1 Boring Old Man

We’re Going to Lose Our Prey

In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, former CIA Director Tenet said it was evident from the start that aerial bombing would not be enough to get bin Laden at Tora Bora. Troops needed to be in the caves themselves, he wrote, but the Afghan militiamen were ‘‘distinctly reluctant’’ to put themselves in harm’s way and there were not enough Americans on the scene. He said that senior CIA officials lobbied hard for inserting U.S. troops. Henry Crumpton, the head of special operations for the CIA’s counterterrorism operation and chief of its Afghan strategy, made direct requests to Franks. Crumpton had told him that the back door to Pakistan was open and urged Franks to move more than 1,000 Marines who had set up a base near Kandahar to Tora Bora to block escape routes.

But the CentCom commander rejected the idea, saying it would take weeks to get a large enough U.S. contingent on the scene and bin Laden might disappear in the meantime. At the end of November, Crumpton went to the White House to brief President Bush and Vice President Cheney and repeated the message that he had delivered to Franks. Crumpton warned the President that the Afghan campaign’s primary goal of capturing bin Laden was in jeopardy because of the military’s reliance on Afghan militias at Tora Bora. Crumpton showed the President where Tora Bora was located in the White Mountains and described the caves and tunnels that riddled the region. Crumpton questioned whether the Pakistani forces would be able to seal off the escape routes and pointed out that the promised Pakistani troops had not arrived yet. In addition, the CIA officer told the President that the Afghan forces at Tora Bora were ‘‘tired and cold’’ and ‘‘they’re just not invested in getting bin Laden.’’

According to author Ron Suskind in The One Percent Solution, Crumpton sensed that his earlier warnings to Franks and others at the Pentagon had not been relayed the President. So Crumpton went further, telling Bush that ‘‘we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.’’ He recommended that the Marines or other U.S. troops be rushed to Tora Bora.

‘‘How bad off are these Afghani forces, really?’’ asked Bush. ‘‘Are they up to the job?
‘‘Definitely not, Mr. President,’’ Crumpton replied. ‘‘Definitely not.’’

Flight from Tora Bora

On December 14, the day bin Laden finished his will, Dalton Fury finally convinced Ali and his men to stay overnight in one of the canyons that they had captured during daylight. Over the next three days, the Afghan militia and their American advisers moved steadily through the canyons, calling in airstrikes and taking out lingering pockets of fighters. The resistance seemed to have vanished, prompting Ali to declare victory on December 17. Most of the Tora Bora complex was abandoned and many of the caves and tunnels were buried in debris. Only about 20 stragglers were taken prisoner. The consensus was that Al Qaeda fighters who had survived the fierce bombing had escaped into Pakistan or melted into the local population. Bin Laden was nowhere to be found. Two days later, Fury and his Delta Force colleagues left Tora Bora, hoping that someone would eventually find bin Laden buried in one of the caves.

There was no body because bin Laden did not die at Tora Bora. Later U.S. intelligence reports and accounts by journalists and others said that he and a contingent of bodyguards departed Tora Bora on December 16. With help from Afghans and Pakistanis who had been paid in advance, the group made its way on foot and horseback across the mountain passes and into Pakistan without encountering any resistance. The Special Operations Command history noted that there were not enough U.S. troops to prevent the escape, acknowledging that the failure to capture or kill bin Laden made Tora Bora a controversial battle. But Franks argued that Tora was a success and he praised both the Afghan militias and the Pakistanis who were supposed to have protected the border. ‘‘I think it was a good operation,’’ he said in an interview for the PBS show Frontline on the first anniversary of the Afghan war. ‘‘Many people have said, ‘Well, gosh, you know bin Laden got away.’ I have yet to see anything that proves bin Laden or whomever was there. That’s not to say they weren’t, but I’ve not seen proof that they were there.’’

Bin Laden himself later acknowledged that he was at Tora Bora, boasting about how he and Zawahiri survived the heavy bombing along with 300 fighters before escaping. ‘‘The bombardment was round-the-clock and the warplanes continued to fly over us day and night,’’ he said in an audio tape released on February 11, 2003. ‘‘Planes poured their lava on us, particularly after accomplishing their main missions in Afghanistan.’’

Yet when we read Senator Kerry’s Report about Tora Bora, we can’t decide if President Bush or Vice President Cheney were simply indifferent to the briefing by Henry Crumpton about Tora Bora, or whether they just ignored it for some reasons of their own. It’s like their earlier responses to Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke. He could talk of nothing except an imminent attack by al Qaeda, joined by C.I.A. Director George Tenet. Why didn’t they listen?

Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan…