Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed To Get Bin Laden And Why It Matters Today
A Report To Members Of The Committee On Foreign Relations United States Senate
John F. Kerry, Chairman
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
NOVEMBER 30, 2009
3. AN ALTERNATIVE BATTLE PLAN
Troops Were Ready to Go
Assembling the troops to augment the handful of special ops commandos under Fury’s leadership at Tora Bora would have been a manageable task. Franks had set the ceiling of 10,000 U.S. troops to maintain a light footprint. Still, within that number there were enough ready and willing to go after bin Laden. In late November, about the time U.S. intelligence placed bin Laden squarely at Tora Bora, more than 1,000 members of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units, among the military’s most mobile arms, established a base southwest of Kandahar, only a few hours flight away. They were primarily interdicting traffic and supporting the special operations teams working with Afghan militias. Another 1,000 troops from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division were split between a base in southern Uzbekistan and Bagram Air Base, a short helicopter flight from Tora Bora. The Army troops were engaged mainly in military police functions, according to reports at the time.
Both forces are trained in unconventional warfare and could have been redeployed rapidly for an assault. Lt. Col. Paul Lacamera, commander of a 10th Mountain battalion, later said that his men had been prepared to deploy anywhere in Afghanistan since mid- November. ”We weren’t just sitting there digging holes and looking out,” said Lacamera, whose actions in a later assault on Al Qaeda forces won him a Silver Star. ”We were training for potential fights because eventually it was going to come to that.”
The commander of the Marines outside Kandahar, Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis, told a journalist that his troops could seal off Tora Bora, but his superiors rejected the plan. Everyone knew that such an operation would have conflicted with the Afghan model laid down by Franks and Rumsfeld. But there were other reasons to hesitate. One former officer told the Committee staff that the inability to get sufficient medical-evacuation helicopters into the rough terrain was a major stumbling block for those who considered trying to push for the assault. He also said there were worries that bad weather would ground transport helicopters or, worse, knock them out of the sky.
In addition to the troops in country, a battalion of Army Rangers was stationed in the Persian Gulf country of Oman, and 200 of them had demonstrated their abilities by parachuting into an airfield near Kandahar at night in October. In Krause’s analysis, a battalion of about 800 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could have been deployed to Tora Bora in less than a week, covering the 7,000 miles in C-17 transport aircraft.
No one should underestimate the logistical difficulty and danger of deploying even specially trained troops into hostile territory at altitudes of 7,000 to 10,000 feet. Landing zones for helicopters would likely have come under fire from Al Qaeda positions and drop zones for paratroopers were few and far between in the jagged terrain. But Chinook helicopters, the work horse for rapid deployments, proved capable of carrying combat troops above 11,000-foot mountain ranges as part of Operation Anaconda, a similar block- and-sweep mission carried out in February 2002 in eastern Afghanistan.
Former U.S. military officers said that sending American troops into Tora Bora was discussed at various times in late November and early December of 2001. The CIA’s Afghan chief, Hank Crumpton, made specific requests to Franks for U.S. troops and urged President Bush not to rely on Afghan militias and Pakistani paramilitary troops to do the job. CentCom went so far as to develop a plan to put several thousand U.S. troops into Tora Bora. Commanders estimated that deploying 1,000 to 3,000 American troops would have required several hundred airlift flights by helicopters over a week or more.
DeLong defended the decision not to deploy large numbers of American troops. ”We didn’t have the lift,” he told the Committee staff. ”We didn’t have the medical capabilities. The further we went down the road, the easier the decision got. We wanted Afghanistan to be peaceful for Karzai to take over. Right or not, that was the thinking behind what we did.”
The Afghan model proved effective in some instances, particularly when Afghan opposition forces working with American advisers were arrayed against poorly trained Taliban foot soldiers. The precision bombs and overwhelming airpower also played a major role in dispersing the Taliban forces and opening the way for the rapid takeover of the country, though critics now say scattering the Taliban simply allowed them to regroup later. In the early days at Tora Bora, the light footprint allowed a handful of CIA and special operations operatives to guide bombs that killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Al Qaeda fighters. But the model was ineffective when it came to motivating opposition militiamen of questionable skills and doubtful resolve to carry the fight to the biggest concentration of Al Qaeda fighters of the war, particularly when the jihadis were battling to protect their leader. Fewer than 100 special operations force soldiers and CIA operatives were unable to turn the tide against those odds.
Some critics said bin Laden escaped because the United States relied too heavily on Afghan militias to carry the fight forward at Tora Bora and on Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps to block any escape. As Michael O’Hanlon pointed out, our allies did not have the same incentives to stop bin Laden and his associates as American troops. Nor did they have the technology and training to carry out such a difficult mission. The responsibility for allowing the most wanted man in the world to virtually disappear into thin air lies with the American commanders who refused to commit the necessary U.S. soldiers and Marines to finish the job.
The same shortage of U.S. troops allowed Mullah Mohammed Omar and other Taliban leaders to escape. A semi-literate leader who fled Kandahar on a motorbike, Mullah Omar has re-emerged at the helm of the Taliban-led insurgency, which has grown more sophisticated and lethal in recent years and now controls swaths of Afghanistan. The Taliban, which is aligned with a loose network of other militant groups and maintains ties to Al Qaeda, has established shadow governments in many of Afghanistan’s provinces and is capable of mounting increasingly complex attacks on American and NATO forces. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who helped develop the Obama administration’s Afghan policy, recently referred to the mullah’s return to power “one of the most remarkable military comebacks in modern history.”
Ironically, one of the guiding principles of the Afghan model was to avoid immersing the United States in a protracted insurgency by sending in too many troops and stirring up anti-American sentiment. In the end, the unwillingness to bend the operational plan to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden paved the way for exactly what we had hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency that has cost more lives than anyone estimates would have been lost in a full-blown assault on Tora Bora. Further, the dangerous contagion of rising violence and instability in Afghanistan has spread to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed ally of the United States which is now wracked by deadly terrorist bombings as it conducts its own costly military campaign against a domestic, Taliban-related insurgency.
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