The Battle for Tora Bora
A must-read piece in the New Republic: The definitive account of how Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp in 2001.
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2009/12/22/the_battle_for_tora_bora.htmlhttp://www.tnr.com/article/the-battle-tora-bora?page=0,4The Battle for Tora Bora
How Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp: the definitive account.
Four days before the fall of Kabul in November 2001, Osama bin Laden was still in town. The Al Qaeda leader’s movements before and after September 11 are difficult to trace precisely, but, just prior to the attacks, we know that he appeared in Kandahar and urged his followers to evacuate to safer locations in anticipation of U.S. retaliation. Then, on November 8, he was in Kabul, despite the fact that U.S. forces and their Afghan allies were closing in on the city. That morning, while eating a meal of meat and olives, he gave an interview to Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who was writing his biography. He defended the attacks on New York and Washington, saying, “America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal.” Six months later, when I met Mir in Pakistan, he told me that the Al Qaeda leader had, on that day, appeared to be in remarkably good spirits.
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On December 10, American signals-intelligence operators picked up an important intercept from Tora Bora: “Father
is trying to break through the siege line.” This was then communicated to the Delta operators on the ground. Around 4 p.m. that same day, Afghan soldiers said they had bin Laden in their sights, according to the official U.S. military history of the battle. Later that evening, Fury received a new piece of signals intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts. The information was so precise that it appeared to pinpoint the Al Qaeda leader’s location to within ten meters. At the time, Fury was in the schoolhouse that he had been using as a base. About 15 minutes later, he received another bit of intelligence--somewhat less precise--placing bin Laden two kilometers from the first location. To this day, Fury doesn’t know which information was more recent and therefore more accurate, but he drove into the foothills and got to within about 1,900 meters of the first location.
Fury now found himself in a quandary. This was almost certainly the closest to bin Laden’s position U.S. forces had ever been, but, at the same time, three of his men were pinned down in a ferocious firefight with some Al Qaeda foot soldiers. And, as dusk fell, Fury’s key Afghan ally, Hazarat Ali, had retreated from the battlefield back home to break his Ramadan fast. Fury was under explicit orders not to take the lead in the battle and only to act in a supporting role for the hundreds of Afghans in Hazarat Ali’s ragtag army. Now, he had no Afghan allies to guide him at night into the craggy moonscape of upper Tora Bora. Fury reluctantly made the decision to bail on that night’s mission.
Muhammad Musa, who commanded 600 Afghan soldiers at Tora Bora, later said that he was not impressed by the U.S. forces on the ground. “They were not involved in the fighting,” he said. “There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the air strikes. ... My personal view is, if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, Al Qaeda would not have had a way to escape. The Americans were my guests here, but they didn’t know about fighting.”
In fact, the five dozen or so Americans on the ground at Tora Bora fought well. There were just far too few of them to cordon off a huge, mountainous area and prevent Al Qaeda from escaping into Pakistan.
more, lots of details:
http://www.tnr.com/article/the-battle-tora-bora?page=0,4
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