Donald Rumsfeld had the chance when he was US defence secretary in December 2001 to make sure Osama bin Laden was killed or captured, but let him slip through his hands, a Senate report has found.
The report by the Senate foreign relations committee is damning of the way George Bush's administration conducted the aftermath of its bombing campaign in Afghanistan, saying it amounted to a "lost opportunity". It states that as a result of allowing the al-Qaida leader to flee from his Tora Bora stronghold into Pakistan, Americans were left more vulnerable to terrorism, and the foundations were laid for today's protracted Afghan insurgency. It also lays blame for the July 2005 London bombings on a failure to kill the al-Qaida leaders at Tora Bora.
Republican critics are likely to dismiss the report as a partisan work designed to deflect the current military troubles in Afghanistan away from President Barack Obama and on to his predecessor. The committee is Democratic-controlled.
LinkThis claim has been made so many times it has whiskers. The Lefties of the world love it, and bring it up because they want the West to withdraw from Afghanistan and turn it over to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Here in the US we should remember that Obamie the Bower, and the Left, claimed that the war in Iraq was terrible, wrong, etc., etc. To combat the obvious and long running, conclusion that they were weak on national defense, Afghanistan became the straw man. They, and that includes The Chosen One, embraced the war in Afghanistan as just and one that we must win.
That was a successful strategy to get elected on. It froze the Republicans in place and even better, no one seemed to care about Afghanistan. Small, far away with few causalities and no real strategic value it was assumed that the world would forget The Chosen One’s many promises and he could slip out of there and Iraq in the glow of the American people’s love for his universal health care, stopping our use of oil, and his redistribution of our wealth to ACORN’s minions and clients.
But it didn’t work out that way. The economy was destroyed by the Democratic created subprime mess and the speculators run up of oil prices that the Democrats did nothing to stop. Running out of money Obamie the Bower pandered first to the Muslim world, then to Europe and finally to Asia. His failures were, as expected, large, visible and not acceptable.
Worse, his highly visible weakness and stupidity regarding the real world emboldened Al Qaeda and the Taliban to step up their attacks. Obamie’s chosen General saw that the troops were spread too thin, could not protect themselves and that he needed more. Forty thousand more. Confused and hopeful it would just go away he has dithered and dithered. Tonight he will announce what he will do.
My hope is that he announces that he will do what is necessary to win. My head says he will announce a plan to withdraw, thus killing more troops and more Americans.
But I digress. If the Left wants to make the issue of why bin Ladin was not pursued then I am happy to offer a small bit of information that they are unlikely to know.
At the point in time they speak of it is assumed by many that OBL had fled into the tall mountains in Tora Bora. These are some of the tallest mountains in the world, and the caves and redoubts are ensconced in such a manner that only nuclear weapons can be expected to damage to them.
In addition the high mountain valleys allow attacks only by entering and leaving them in a certain direction. This means that attacks by air, either by planes or helicopters must be done from directions that are known to the defenders. Thus they are like setting ducks to the defenders and even after paying the price, as in Vietnam and as the Soviets did in Afghanistan, it is doubtful they could do serious damage to the caves and redoubts.
And all of this assumes that we could know which cave bin Ladin was in.
If that doesn’t seem like something we should do then I welcome you to the real world.
The alternative then becomes troops. The problem was we didn’t have enough in place. Oh, we could have attacked, but we would not have had superior numbers. Our air support would be limited and because of the terrain, so would be our mobile high caliber guns and rockets as well as tanks. We would be fighting an enemy in his home, on his terms, with fewer troops and no advantage in weapons.
That would have been, and is now, a formula for disaster. That is why Bush decided that having Bin Ladin marginalized and in hiding was enough. He saw no reason to kill thousands of US troops to kill or capture a man who would just live on as a hero. Better to let him live and hope that the criminal justice system in Pakistan or Afghanistan would capture him.
Now you know.
On Twitter I am Lesabre1
