In mid-November 2001 as the Taliban regime fell in Afghanistan, the obvious aim of the US forces was to kill or capture Osama bin Laden (OBL) and his closest deputies. By the end of November it was widely known (although still disputed by some) that OBL with about 1,200 loyalists had escaped to Tora Bora caves in east Afghanistan, rather close to tribal areas of Pakistan. On November 29, this was confirmed by US Vice President Dick Cheney in an interview.
The Tora Bora caves had been well fortified by OBL and his companions during the Soviet invasion and they were familiar not only with the caves but also with the paths reaching from here to Pakistan. They had spent a lot of money on building local contacts.
The USA sent a force of about 100 soldiers who were supposed to enlist the help of local Afghan allies to kill or capture Bin Laden and close aides in Tora Bora. They were supported by heavy aerial bombing of caves by US planes.
As Afghan allies were reluctant to remain in caves after dark, the practice was to launch daytime attacks but return to the base in the evenings. During the first week, the presence of OBL in the caves was confirmed almost beyond doubt by radio intercepts. However, to US fighters it also became clearer by the the day that local Afghan allies were not very reliable. The promised help from Pakistan was also not reliable and was being delayed. Hence the small US force, which fought quite valiantly in the midst of several difficulties, repeatedly asked for ground-level US reinforcements. This was refused.
Despite this on December 9 the US forces gained a clear edge as a 15,000 pound daisy cutter bomb, apart from massive destruction, created so much heat in the caves that things became very difficult for OBL fighters. The situation worsened when some US soldiers advanced to guide bomber planes to aim better and they stepped up bombing for about 17 hours.
However, a leading local ally pleaded with the US force to halt bombings for a while to arrange the surrender of leading al Qaeda fighters. This proved to be just a ruse that allowed about 800 OBL loyalists to escape on the night of December 11. OBL and his close aides stayed on.
On December 14, the US forces prevailed upon Afghan allies to stay on for the night and a cave-to-cave hunt was launched. Now it was time for OBL and his group to leave and they did so on foot and horseback on or about December 16, helped by Afghan and Pakistani contacts to cross over to Pakistan unhindered.
This timeline is well-confirmed in perhaps the most comprehensive and credible report on OBL’s escape prepared for the members of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in November 2009. In his accompanying letter, Chairperson John F. Kerry has stated that the focus is on learning from mistakes in the past.
With this focus, this report titled ‘Tora Bora Revisited (TBR)—how we failed to get bin Laden and why it matters today’, made a strong indictment of the highest levels of military and political leadership in the USA which refused to provide reinforcements to US soldiers on the ground in Tora Bora, resulting in the escape of OBL.
As the TBR report confirms, in late November, CIA senior official on counter-terrorism Henry Crumpton, who was earlier head of the CIA unit on Afghanistan as well, made a strong plea for sending more ground troops to Tora Bora to top army authorities and in fact went to the extent to meeting President Bush and Vice-President Cheney for this. They listened to him but did nothing.
Gary Bernsten, senior CIA operator who was specialy sent to Tora Bora by his boss to ‘kill the enemy’, later wrote – “We needed US soldiers on the ground. I had sent request for 800 Army US rangers and was still waiting for a response. I repeated to anyone at headquarters who would listen – we need rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slippng away.”
This account of frustration of ground-level US forces is matched by statements of other Tora Bora force leaders. In fact, even the official history of the Special Operation Command regrets this when it says, “Given the commitment of fewer than 100 American personnel, US forces proved unable to block egress route from Tora Bora south into Pakistan.” This as well as other reviews note that the additional US soldiers needed at Tora Bora were clearly available. But for this extremely important assignment only about 100 soldiers were sanctioned.
Summarizing the sad failure, the TBR report notes –
l Calls for reinforcements for launching assault were rejected.
l Requests were also turned down for US troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan.
l The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines.
Further the TBR report confirms that there were enough US troops in or near Afghanistan to execute the classic sweep and block maneuver required to prevent the escape of OBL.
The report noted further that this failure proved very costly as the escape of a chrismatic terrorist gave more strength to his followers and al Qaeda units in many countries. By crossing over to Pakistan, OBL and his al Qaeda militants continued their plots there, including the July 2005 transit bombings in London and two aborted attacks in the USA.
One of the important factors behind this failure was the fact, not even known to ground forces in Tora Bora, that President Bush had already shifted his focus from strengthening Afghanistan efforts to invading Iraq for removing Saddam Hussein. In fact, even as senior experts were pleading with him for Tora Bora reinforcements, Bush had quietly asked his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a known hawk on Iraq, to prepare for the invasion. This happened on November 21, just a week or so after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, not allowing time for consolidation and focused attention here.
Apart from its main focus on the failure to prevent the escape of OBL, the TBR report also has important things to say about the months and weeks preceding the 9/11 attack.
l There were a lot of warning signs, in fact so many that CIA director George Tenet was to say later that “the system was blinking red” from July 2001 till the actual attacks. The first reports of possible attacks on US land had been picked up in June and warnings increased steadily from then on. Yet adequate action based on this was not taken.
l More specifically, on July 12 Tenet went to Capitol Hill to provide a top-secret briefing for senators about the rising threat of an imminent attack on US land as Al Qaeda and OBL were preparing for such an attack. Tenet said these attacks were a question not of if, but of when.
l On August 6, President Bush, as part of his daily briefing, was given a note titled ‘Bin Laden determined to strike the US’. This note warned that the FBI had uncovered “patterns of suspicious activity in the country consistent with preparation for hijacking or other types of attacks, including recent surveillence of federal buldings in New York.” This warning was called historic by Bush, but what was done about it? The official 9/11 Commission later found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of an al Qaeda attack in the USA.
Another important fact recorded in the TBR report appears to be even more ominous, even if it only goes to confirm what is already known from various sources regarding the efforts of the Al Qaeda to acquire nuclear weapons and the contacts it sought to establish with Pakistani nuclear scientists.
The TBR report says that in mid-August 2001, two Pakistani nuclear scientists met OBL and his closest deputy and strategist al-Zawahiri in Kandahar. The four men spent two days discussing the determination of Al Qaeda to obtain nuclear weapons. Before they took leave of each other, the two al Qaeda leaders told the nuclear scientists that something momentous was going to happen soon. This conversation took place less than a month before the 9/11 attack.