Afghan War: Part of what the Iraq War cost us (3 of 7)

In their book America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (2003), Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay are critical of the failure at Tora Bora.

Their description of the failure there gives a good picture of the reluctance to commit American forces to Afghanistan and specifically to use them to go after the al-Qaeda forces temporarily cornered there, probably including Bin Laden himself. As they note, "Most Americans would have supported the use of U.S. troops to get bin Laden, the man responsible for the murder of three thousand of their fellow citizens." But Gen. Tommy Franks "decided to rely on local militias and the Pakistan regular army to tighten the noose around Tora Bora." As they describe it:

What went wrong? al Qaeda fighters bribed some of the Afghan militias to let them pass. But the most important reason for the failure was that the Afghans and Pakistani forces did not have the same incentive to get bin Laden as the United States did. The Afghanis wanted undisputed control of the area - which getting rid of al Qaeda would do. Pakistani regular army troops might do what they were told, but they were not eager to hunt down fierce Arab fighters in the middle of winter high up in the mountains. Neither cared much about what would happen to Osama bin Laden and his fighters once they had disappeared. Some may even have been sympathetic to his cause.

This, clearly was a job for American troops - not foreign forces with little stake in the result. And American troops were available. U.S. Marines had established a base south of Kandahar. Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division were readying for deployment into Bagram airbase north of Kabul, and thousands of additional forces were stationed in the region. As the military historian Frederick Kagan later argued, a few battalions of helicopter-borne troops could have been deployed to seal the escape routes out of the mountains. Yet, despite the fact that Franks had openly doubted the Afghan opposition, he and his commanders decided to rely on local fighters rather than on American troops to accomplish this critical mission. This decision was made even though Bush had put the highest priority on capturing bin Laden, including signing a presidential finding giving the CIA authority to kill him.

Tags: afghanistan war, tora bora