Okay, I've looked into this a bit. There are a lot of ridiculous claims out there. This is the best I've seen on it.
pbs.org
The full history of how Al Qaeda's leaders got away in the fall of 2001 isn't available to us yet because none of them have talked about it, but from what we know, it seems that in the late stages of the war, bin Laden and a lot of his senior Arab and Chechen and Uzbek and Southeast Asian volunteers had gathered in a mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan well known to them from their involvement in the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s. They were under attack from the air by American forces, and they were under attack on the ground from Afghan allies of the United States. They decided to retreat into Pakistan, and they succeeded into escaping, essentially, over the hills into Pakistan.
Why? There was no blocking force on the Pak-Afghan border large and effective enough to stop them as they retreated, and it may have been impossible to establish a large and effective enough blocking of a force to stop such a retreat. These are remote mountains, very underpopulated. To the extent there is a local population, it's all hostile to the United States. The Pakistan paramilitary forces that are the main guards of the borders are themselves tribal levies from the same groups that are sympathetic to Al Qaeda. The Pakistan regular army, which might have been more reliable than some of these tribal levies, was in December of 2001 being drawn away from that border to face India because of a war scare with India at that time.
So the conditions for Al Qaeda's retreat were quite favorable, and the United States did not do the one thing that the Pentagon had within its power to do, which was to move regular U.S. troops into a blocking position behind these mountains. And of course, the commander of this operation, [Gen.] Tommy Franks, was later criticized for not ordering, in particular, the 10th Mountain Division, which was then largely at a base in Uzbekistan and which was trained to fight in conditions such as it would have encountered on these hills, down into a position to block the Al Qaeda retreat.
It's interesting: In his memoir and in interviews, Franks has been asked, "Why didn't you put American troops into position to block this Al Qaeda retreat?" What he said is that he was afraid of the very thing we talked about a few minutes ago: He was afraid that he would inflame local Afghan opinion by putting a big, heavy, occupying American footprint in the heartland of Taliban country and that he was afraid he was just going to make everything worse at that stage. ...
.....
... How much of this is just plain old-fashioned bureaucratic firefighting?
Part of it is that Gen. Franks and his command never wanted to go into Afghanistan, and it wasn't just under Gen. Franks, but under his predecessors as well. Bill Clinton had taken the previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hugh Shelton, aside and said to him, in my earshot, "I think we ought to have U.S. commandos go into Afghanistan, U.S. military units, black ninjas jumping out of helicopters, and go after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan." And Shelton said: "Whoa! I don't think we can do that. I'll talk to Central Command." And of course Central Command came back and said, "Oh no, that's too difficult."
So there was no plan in the safe drawer at Central Command, no plan that they could pull out and say, "Well, just do this; we've planned it; let's go into Afghanistan."...
... This [CIA] plan was drawn up years before and was in place because of the relationship with the Northern Alliance. Tenet was able to put it on the desk at the White House [four days after 9/11]. I think the military never got over that.
It was a unique situation that we had a longtime relationship with ... the Northern Alliance and people that served in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the years. That plan was there because they were anticipating not attacking Al Qaeda, because Al Qaeda is relatively new, but dealing with the rise of the Taliban and eventual chaos in Afghanistan.
But no, I mean, the military didn't arrive for, like, six weeks or five weeks. The problem was that they had battle groups in the Persian Gulf and all the support -- that's the way they operate. They have to look at it for huge numbers of troops. ...
....
[But couldn't the president have ordered the troops in?]
... Of course. During the 2004 campaign, when you had the Kerry/Bush discussion on this, and John Kerry says, "The president contracted this all out to the Afghans to do this," well, that's not exactly true. ... It was mostly us. We had our teams out there calling in air strikes. We did use Afghans as blocking forces, and Delta Force would go in. ... The Afghans didn't want to fight. ... We had to pay them, had to yell at them, had to threaten them, had to do all sorts of things to get them to get into combat.
There was truly a fog over what occurred, and it doesn't surprise me, because there is often lots of bureaucracy between that man in the field, whether he's a CIA officer or a military commander, and the commander in chief back there. ... And the president, of course, relied on the people around him. I don't think the president was served well. ... I know the president would have done anything possible to kill bin Laden at that point, but I'm certain my requests never got to him.
You blaming Tenet?
... It was CENTCOM's decision. ... I think Tenet stepped up on that.
So with [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld?
There's a book written by [CENTCOM deputy commander] Mike DeLong [with Noah Lukeman] called [Inside] CENTCOM: [The Unvarnished Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq]. In that book, DeLong talks about a conversation that he has with Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld calls CENTCOM and says, "Send in troops," and CENTCOM's response is: "The altitude's too high. It's too cold." It's this, it's that -- makes up a lot of reasons. And Rumsfeld says, ... "I ski at 14,000 feet, and I'm 70," and the response is, "You don't have to carry a pack." And he says, "OK, do what you think is right." So the secretary of defense wanted them in there, but he left the final decision to the commanders on the ground, and they didn't want to do it, based on the reading of Mike DeLong's book.
... When do you come back? And does it feel like the crowning achievement of the CIA?
No. I'm told in early December: "You're being replaced. We're going to bring somebody in who is going to be the chief of this whole thing now. You can go back to Latin America." ... I was surprised that I was pulled out at that point, but I understood how the politics works in all of this. But I was not celebrating. ... It was bittersweet, because I didn't know if [bin Laden] was dead. I didn't know if I'd finished it. ... As I've stated in other places, it was a flawed masterpiece, ... that we were able to have an equation where U.S. forces and CIA officers working in tandem with [Afghan] insurgent forces could defeat a much larger group. But at that final moment when we closed with bin Laden, at that point they failed to recognize that we needed our own men to do that final bit of fighting. ...
Why?
They hadn't planned for it. The U.S. military, I'm sure it has a battle plan for almost every place in the world: landing on the shores of this place, doing an airdrop on this field. [They] probably didn't even have maps of Tora Bora. ...
........
Let's go for a moment to Tora Bora: ... Were you privy to Gary [Schroen's] wires and phone calls and entreaties to go get Osama bin Laden up in the mountains?
I wasn't privy to phone calls and a lot of the back-channel stuff. I was aware of the debate that was going on. Whether it was a CIA officer or whether it's a U.S. military officer, they will each come at the issue with their own perspective based on what knowledge they have, and frequently, that's incomplete knowledge on both sides.
I would just caution that each side only had a certain amount of perspective. And CIA, God love it, is always saying: "We can take that hill. We can do it, we can do it, we can do it." Sometimes it's not as easy as some within CIA believe. At the same time, I think the military comes at some of these issues in saying: "We need more. We need to make sure that we have a program or a capability that will ensure success." There is sometimes a caution on the part of the military and a sense within the agency that we need to move faster and in a much more aggressive way.
My perspective is that the truth is somewhere in between, that we probably could have moved with greater alacrity and with greater force, and possibly intercepted and taken care of some problems, but there were so many unknowns at that time and so many dynamics under way that, again, the CIA perspective was one; military's was another. ...
... We've spent a lot of time talking to CIA agents, many of whom say we had Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. ... Did they have him?
Not to the best of our knowledge, no. What we thought was at that time, bin Laden was like Elvis: He was everywhere. He was over here; he was over here; he was over here. Was it most likely that after we had done what we had done in Kandahar and Kabul that he had probably gone up into the mountains? That's what we thought. We believed the agency, that we thought he was up there somewhere -- didn't know where, because there's maybe 200 caves up there that cross from Afghanistan to Pakistan. You can't watch them. ...
Never knew for sure. We had word from the agency that he may have been wounded, but we never knew.
Tora Bora is up on the Afghan-Pakistan border somewhere between about 6,000 to 13,000 feet. It's sort of a mountain range, really a tough area. The villagers up there don't claim either Afghanistan or Pakistan as their country. They are loyal to their village chief, and that's it. They don't like anybody else -- don't like the Pakistanis, don't like the Afghanis [sic], and for heaven's sakes, they don't like wide-eyed coalition forces, especially Americans. We knew if we had gone up there with U.S. forces that we would have been fighting villagers who really were doing nothing else other than protecting their village.
If we had done that -- and this is prior to the election of Karzai, just prior, by the way -- that we could have destroyed all the good humanitarian work we had done trying to build this country together. That's in the back of our mind also. Two, we sure as hell would like to get Osama bin Laden. So how do we combine all that together? Well, what we did was bring in Dell Daley, head of our special forces, two-star general. He's there. ... We got with him, and we said: "We're going to do something like we did with the Northern Alliance, embed these forces with you. But this time, Dell Daley's going to call the shots, not necessarily this other Afghan general that was going up in the mountains." But we also knew this was the right way to go, because the people he used were people from the area, and it would work well. And it did work well. ...
Were you in meetings about this? How were these decisions made?
They were always made the same [way], with the secretary, Franks, Tenet. The agency wasn't crazy about this, to be fair. The service chiefs wanted U.S. forces up there. ... But at the end of the day, Franks and I had this discussion. ... For the good of Afghanistan, if we did wound Osama bin Laden, great. We could have put the best forces in the entire world up there; anybody could have gotten through to the other side. It's the way it was. So for the good of the country, two weeks later Karzai was elected interim president, and we killed hundreds and hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda up there in Tora Bora with the weapons we used, and didn't kill any villagers. ...
Where was Rumsfeld on the debate about this from the beginning? Did he want them to go up there?
No, he agreed with us. These were all collegial discussions all the time, and not [just] what's going to happen today, [but] how is this going to affect tomorrow? And of course, we all wanted bin Laden, but we couldn't focus on bin Laden. If you kill his leadership, he by himself, a CEO with no managers, can't run a company. We were already seeing that the Al Qaeda were starting to splinter, because we were, quite frankly, getting rid of his senior leadership. It was disappearing. ...
.....
... I think the Afghanistan plan is the perfect example of the president being subject to an ignorant analyst. Mr. Tenet's plan, as best I recall from Mr. Woodward's book was a few CIA officers, a few Special Forces people and bags and boxes of money. And he sold that to the president of the United States and to Secretary Powell and to Mr. Rumsfeld.
And he only sold that because he didn't consult with anybody within his own Agency. I, for all of my sins, have spent the better part of 15 years working in the Afghan [venue], at a time when there were billions of dollars available to use with the Afghans to get them to do what we wanted them to do. And not once in that period can I recall an Afghan doing anything we ever asked them to do. They'll take your money, they'll say they're going to do it, but they're extremely independent people, and unwilling to have you believe that they're doing your bidding. If you wanted something done, and an Afghan was going to do it in any way, and you paid him, he might do something else just so you don't think he's your operative.
We had 15 years experience of that. And everyone who was cognizant of how Afghan operations worked would have told Mr. Tenet that he was nuts. 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. ...
... |
