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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (688675)	6/30/2005 2:22:53 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

I just posted Cheney saying he knows where Osama is. Porter Goss said the same thing. So they're lying? I know where he is too. I'm sure he is on the planet earth. Probably in Asia. Likely somewhere around the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. Gee, why don't I just go over an collect the $25mil now. If Gross and Cheney know he is someplace moderatly specific (say the northern half of the Pakistani side of the border), then they technically know where he is. That still doesn't mean he would be easy to catch. Somehow I doubt their statement was "We know where OBL is", and I very much doubt that it was that they know exactly where he is. The DOD and CIA have confirmed Osama was probably trapped at Tora Bora but got away. "Was probably", isn't much of a confirmation. Esp. without details as to exactly when he was at Tora Bora. And its not like Tora Bora was a small place with only one or two easily observed exits. There where a number of fortified areas dug in to the mountains there and many mountain trails that headed off in different directions, many of them to Pakistan. There is a decent change that he was gone before we got a sizable force to Tora Bora. Even if he was there and wasn't gone by the time we got some soldiers in to the area "trapped" is a relative term in this case. He had many escape routes. The main roads and larger trails may have been cut off, some others might have been observed, but its a lot of countryside. I suppose if we moved half the US army in to the area around Tora Bora (BTW we don't have half the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan combined) and he was dumb enough to still while we built this force up and the soldiers in it got used to operating in the area, then we might be able to cut off all escape from Tora Bora, but barring that all we could do is cut off the bigger routes and perhaps make escape through the smaller routes risky. Its not like he moves around with a powerful radio beacon or with a large light shining in to the sky announcing his presence. In many ways the world seems smaller than it used to, we can fly around it, and we get video signals from all over it, but when your trying to find a competent person in rough terrain, who knows the area, even a tiny corner of it can prove to be too big. If he is stupid, you probably find him. If someone betrays him, you probably find him. If not it very hard. Even if we knew he was in the trails around Tora Bora it would be hard to find him unless he staid there. A battalian of soldiers isn't enough to cut off the area. A division (and we never had that many soldiers in that area) would likely not be enough. OTOH we would have been more likely to catch him if we had a stronger force along the border. Could we have gotten a force there in time? Hard to say, its very rough terrain, and the Afghani side of the border was full of Osama supporters while the Pakistani side was outside of the operational area for the American soldiers (and the local Afghan allies as well). If you wanted to bring in several thousand more soldiers it would have taken some time and also the Al Qaida fighters probably would have noticed what was happening. To move them in quickly they would have to be moved in by helicopter and some of those helicopters would have been shot down considering they would be flying over enemy controled territory, and in the mountains so the air would be thinner and they wouldn't be traveling as far off the ground as they might otherwise have traveled to get out of the range of smaller arms, machine guns, RPGs and shoulder fired SAMs. I think it would be likely that bin Laden would have escaped anyway, but there is no way to really know. We would probably have capured and killed more Al Qaida but I'm not so sure Osama would have been among those captured or killed. Ideally you either know where he is going to be before he gets there, or you know a location where he will stay for awhile. We didn't know that he would be in Tora Bora before he arrived, and he didn't stick around for an extended stay. In any case why capturing or killing Osama is a goal, it wasn't the point of the Afghanistan operation. He is one man, perhaps the most important single man we could get, but the organization would go on without him. We dismantled the training infrastructure Al Qaida had in Afghanistan and killed and captured a lot of Al Qaida. Those things are more important than any single individual. If we had gotten OBL but not done the other things the mission would have been a failure. Tim