By Matt Hurley for the TIB Network:
Senators Kerry and Edwards continue to make the charge that the administration “outsourced” the killing/capture of Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan to warlords who just weeks before were fighting for the other side. This assertion couldn’t be any more ridiculous if they claimed we gave the job to Mickey Mouse and Friends.I’m in the midst of reading An American Soldier by General Tommy Franks, former commander-in-chief of the US Central Command and the architect of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns in the Global War on Terror. Franks discusses the options facing his planning staff for Afghanistan in the book. It was clear to the general that if Afghanistan was going to be successful, it was going to be a Special Forces operation. Making that realization early on is what crafted the rest of the strategy.
Why Special Forces?
Take a look at a map of Afghanistan. It is a totally landlocked country consisting, primarily, of mountainous regions. No access to the water means no amphibious landing; no Marines storming the beaches. (Geographical Map)
Geographically, you have Iran to the west; Pakistan to the south and east; and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to the north. Relations with these countries were not favorable from the start, but we were able to get overflight rights to Pakistan and access to an old Soviet air base in Uzbekistan. These were key strategic victories for Franks’ plan. The Pakistani overflight rights meant that the Navy could deploy tomahawk missiles and the air component had an access corridor to Afghanistan. Getting access to the Soviet air base meant that a small force could be “heloed“ in to northern Afghanistan. (Region Map)
The Central Intelligence Agency had been working with the Northern Alliance for some time and established a working relationship with them. The goal was to eliminate Osama bin Laden, but nobody was going to be disappointed if they took the Taliban with him. On September 10th, 2001, Islamofascists killed the political leader of the Northern Alliance which split the Alliance in to at least two factions controlled by “warlords.”
The role of Special Forces in a mission like this, is to work with the locals and create a viable fighting force with whatever they can find or procure. Our guys are VERY GOOD at this sort of thing. When you combine the SEALs and Rangers with the Air Forces combat controllers, you have a small number of guys who have AMAZING skills that have DEADLY consequences for the enemy.
We didn’t have the access to roll Patton’s Third Army through to Kabul. No beach to stage the invasion of Normandy. And as effective as our Air Force is, there is no war to win a war from the sky. Furthermore, General Franks didn’t believe we needed all that in order to win. Franks was one of the guys who modernized and improved our joint warfare capabilities. He knew what was possible, what was improbable, and what he needed to win.
Outsourcing?
Senators Kerry and Edwards forget who was leading the Northern Alliance. It wasn’t warlords. It was Special Forces operators from the United States military.
Don’t forget, there was no access to Afghanistan in which we could deploy significant land forces in sufficient time to be useful. Paradropping that many forces into the region was going to take too long and increased the likelihood of failure due to being shot down from the air.
Eventually, elements of the 10th Mountain Division were inserted into Afghanistan. The 10th did a fantastic job, but that’s no reason to think that the Special Forces guys working with the Northern Alliance weren’t up to finishing the job in Tora Bora.
The biggest assumption of them all is that Osama bin laden was even in the Tora Bora region. Nobody knows that for sure. Certainly not Senators Kerry and Edwards, unless they’ve been holding out on us.
Another fallacy in Senators Kerry’s and Edward’s argument is that they continue to hammer the supposed lack of a “multilateral” force in Iraq, but in Afghanistan the decision was made to use other troops with American Special Forces. Kerry and Edwards can’t have it both ways.
10/7 Update
Peter Robinson has been collecting relevant emails from Corner readers that I think shed some light on the subject:Now that I’ve read a lot of emails on Tora Bora (I’ll say it again: the people who read this happy Corner are astonishingly well-informed), this much seems clear:
1. No one is able to make any sense at all of the Kerry/Edwards claim that the administration “outsourced” the job of capturing Osama bin Laden to Afghan warlords. Afghan forces participated in the action. But they were there to cut off certain escape routes, not to seize or kill Osama.
2. There is indeed some evidence that Americans permitted Osama to slip through their fingers—but not, be it noted, the president or secretary of defense, and not the forces on the ground. Instead, it was American commanders who failed, hesitating for fear casualties.
You’ll find this account in a 2002 article in the London Spectator. Registration is required, so I won’t bother posting the link, but here are the crucial few sentences:By the end of the battle, the SAS [the elite British force] was certain that it knew where bin Laden was: in a mountain valley, where he could have been trapped. The men of the SAS would have been happy to move in for the kill….3. Maybe the American commanders made some mistakes—but maybe they didn’t. Every knowledgeable correspondent has insisted that the operation proved fraught with difficulties and imponderables in any event. From an officer in the Canadian armed forces, on Operation Anaconda, which took place at Shak-i-kot a few months after the assault on Tora Bora:
It did not get the chance. The SAS was under overall US command, and the American generals faltered. Understandably enough, they wanted Delta Force [an elite American unit] to be in at the death….
It seems unlikely that bin Laden could have been bagged without casualties. The men on the ground did not quail at that prospect; the generals on the radio did. They wanted Delta Force to kill bin Laden; they were not prepared to allow their men to be killed in the process. They would not even allow USAF ground-attack aircraft to operate below 12,000 feet. For what it’s worth, this view seems to be widely accepted in Britain. From my friend Clive Davis, London correspondent of the Washington Times:
[In] David Hare's dreary documentary-play "Stuff Happens", which just opened at the National Theatre….Tony Blair is shown pleading with Bush over the phone to allow British special forces to go into the cave to slip on the handcuffs. I've been waiting for some authoritative Westminster figure to stomp all over this, but to the best of my knowledge nobody has, so no doubt it will soon become the conventional wisdom.Like Tora Bora, the concept of Op Anaconda was to catch AQ [al Qaeda] as they were retreating into Pakistan. There were a couple of problems with the op that resulted in a number of AQ being able to escape.Just how hard is it, exactly, to catch someone in difficult terrain? From another correspondent, a note that Mssrs. Kerry and Edwards ought to ponder:
Item: the op was launched prematurely, having been triggered by a Chinook being downed. This meant that not all of the cut-off teams were in place on all of the known escape routes at h-hour. They were generally replaced by massive air bombing, but in the mountainous terrain of the region this was much less effective.
Item: the Afghan allies used as clearing force were not as effective as desired, coming in slower than anticipated in the plan.
Item: being subjected to effective enemy fire limited the ability of the cut-off teams to call in indirect fire and air/ aviation….
Something that people forget, particularly because the US army is so good, is that the other side does fight back, and that plans often do not go off without a hitch because the enemy invariably reacts to what you're doing. This is particularly true when dealing with an experienced enemy working on his turf, and amplified by the fact that the terrain in question is complex.[R]emember that Eric Rudolph [who was being sought for the murder of an abortionist] hid in the back woods of North Carolina for nine years [emphasis mine] despite massive searches by government officers. He was caught only when he ran out of food.
