The Longest War (16 page)

However, substantial numbers of Americans on the ground were needed to throw up an effective cordon around al-Qaeda’s hard core. Michael De-long, a three-star Marine general and the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which had overall responsibility for the Tora Bora battle, recalled that the Pentagon did not want to put many American soldiers on the ground because of a concern that they would be treated like antibodies by the locals. “
The mountains of Tora Bora
are situated deep in territory controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and any outsiders. The reality is if we put our troops in there we would inevitably end up fighting Afghan villagers—creating bad will at a sensitive time.”

There may also have been reluctance at the Pentagon to send soldiers into harm’s way. The Pentagon’s risk aversion is now hard to recall, following the years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the thousands of American soldiers who have since died—but it was quite real at the time. Recall that in the most recent U.S. war—the 1999 conflict in Kosovo—
not a single American had died in combat
. And, at that point in the Afghan War,
more journalists had died than U.S. soldiers
. Fury says that the fourteen U.S. Green Beret soldiers from the “white” Special Forces who were on the ground at Tora Bora were told to “
stay in the foothills
” at least four kilometers from any action—“pretty much out of harm’s way.” The Green Berets did call in airstrikes but were not allowed to engage in firefights with al-Qaeda because of concerns that the battle would turn into a “meat grinder.”

Finally, there was Iraq. In late November, as the battle of Tora Bora was gearing up in earnest, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told General Franks that President Bush “
wants us to look for options in Iraq
.” Franks told
Rumsfeld that there was a planning document, known as OPLAN 1003, which was a detailed blueprint for an invasion of Iraq that ran to eight hundred pages, but whose assumptions were now “out of date.” Rumsfeld instructed the general to “dust it off” and brief him in a week’s time. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Richard Myers, recalls, “
I realized
that one week was not giving Tom and his staff much time to sharpen” the plan. Franks points out in his autobiography that his staff was already working
seven days a week, sixteen-plus hours a day
as the Tora Bora battle was reaching its climax. Although Franks doesn’t say so, it is impossible not to wonder if the labor-intensive planning ordered by his boss for another major war was a distraction from the one he was already fighting.

The Pentagon’s reluctance to send more soldiers to Tora Bora arose out of a combination of factors: fear of offending the Afghan warlords in eastern Afghanistan; worries about replicating the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan; concerns about the difficult terrain; and an unwillingness to take casualties. However, given that only three months earlier some three thousand Americans had died on 9/11 and that al-Qaeda’s leaders and hundreds of the group’s foot soldiers were now all concentrated at Tora Bora, the Pentagon’s reluctance to commit more American boots on the ground is a decision that historians are not likely to judge kindly.

In the end, there were probably more journalists at Tora Bora than there were Western soldiers, who totaled around seventy or so Delta operators, Green Berets, and British Special Boat Service troops. CNN’s veteran war correspondent Nic Robertson remembered that in the vicinity of Tora Bora there were “
close to 100 journalists
in tents, buses and mud houses.” Since news organizations from around the world could arrange for their journalists and crews to cover Tora Bora, it is puzzling why the U.S. military could not have put more soldiers on the ground to entrap the hard core of al-Qaeda.

Could the Pentagon
have deployed a substantial number of additional soldiers to Tora Bora during the battle? Yes: there were around two thousand American troops already in or around the Afghan theater. Stationed at the U.S. air base known as K2 in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor to the north, were some one thousand soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division, which specializes in high-altitude warfare. Hundreds of those soldiers had already deployed forward to Bagram Air Base, an hour drive north of Kabul, as the Tora Bora battle heated up. In addition, 1,200 Marines from the highly mobile 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units were stationed at Forward
Operating Base Rhino in the deserts near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan from November 25. Brigadier General James N. Mattis, the commander of the Marines in the Afghan theater, is reported to have
asked to send his men into Tora Bora
, but his request was turned down.

Dalton Fury, the on-scene Delta commander, estimates that
three hundred U.S. soldiers
could have secured the main passes out of Tora Bora. Was such an operation feasible? Perhaps. On the night of October 19, weeks before the Tora Bora battle, 199 Army Rangers had parachuted in total
blackout conditions
onto a Taliban-held desert landing strip near Kandahar, which they then secured. (To be fair, that operation was conducted without the expectation of Taliban resistance, and there was none.) And at the same time a further ninety-one U.S. Special Forces soldiers were dropped into Mullah Omar’s own Kandahar compound, where they gathered intelligence and arrested members of the Taliban before pulling out after an hour. Those operations demonstrated that elite American units could be dropped anywhere into Afghanistan, a month and a half before the Tora Bora battle began in earnest.

Of course such a force would have had to deal with the treacherous weather conditions and high altitudes of Tora Bora as well as fierce resistance from al-Qaeda. An official U.S. military history of the Afghan War later stated that the mountainous terrain and lack of helicopter assets in the theater meant that it was “
unrealistic
” to think that more U.S. forces could have been inserted to “seal the passes into Pakistan.” Maybe so, but what is not in doubt is that no effort was ever made by the Pentagon to test this proposition.

In the end there would be no American blocking forces securing the passes of Tora Bora, despite the fact that the
New York Times
story on November 25
, quoting a local Afghan warlord, had explicitly made the point that bin Laden would likely “slip into Pakistan” when Tora Bora came under attack. And, as we have seen, Hank Crumpton, the CIA officer running the overall Afghan operation, had also briefed the White House and CENTCOM that this was a strong possibility.

What is most infuriating about all this is that bin Laden’s presence at Tora Bora was well-known not just to those U.S. forces on the ground at the battle, but also to officials higher up the American chain of command, something that they
publicly acknowledged
at the time. According to a
background briefing reported by CNN
, Pentagon officials in mid-December 2001 told reporters that there was “reasonable certainty” that bin Laden was at Tora Bora, a judgment that they based on intercepted radio transmissions. Similarly, the
New York Times
reported on December 12, 2001, that a “
senior military officer
” in Washington placed bin Laden at Tora Bora, based on “intercepted radio communications.” And in late November, as the battle raged on in Tora Bora, when asked on ABC News if bin Laden was there, Vice President Dick Cheney said, “
I think he
’s probably in that general area.”
Two weeks later
, Cheney was on NBC’s
Meet the Press
also explaining that “the preponderance of reporting at this point” was that bin Laden was in Tora Bora. The next day, Paul Wolfowitz, the number-two official at the Pentagon, when asked if bin Laden was in Tora Bora, told reporters, “
We don
’t have any credible evidence of him being in other parts of Afghanistan or outside of Afghanistan.” Even General Franks himself recounted in his autobiography that in December 2001 he briefed President Bush, saying, “Unconfirmed reports that Osama has been seen in the White Mountains, Sir. The Tora Bora area.” And shortly after the battle, on January 7, 2002, Franks told the Associated Press that bin Laden had indeed been at Tora Bora, “
at one point or another
.”

The
official U.S. military history
of the Afghan War later concluded that bin Laden was indeed at Tora Bora during the battle: “All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9–14 December.” And Lieutenant General Michael Delong, Franks’s deputy at CENTCOM, also wrote in his memoir that his superiors and he were well aware at the time that bin Laden was at Tora Bora: “We were hot on Osama bin Laden’s trail. He was definitely there when we hit [the Tora Bora] caves. Every day during the bombing, Rumsfeld asked me, ‘
Did we get him
? Did we get him?’”

None of this was sufficient for anyone in the Bush administration or at the higher echelons of the Pentagon to order more U.S. soldiers into the battle zone. Later, top Bush administration officials and General Franks himself would simply deny that the al-Qaeda leader had ever been at Tora Bora.

The question of whether the United States had missed an opportunity to kill bin Laden during the battle of Tora Bora became a particular issue during the razor-close 2004 U.S. presidential campaign. During the September 30 presidential debate, Democratic contender Senator John Kerry said, “
When we had Osama
bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best-trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist.”

This charge produced a furious response from the Bush campaign, since it went to the heart of the president’s claim that he was the “strong on terrorism”
contender. Writing in the
New York Times
, General Franks, a Bush supporter and the overall commander of the Tora Bora operation, stated, “
We don
’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora.” At a town hall meeting in Ohio, the same day that Franks’s piece appeared in the
Times
, Vice President Dick Cheney charged that Kerry’s critique of the Tora Bora campaign was “
absolute garbage
.”

On October 27, President
Bush himself weighed in
at a campaign rally a week before voters went to the polls, accusing Kerry “of saying anything it takes to get elected. Like when he charged that our military failed to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, even though our top military commander, General Tommy Franks, said, ‘The senator’s understanding of events does not square with reality,’ and intelligence reports place bin Laden in any of several different countries at the time.”

Two days later, bin Laden himself
suddenly appeared on a videotape
on Al Jazeera, his first appearance on video in more than a year. The tape was then replayed on TV stations across the United States. In the video, bin Laden spoke directly to the American people from behind a desk, dressed formally in gold robes and a white turban, his long beard streaked with gray. Bin Laden was well lit, suggesting a careful production, and he was without a gun at his side, a rare sight. That nonbelligerent visual message mirrored what bin Laden said: “Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, or Bush, or al-Qaeda. It is in your own hands and any state that does not violate our security has automatically guaranteed its own,” implying that al-Qaeda would suspend its attacks if there were a change in U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. On the videotape bin Laden for the first time made an unequivocal public admission of his own involvement in the 9/11 plot, saying that he had agreed with the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta, “that his mission be accomplished in twenty minutes before Bush and his administration had time to notice.”

The most obvious message of the election-eve videotape was that bin Laden was not only alive but doing quite well, a potent reminder that the Bush administration had not brought the al-Qaeda leader to justice. By now Bush and Kerry were running neck and neck and
Kerry was quick to point out
that “when George Bush had the opportunity in Afghanistan and Tora Bora he didn’t choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.” President Bush immediately responded to Kerry’s charge, saying, “My opponent tonight continued to say things he knows are not true … it is especially shameful in the light of a new tape from America’s enemy.”

Kerry was correct about what had taken place at Tora Bora, most importantly the fact that hundreds of al-Qaeda’s hard core, including bin Laden, escaped from the grasp of the United States to live to fight another day, while Bush, Cheney, and General Franks either misled the American public about what had happened at Tora Bora or were simply ignorant of what had really taken place during the most important battle of the “war on terror.”

Just how close bin Laden came to death at Tora Bora was illustrated by a videotape that aired on December 27, 2001, a couple of weeks after the battle had ended. As we have seen, bin Laden said, “
I am just a poor slave
of God. If I live or die, the war will continue,” his choice of words seeming to confirm his recent brush with death at Tora Bora. A visibly aged bin Laden did not move his entire left side during the thirty-four-minute videotape, suggesting he had sustained a serious injury. Abdel Bari Atwan, who had spent two days interviewing bin Laden in Tora Bora in 1996, says that in late December 2001, “
I was in the Gulf region
and I met somebody from al-Qaeda and he told me that Osama bin Laden was injured during the Tora Bora bombing, and he was operated on his left shoulder.”

On December 14, around the time bin Laden fled Tora Bora, he wrote a final testament that included a bleak message to his offspring: “
As to my children
, forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have chosen a road fraught with dangers and for this sake suffered from hardships, embitterment, betrayal, and treachery. I advise you not to work with al-Qaeda.”