BLACKFIVE: Tora Bora- Did we miss bin Laden?

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Tora Bora- Did we miss bin Laden?

Posted By Uncle Jimbo

I wrote a post last week that showed a video of bin Laden wandering free and questioned why the Clinton administration had done nothing about it. In the comments to that post at madison.com A-Ron, who writes one of my favorite local blogs MBIMOTMOG, hit me on a number of related points and I took some shots in the exchange. He did an excellent job of citing relevant sources and I did a crap job of supporting mine. I have laid out my view about whether we could or should have used ground forces at Tora Bora which is informed by some commentary from folks who have experience there. The Blackfive readership is much more knowledgeable than me, so I now solicit any and all info and commentary on this topic.

One of the recurring complaints against W and his team is the purported failure to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora by not using US ground troops. I believe this is a flawed understanding of the situation as I will detail here.

The campaign in Afghanistan is one of the most incredible examples of the capabilities of Special Operations Forces as combat multipliers. Using only several hundred Americans and thousands of native Afghan troops we routed the Taliban and Al Qaeda from their sanctuary and destroyed them as a military force. Beginning in Oct. 2001 the Northern Alliance and it’s Spec Ops advisers were pushing the Taliban South and East using local knowledge and muscle and US airpower. By the end of November the Taliban were simply trying to escape to Pakistan or slip away and blend back into the populace. The first uses of conventional forces was supporting the fall of Kandahar but there were not large numbers of conventional forces on the ground at the end of November. Also the heavy lift helicopters capable of delivering troops high in the mountains and resupplying them were in even shorter supply.

The last stop on the path to Pakistan going east is in Tora Bora, which is often described as a fortress. It is actually the last bolthole where someone can hide in very inhospitable terrain still in Afghanistan, yet still be only several dozen miles to safety in Pakistan. Better yet the entire area is riddled with hundreds of smuggler’s trails offering a myriad of options for escape. In early December the CIA believed that bin Laden and close to one thousand Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters had made their way to Tora Bora and were sitting tight. The use of local militia had been amazingly successful thus far and given our limited airlift and combat troop levels was really the only option for operations against Tora Bora. The same methods used with the Northern Alliance were employed to recruit several local warlords to provide the troops needed to attack Tora Bora and to secure the escape routes.

It is one thing to question this decision if there was an actual alternative that would have allowed us to use US troops to do the job, but for the reasons I have mentioned and others I will detail now that was not a realistic option.