, Afghanistan might have become effectively
partitioned, with al Qaeda taking refuge exclusively in the south and
the war effort rendered largely futile. Convincing these Pashtun to
change sides and fight against the Taliban required just the right mix
of diplomacy, military momentum and finesse, and battlefield assistance
from CIA and special operations teams.
Yet despite the overall accomplishments, mistakes were made. The
Pentagon's handling of the al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, was one of them. Whether these men should have been
designated as prisoners of war can be debated. Neither group fought for
a recognized government, and al Qaeda fighters satisfied virtually none
of the standard criteria associated with soldiers. The Bush
administration's decision not to designate the detainees as pows is
thus understandable, particularly since it did not want to be forced to
repatriate them once hostilities in Afghanistan ended. But it probably
would have been wiser to accord the detainees pow rights initially,
until a military tribunal could determine them ineligible for pow
status, as the Geneva Conventions stipulate.
The pow issue aside, the administration's initial reluctance to
guarantee the basic protections of the Geneva Conventions to Taliban
soldiers and its continued refusal to apply them to al Qaeda were
unwise. These decisions fostered the impression that the detainees were
not being treated humanely. This perception was wrong, but it became
prevalent. Rumsfeld had to go on the defensive after photos circulated
around the world showing shackled prisoners kneeling before their open-
air cells; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard Myers talked
somewhat hyperbolically about how the detainees might gnaw through
hydraulic cables on airplanes if not forcibly restrained; and some
Pentagon officials even suggested that the detainees did not
necessarily deserve Geneva treatment, given the crimes of al Qaeda on
September 11. But Rumsfeld's comments came too late, and America's
image in the Arab world in particular took another hit.
The big U.S. mistake, however, concerned the hunt for top al Qaeda
leaders. If Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Zubaydah, and other
top al Qaeda officials are found to have survived, the war will have
failed to achieve a top objective. Rather than relying on Afghan and
Pakistani forces to do the job in December near Tora Bora, Rumsfeld and
Franks should have tried to prevent al Qaeda fighters from fleeing into
Pakistan by deploying American forces on or near the border. U.S.
troops should also have been used in the pursuit of Mullah Omar and
remnants of the Taliban, even though this mission was less important
than the one against al Qaeda leaders.
Admittedly, there were good reasons not to put many Americans in
Afghanistan. First, Washington feared a possible anti-American
backlash, as Rumsfeld made clear in public comments. Complicating
matters, the United States would have had a hard time getting many tens
of thousands of troops into Afghanistan, since no neighboring country
except Pakistan would have been a viable staging base--and Pakistan was
not willing to play that role.
But even though Rumsfeld's reasoning was correct in general, it was
wrong for Tora Bora. Putting several thousand U.S. forces in that
mountainous, inland region would have been difficult and dangerous. Yet
given the enormity of the stakes in this war, it would have been
appropriate. Indeed, centcom made preparations for doing so. But in the
end, partly because of logistical challenges but perhaps partly because
of the Pentagon's aversion to casualties, the idea was dropped. It is
supremely ironic that a tough-on-defense Republican administration
fighting for vital national security interests appeared almost as
reluctant to risk American lives in combat as the Clinton
administration had been in humanitarian missions--at least until
Operation Anaconda, when it may have been largely too late.
Furthermore, local U.S. allies were just not up to the job in Tora
Bora. Pakistan deployed about 4,000 regular army forces along the
border itself. But they were not always fully committed to the mission,
and there were too few well-equipped troops to prevent al Qaeda and
Taliban fighters from outflanking them, as many hundreds of enemy
personnel appear to have done. Afghan opposition forces were also less
than fully committed, and they were not very proficient in fighting at
night.
What would have been needed for the United States to perform this
mission? To close off the 100 to 150 escape routes along the 25-mile
stretch of the Afghan-Pakistani border closest to Tora Bora would have
required perhaps 1,000 to 3,000 American troops. Deploying such a force
from the United States would have required several hundred airlift
flights, followed by ferrying the troops and supplies to frontline
positions via helicopter. According to centcom, a new airfield might
have had to be created, largely for delivering fuel. Such an operation
would have taken a week or more. But two Marine Corps units with more
than 1,000 personnel were already in the country in December and were
somewhat idle at that time. If redeployed to Tora Bora, they could have
helped prevent al Qaeda's escape themselves. They also could have been
reinforced over subsequent days and weeks by Army light forces or more
marines, who could have closed off possible escape routes into the
interior of Afghanistan. Such an effort would not have assured success,
but the odds would have favored the United States.
How much does it matter if bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and their
cohorts go free? Even with its top leaders presumably alive, al Qaeda
is weaker without its Afghan sanctuary. It has lost training bases,
secure meeting sites, weapons production and storage facilities, and
protection from the host-country government. But as terrorism expert
Paul Pillar has pointed out, the history of violent organizations with
charismatic leaders, such as the Shining Path in Peru and the Kurdistan
Workers' Party (pkk) in Turkey, suggests that they are far stronger
with their leaders than without them. The imprisonment of Abimael
Guzman in 1992 and Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 did much to hurt those
organizations, just as the 1995 assassination of Fathi Shikaki of the
Palestinian Islamic Jihad weakened that group significantly. Some
groups may survive the loss of an important leader or become more
violent as a result--for example, Hamas flourished after the Israelis
killed ``the Engineer'' Yahya Ayyash in 1996. But even they may have a
hard time coming up with new tactics and concepts of operations after
such a loss.
If bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and other top al Qaeda leaders continue
to evade capture, they may have to spend the rest of their lives on the
run. And their access to finances may be sharply curtailed. But they
could still inspire followers and design future terrorist attacks. If
successful, their escape would be a major setback.
evolution in military affairs
Even though advocates of the famous ``revolution in military
affairs'' have generally felt frustrated over the past decade, a number
of important military innovations appeared in Operation Enduring
Freedom. They may not be as revolutionary as blitzkrieg, aircraft-
carrier war, and nuclear weapons, but they are impressive nonetheless.
Advocates of radical change have tended to underestimate the degree to
which the U.S. military can and does innovate even without dramatic
transformation.
Several developments were particularly notable. First, there was
the widespread deployment of special operations forces with laser
rangefinders and gps devices to call in extremely precise air strikes.
Ground spotters have appeared in the annals of warfare for as long as
airplanes themselves, but this was the first time they were frequently
able to provide targeting information accurate to within several meters
and do so quickly.
Second, U.S. reconnaissance capabilities showed real improvement.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs), together with imaging satellites and
jstars, maintained frequent surveillance of much of the battlefield and
continuous coverage of certain specific sites--providing a capability
that General Myers described as ``persistence.''
Also notable were advances in battlefield communications. The
networks established between uavs, satellites, combat aircraft, and
command centers were faster than in any previous war, making
``persistence'' even more valuable. The networks were not always fast
enough, especially when the political leadership needed to intercede in
specific targeting decisions. Nor were they available for all combat
aircraft in the theater; for example, the Air Force's ``Link 16'' data
links are not yet installed on many strike aircraft. But they did often
reduce the time between detecting a target and destroying it to less
than 20 minutes.
Perhaps most historic was the use of CIA-owned Predator uavs to
drop weapons on ground targets. Aside from cruise missiles, this was
the first time in warfare that an unmanned aircraft had dropped bombs
in combat, in the form of ``Hellfire'' air-to-ground missiles. There
were also further milestones in the realm of precision weapons, which
for the first time in major warfare constituted the majority of bombs
dropped. They were dropped from a wide range of aircraft, including
carrier-based jets, ground-based attack aircraft, and b-52 as well as
b-1 bombers. The bombers were used effectively as close-air support
platforms, loitering over the battlefield for hours until targets could
be identified. They delivered about 70 percent of the war's total
ordnance.
In addition to the laser-guided bomb, the weapon of choice for the
United States quickly became the joint direct attack munition (jdam).
First used in Kosovo, it is a one-ton iron bomb furnished with a
$20,000 kit that helps steer it to within 10 to 15 meters of its target
using gps and inertial guidance. It is not quite as accurate as a
laser-guided bomb but is much more resistant to the effects of weather.
In the Kosovo war, only the b-2 could deliver it, but now the jdam can
be dropped by most U.S. attack aircraft. By the end of January, the
United States had dropped more than 4,000 laser-guided bombs and more
than 4,000 jdams as well.
Other ordnance was also important. Up to 1,000 cluster bombs were
used, with accuracy of about 30 meters once outfitted with a wind-
correcting mechanism. Although controversial because of their dud rate,
cluster bombs were devastating against Taliban and al Qaeda troops
unlucky enough to be caught in the open. A number of special-purpose
munitions were used in smaller numbers, including cave-busting
munitions equipped with nickel-cobalt steel-alloy tips and special
software; these could penetrate up to 10 feet of rock or 100 feet of
soil.
The ability to deliver most U.S. combat punch from the air kept the
costs of war relatively modest. Through January 8, the total had
reached $3.8 billion, while the military costs of homeland security
efforts in the United States had reached $2.6 billion. The bills in
Afghanistan included $1.9 billion for deploying troops, $400 million
for munitions, $400 million for replacing damaged or destroyed
equipment, and about $1 billion for fuel and other operating costs.
lessons for the future
What broad lessons emerge from this conflict? First, military
progress does not always depend on highly expensive weapons platforms.
Many important contemporary trends in military technology and tactics
concern information networks and munitions more than aircraft, ships,
and ground vehicles. To take an extreme example, b-52 bombers with jdam
were more useful in Operation Enduring Freedom than were the stealthy
b-2s. Second, human skills remain important in war, as demonstrated
best by the performance of special operations forces and CIA personnel.
The basic infantry skills, foreign language abilities, competence and
care in using and maintaining equipment, and physical and mental
toughness of U.S. troops contributed to victory every bit as much as
did high-tech weaponry.
Third, military mobility and deployability should continue to be
improved. The Marine Corps did execute an impressive ship-to-objective
maneuver, forgoing the usual ship-to-shore operation and moving 400
miles inland directly. But most parts of the Army still cannot move so
quickly and smoothly. Part of the solution may be the Army's long-term
plans for new and lighter combat equipment. (The Marine Corps' v-22
Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft may be useful, too, at least in modest
numbers and once proven safe.) But the Army could also emulate the
Marine Corps' organization, training, and logistics where possible--and
soon. The task is hardly hopeless; Army forces were tactically quite
mobile and impressive in Operation Anaconda.
Finally, the war showed that more joint-service experimentation and
innovation are highly desirable, given that the synergies between
special operations forces on the ground and Air Force and Navy aircraft
in the skies were perhaps the most important keys to victory.
How do these lessons match up with the Bush administration's
Quadrennial Defense Review of September 30, 2001, and its long-term
budget plan of February 4, 2002? The administration has basically
preserved the force structure and weapons modernization plan that it
inherited from the Clinton administration, added missile defense and
one or two other priorities--and thrown very large sums of money into
the budget. The Bush administration envisions a national security
budget (Pentagon spending plus nuclear weapons budgets for the
Department of Energy) that will grow to $396 billion in 2003 and $470
billion in 2007. (It was $300 billion when Bush took office and is $350
billion in 2002.) The war on terrorism cannot explain this growth; its
annual costs are currently expected to be less than $10 billion after
2003. That $470 billion figure for 2007 is a whopping $100 billion more
than the Clinton administration envisioned for the same year in its
last budget plan.
For many critics who tend to focus on weapons procurement, the
problem with Bush's plan is that it protects the traditional weapons
priorities of the military services without seeking a radical enough
transformation of the U.S. armed forces. But this common criticism is
only half right. The Bush administration has an aggressive program for
so-called defense transformation, principally in research, development,
and experimentation, where it envisions spending an additional $100
billion between 2002 and 2007. If anything, these plans are slightly
too generous and ambitious.
In fact, the problem is the traditional one: the unwillingness to
set priorities and to challenge the military services to do so as well,
especially in the procurement accounts. Despite the lack of a
superpower rival, the administration proposes replacing most major
combat systems with systems often costing twice as much, and doing so
throughout the force structure. This plan would drive up the
procurement budget to $99 billion by 2007 from its present level of $60
billion.
A more prudent modernization agenda would begin by canceling at
least one or two major weapons, such as the Army's Crusader artillery
system. But the more important change in philosophy would be to
modernize more selectively in general. Only a modest fraction of the
armed forces need to be equipped with the most sophisticated and
expensive weaponry. That high-end or ``silver bullet'' force would be a
hedge against possible developments such as a rapidly modernizing
Chinese military. The rest of the force should be equipped primarily
with relatively inexpensive, but highly capable, existing weaponry
carrying better sensors, munitions, computers, and communications
systems. For example, rather than purchase 3,000 joint-strike fighters,
the military would buy only 1,000 of those and then add aircraft such
as new f-16 Block 60 fighters to fill out its force structure.
Other parts of the proposed Bush plan deserve scrutiny, too. After
several successive years of increases, military pay is now in fairly
good shape. In most cases, compensation is no longer poor by comparison
with private-sector employment; as such, the administration's plans for
further large increases go too far. The proposed research and
development budgets, meanwhile, exceed the already hefty increases
promised by Bush during his presidential campaign; given that research
and development were not severely cut during the 1990s, such growth
seems excessive now. Finally, the Pentagon needs to reform the way it
provides basic services such as military health care, housing, and
various base operations. Unfortunately, if budgets get too big, the
Pentagon's incentives to look for efficiencies often weaken. On
balance, the planned increases in defense spending are roughly twice as
much as necessary for the years ahead.
A final assessment of Operation Enduring Freedom depends on whether
bin Laden and his top lieutenants have escaped Afghanistan. It could be
a while before anyone knows; indeed, Rumsfeld has speculated that U.S.
troops could remain in Afghanistan into 2003. A verdict will also have
to await a better sense of where Afghanistan is headed. Whatever the
stability of the post-Taliban government, it is doubtful that the
Taliban and al Qaeda will ever control large swaths of the country
again. But if pockets of terrorists remain in the country, or if
Afghanistan again descends into civil war, the victory will be
incomplete. In the former case, Afghanistan could still be an important
if diminished asset for al Qaeda; in the latter, the U.S. image
throughout the Islamic world may take another blow as critics find more
fuel for their claims that Americans care little about the fate of
Muslim peoples.
To prevent such outcomes, Washington needs to work hard with other
donors to make reconstruction and aid programs succeed in Afghanistan.
The Bush administration also needs to rethink its policy on
peacekeeping. Its current unwillingness to contribute to a stability
force for Afghanistan is a major mistake that U.S. allies may not be
able to redress entirely on their own. A force of 20,000 to 30,000
troops is clearly needed for the country as a whole; several thousand
troops in Kabul will probably not suffice.
That said, the situation in Afghanistan has improved enormously
since October 7--and so has U.S. security. The Afghan resistance, the
Bush administration, its international coalition partners, the U.S.
armed forces, and the CIA have accomplished what will likely be
remembered as one of the greater military successes of the twenty-first
century.
Appendix II.--United States Special Operations
Command History, 6th Edition
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