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" ! COMMITTEE PRINT 

111TH CONGRESS

1st Session 

S. PRT. 

2009

111–35 

TORA BORA REVISITED: 

HOW WE FAILED TO GET BIN LADEN 

AND WHY IT MATTERS TODAY 

A Report To Members 

OF THE 

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS 

UNITED STATES SENATE 

John F. Kerry, Chairman 

ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

NOVEMBER 30, 2009 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations 

Available via World Wide Web: 

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html 


seneagle
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts, Chairman

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut 

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin 

BARBARA BOXER, California 

ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey 

BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland 

ROBERT P. CASEY, JR., Pennsylvania 

JIM WEBB, Virginia 

JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire 

EDWARD E. KAUFMAN, Delaware 

KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York 

RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana 

BOB CORKER, Tennessee 

JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia 

JAMES E. RISCH, Idaho 

JIM DEMINT, South Carolina 

JOHN BARRASSO, Wyoming 

ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi 

JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma 

DAVID MCKean, Staff Director

KENNETH A. MYERS, JR., Republican Staff Director

(II)

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Letter of Transmittal ........................................................................................... v 

Executive Summary ............................................................................................. 1 

1. Flight to Tora Bora .......................................................................................... 3 

The Sheikh Arrives .......................................................................................... 5 

Other Voices, Same Conclusion ....................................................................... 7 

‘‘A Controversial Fight’’ .................................................................................... 9 

2. The Afghan Model: A Flawed Masterpiece or Just Flawed? ........................ 10 

A Shift in Attention and Resources ................................................................ 12 

‘‘We’re Going to Lose Our Prey’’ ...................................................................... 13 

Flight from Tora Bora ...................................................................................... 13 

3. An Alternative Plan ......................................................................................... 15 

Troops Were Ready to Go ................................................................................ 17 

The Price of Failure .......................................................................................... 19 

Endnotes ............................................................................................................... 21 

APPENDIXES

Appendix I.—‘‘A Flawed Masterpiece,’’ Michael E. O’Hanlon, Foreign Affairs, 

March/April 2002 ................................................................................................. 25 

Appendix II.—United States Special Operations Command History, 6th Edition ........................................................................................................................ 33

(III)

(v) 

LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL 

UNITED STATES SENATE, 

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, 

Washington, DC, November 30, 2009. 

DEAR COLLEAGUE: This report by the committee majority staff is 

part of our continuing examination of the conflict in Afghanistan. 

When we went to war less than a month after the attacks of September 11, the objective was to destroy Al Qaeda and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, and other senior figures in the 

terrorist group and the Taliban, which had hosted them. Today, 

more than eight years later, we find ourselves fighting an increasingly lethal insurgency in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan 

that is led by many of those same extremists. Our inability to finish the job in late 2001 has contributed to a conflict today that endangers not just our troops and those of our allies, but the stability 

of a volatile and vital region. This report relies on new and existing 

information to explore the consequences of the failure to eliminate 

bin Laden and other extremist leaders in the hope that we can 

learn from the mistakes of the past. 

Sincerely, 

JOHN F. KERRY, 

Chairman. 

(1) 

TORA BORA REVISITED: 

HOW WE FAILED TO GET BIN LADEN 

AND WHY IT MATTERS TODAY 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

On October 7, 2001, U.S. aircraft began bombing the training 

bases and strongholds of Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban across 

Afghanistan. The leaders who sent murderers to attack the World 

Trade Center and the Pentagon less than a month earlier and the 

rogue government that provided them sanctuary were running for 

their lives. President George W. Bush’s expression of America’s desire to get Osama bin Laden ‘‘dead or alive’’ seemed about to come 

true. 

Two months later, American civilian and military leaders celebrated what they viewed as a lasting victory with the selection of 

Hamid Karzai as the country’s new hand-picked leader. The war 

had been conceived as a swift campaign with a single objective: defeat the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda by capturing or killing bin 

Laden and other key leaders. A unique combination of airpower, 

Central Intelligence Agency and special operations forces teams 

and indigenous allies had swept the Taliban from power and ousted 

Al Qaeda from its safe haven while keeping American deaths to a 

minimum. But even in the initial glow, there were concerns: The 

mission had failed to capture or kill bin Laden. 

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. Al Qaeda shifted its locus across the border 

into Pakistan, where it has trained extremists linked to numerous 

plots, including the July 2005 transit bombings in London and two 

recent aborted attacks involving people living in the United States. 

The terrorist group’s resurgence in Pakistan has coincided with the 

rising violence orchestrated in Afghanistan by the Taliban, whose 

leaders also escaped only to re-emerge to direct today’s increasingly 

lethal Afghan insurgency. 

This failure and its enormous consequences were not inevitable. 

By early December 2001, Bin Laden’s world had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section of 

2 

eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora. Cornered in some of the 

most forbidding terrain on earth, he and several hundred of his 

men, the largest concentration of Al Qaeda fighters of the war, endured relentless pounding by American aircraft, as many as 100 air 

strikes a day. One 15,000-pound bomb, so huge it had to be rolled 

out the back of a C-130 cargo plane, shook the mountains for miles. 

It seemed only a matter of time before U.S. troops and their Afghan allies overran the remnants of Al Qaeda hunkered down in 

the thin, cold air at 14,000 feet. 

Bin Laden expected to die. His last will and testament, written 

on December 14, reflected his fatalism. ‘‘Allah commended to us 

that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to 

parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole,’’ he wrote, according to a copy of the will that surfaced later and is regarded as 

authentic. ‘‘Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in 

the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the 

sword permeated every cell in my heart, ‘and fight the pagans all 

together as they fight you all together.’ How many times did I 

wake up to find myself reciting this holy verse!’’ He instructed his 

wives not to remarry and apologized to his children for devoting 

himself to jihad. 

But the Al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer 

than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies, and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were 

rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block 

the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. 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. Instead, the U.S. command chose 

to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin 

Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal 

his escape routes. On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked 

unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today. 

The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden 

or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald 

Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation 

Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an 

anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell 

doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations 

troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan 

opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence 

officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching 

more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan. 

There were enough U.S. troops in or near Afghanistan to execute 

the classic sweep-and-block maneuver required to attack bin Laden 

and try to prevent his escape. It would have been a dangerous fight 

across treacherous terrain, and the injection of more U.S. troops 

and the resulting casualties would have contradicted the riskVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:46 Nov 30, 2009 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00008 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\DOCS\DOUG.TXT MikeBB PsN: MIKEB
3 

averse, ‘‘light footprint’’ model formulated by Rumsfeld and Franks. 

But commanders on the scene and elsewhere in Afghanistan argued that the risks were worth the reward. 

After bin Laden’s escape, some military and intelligence analysts 

and the press criticized the Pentagon’s failure to mount a full-scale 

attack despite the tough rhetoric by President Bush. Franks, Vice 

President Dick Cheney and others defended the decision, arguing 

that the intelligence was inconclusive about the Al Qaeda leader’s 

location. But the review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants underlying 

this report removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that 

Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora. 

For example, the CIA and Delta Force commanders who spent 

three weeks at Tora Bora as well as other intelligence and military 

sources are certain he was there. Franks’ second-in-command during the war, retired Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, wrote in his autobiography that bin Laden was ‘‘definitely there when we hit the 

caves’’—a statement he retracted when the failure became a political issue. Most authoritatively, the official history of the U.S. Special Operations Command determined that bin Laden was at Tora 

Bora. ‘‘All source reporting corroborated his presence on several 

days from 9–14 December,’’ said a declassified version of the history, which was based on accounts of commanders and intelligence 

officials and published without fanfare two years ago. 

The reasons behind the failure to capture or kill Osama bin 

Laden and its lasting consequences are examined over three sections in this report. The first section traces bin Laden’s path from 

southern Afghanistan to the mountains of Tora Bora and lays out 

new and previous evidence that he was there. The second explores 

new information behind the decision not to launch an assault. The 

final section examines the military options that might have led to 

his capture or death at Tora Bora and the ongoing impact of the 

failure to bring him back ‘‘dead or alive.’’ 

1. FLIGHT TO TORA BORA

Whether Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora in late 

2001 has been the topic of heated debate since he escaped 

Afghanistan to the tribal belt of Pakistan. The evidence is 

convincing that the Al Qaeda leader was in the mountains 

of eastern Afghanistan in that critical period. The information comes from U.S. military officers at Tora Bora, from 

detainees who were in the camps with bin Laden, from the 

senior CIA officer in Afghanistan at the time, and from the 

official history of the special operations forces. Based on 

that evidence, it is clear that the Al Qaeda leader was within reach of U.S. troops three months after the attacks on 

New York and Washington. 

In the middle of August 2001, two Pakistani nuclear scientists 

sat down in a mud-walled compound on the outskirts of Kandahar 

in southern Afghanistan, the spiritual and tactical headquarters of 

Taliban fundamentalists who controlled most of the country. Seated with them were bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who was his chief deputy and strategist. The four men 

4 

spent two days discussing Al Qaeda’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons before bin Laden and Zawahiri abruptly excused 

themselves and left the compound. Before departing, bin Laden 

promised the Pakistanis that something momentous was going to 

happen soon. 

American intelligence had already picked up indications that 

something momentous was coming. George Tenet, who was Director of Central Intelligence at the time, later testified before the 9/ 

11 Commission that the ‘‘system was blinking red’’ from July 2001 

until the actual attacks. The first reports of possible attacks on the 

United States had been picked up in June and the warnings increased steadily from then on. On July 12, Tenet went to Capitol 

Hill to provide a top-secret briefing for Senators about the rising 

threat of an imminent attack. Only a handful of Senators turned 

up in S-407, the secure conference room in the Capitol, to hear the 

CIA Director warn that he was extremely worried that bin Laden 

and Al Qaeda were preparing an attack on U.S. soil. Tenet told 

them the attack was not a question of if, but when. 

Less than a month later, on August 6, President Bush’s daily 

briefing repeated the warning under the ominous headline ‘‘Bin 

Ladin Determined To Strike in U.S.’’ The text described previous 

plots carried out by Al Qaeda against American targets overseas 

and said the FBI had uncovered ‘‘patterns of suspicious activity in 

this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other 

types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings 

in New York.’’ At the time, President Bush later told the 9/11 Commission that he regarded the warning as historical in nature. The 

Commission’s voluminous report said its investigators ‘‘found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the 

President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an 

Al Qaeda attack in the United States.’’ 

Bin Laden’s movements in the days surrounding September 11 

remain sketchy. Some facts have emerged from reputable journalists, U.S. military and intelligence sources and Afghans who said 

they saw the Al Qaeda leader at various points along his path to 

Tora Bora. He was spotted in Khost in eastern Afghanistan around 

September 11. On November 8, he and Zawahiri met in Kabul with 

Hamid Mir, a respected Pakistani journalist. By then, U.S. special 

operations forces and Northern Alliance troops were closing in on 

the Afghan capital. The Al Qaeda leaders had risked the trip to attend a memorial service honoring the Uzbek militant leader Juma 

Khan Namangani, who had been killed in a U.S. airstrike. Before 

Kabul fell, bin Laden and Zawahiri traveled 5 hours east to the ancient trading center of Jalalabad. From there, by all reliable accounts, they went to ground at Tora Bora, one of bin Laden’s old 

haunts from the days of fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. 

Tora Bora is a district about 30 miles southeast of Jalalabad. 

Rather than a single place, the name covers a fortress-like section 

of the White Mountains that stretches about six miles long and six 

miles wide across a collection of narrow valleys, snow-covered 

ridgelines and jagged peaks reaching 14,000 feet. During the 

1980s, when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, bin Laden 

turned the site into a formidable stronghold. He built a rough road 

from Jalalabad and brought in heavy equipment to fortify the natVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:46 Nov 30, 2009 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00010 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\DOCS\DOUG.TXT MikeBB PsN: MIKEB
5 

ural caves and dig new ones. He supervised the excavation of connecting tunnels so fighters could move unseen between locations in 

the fights against Soviet troops. 

After the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989, bin Laden left Afghanistan and eventually set up the operations of his fledgling terrorist organization in the northeastern African nation of Sudan. 

After pressure from the United States, Sudan expelled bin Laden 

in 1996 and he flew with his wives and children to Jalalabad on 

a chartered jet. Upon his return to Afghanistan, bin Laden began 

expanding the fortress at Tora Bora, building base camps at higher 

elevations for himself, his wives and numerous children, and other 

senior Al Qaeda figures. Some rooms were reported to be concealed 

350 feet inside the granite peaks. The mountainsides leading to 

those upper reaches were steep and pitted with well-built bunkers 

cloaked in camouflage. In the years that followed, Bin Laden got 

to know the surrounding geography well from spending hours on 

long hikes with his children. His familiarity with the worn trails 

used over the centuries by traders and smugglers to traverse the 

few miles into Pakistan would serve him well. 

The United States rightly anticipated that bin Laden would 

make his last stand at Tora Bora. The precise dates of his arrival 

and departure are hard to pin down, but it’s clear that U.S. intelligence picked up his trail well before he got there. The CIA had 

evidence that bin Laden was headed for the mountain redoubt by 

early November, according to Tenet, the former CIA Director. Outside experts like Peter Bergen, the last American to interview bin 

Laden, estimate that he arrived by the end of November, along 

with 1,000 to 1,500 hardened fighters and bodyguards. In a television interview on November 29, 2001, Vice President Cheney said 

he believed the Al Qaeda leader was in the general area of Tora 

Bora. ‘‘He’s got a large number of fighters with him probably, a 

fairly secure personal security force that he has some degree of confidence in, and he’ll have to try to leave, that is, he may depart for 

other territory, but that’s not quite as easy as it would have been 

a few months ago,’’ Cheney said. 

The Sheikh Arrives 

Bin Laden’s presence was more than conjecture. A major with 

the Army’s Delta Force, who is now retired and uses the pen name 

Dalton Fury, was the senior U.S. military officer at Tora Bora, 

commanding about 90 special operations troops and support personnel. He and his fellow commandos from the elite and secretive 

Delta Force arrived in early December, setting up headquarters in 

a former schoolhouse near the mountains alongside a handful of 

CIA operatives who were already there. The Americans were there 

to direct airstrikes on Tora Bora and work with Afghan militias assembled by two local warlords who had been paid by the CIA to 

help flush out bin Laden and the Al Qaeda contingent. The Delta 

Force soldiers were disguised to blend in with the Afghan militia, 

wearing local clothing, growing bushy beards and sometimes carrying the same types of weapons. 

Fury recounted his experiences in a book, Kill Bin Laden, which 

was published in 2008. He expanded on them in interviews with 

committee staff. Both the book and the interviews left no doubt 

6 

that Fury’s team knew bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora and 

that he was eager to go get him. In the interviews, he explained 

that Al Qaeda fighters arrayed in the mountains used unsecure radios, which meant their communications were easily intercepted by 

his team and by a sophisticated listening post a few miles from the 

mountain. As a result, the Delta Force and CIA operatives had 

real-time eavesdropping capabilities on Al Qaeda almost from their 

arrival, allowing them to track movements and gauge the effectiveness of the bombing. Even more valuable, a few days after arriving, 

one of the CIA operatives picked up a radio from a dead Al Qaeda 

fighter. The radio gave the Americans a clear channel into the 

group’s communications on the mountain. Bin Laden’s voice was 

often picked up, along with frequent comments about the presence 

of the man referred to by his followers as ‘‘the sheikh.’’ 

Fury, who still uses his pen name to protect his identity, said 

there was no doubt the voice on the radios was bin Laden. ‘‘The 

CIA had a guy with them called Jalal and he was the foremost expert on bin Laden’s voice,’’ he said. ‘‘He worked on bin Laden’s 

voice for seven years and he knew him better than anyone else in 

the West. To him, it was very clear that bin Laden was there on 

the mountain.’’ 

Another special operations expert who speaks fluent Arabic and 

heard the intercepted communications in real time in Afghanistan 

told the committee staff that it was clearly bin Laden’s voice. He 

had studied the Al Qaeda leader’s speech pattern and word choices 

before the war and he said he considered the communications a 

perfect match. 

Afghan villagers who were providing food and other supplies for 

the Al Qaeda fighters at Tora Bora also confirmed bin Laden’s 

presence. Fury said some of the villagers were paid by the CIA for 

information about precise locations of clusters of fighters that could 

be targeted for bombing runs. The locals also provided fragmentary 

information on bin Laden’s movements within the Al Qaeda compound, though the outsiders never got near the sheikh. The cooperating villagers were given rudimentary global positioning devices 

and told to push a button at any spot where they saw significant 

numbers of fighters or arms caches. When the locals turned in the 

devices to collect their payments, the GPS coordinates recorded by 

pushing the buttons were immediately passed along to targeting officers, who programmed the coordinates into bombing runs. 

For several days in early December, Fury’s special ops troops 

moved up the mountains in pairs with fighters from the Afghan militias. The Americans used GPS devices and laser range finders to 

pinpoint caves and pockets of enemy fighters for the bombers. The 

Delta Force units were unable to hold any high ground because the 

Afghans insisted on retreating to their base at the bottom of the 

mountains each night, leaving the Americans alone inside Al 

Qaeda territory. Still, it was clear from what they could see and 

what they were hearing in the intercepted conversations that relentless bombing was taking its toll. 

On December 9, a C-130 cargo plane dropped a 15,000-pound 

bomb, known as a Daisy Cutter, on the Tora Bora complex. The 

weapon had not been used since Vietnam, and there were early 

fears that its impact had not been as great as expected. But later 

7 

reports confirmed that the bomb struck with massive force. A captured Al Qaeda fighter who was there later told American interrogators that men deep in caves had been vaporized in what he 

called ‘‘a hideous explosion.’’ That day and others, Fury described 

intercepting radio communications in which Al Qaeda fighters 

called for the ‘‘red truck to move wounded’’ and frantic pleas from 

a fighter to his commander, saying ‘‘cave too hot, can’t reach others.’’ 

At one point, the Americans listened on the radio as bin Laden 

exhorted his men to keep fighting, though he apologized ‘‘for getting them trapped and pounded by American airstrikes.’’ On December 11, Fury said bin Laden was heard on the radio telling his 

men that he had let them down and it was okay to surrender. Fury 

hoped the battle was over, but he would soon determine that it was 

part of an elaborate ruse to allow Al Qaeda fighters to slip out of 

Tora Bora for Pakistan. 

Fury is adamant that bin Laden was at Tora Bora until mid-December. ‘‘There is no doubt that bin Laden was in Tora Bora during 

the fighting,’’ he wrote in Kill Bin Laden. ‘‘From alleged sightings 

to the radio intercepts to news reports from various countries, it 

was repeatedly confirmed that he was there.’’ 

Other Voices, Same Conclusion 

Fury was not alone in his conviction. In some cases, confirmation 

that bin Laden was at Tora Bora has come from detainees at Guantanamo Bay. A ‘‘summary of evidence’’ prepared by the Pentagon 

for the trial of an unnamed detainee says flatly that the man ‘‘assisted in the escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora.’’ The detainee was described as one of bin Laden’s commanders in the fight 

against the Soviets. The document, which was released to the Associated Press in 2005 through a Freedom of Information request, 

was the first definitive statement by the Pentagon that the mastermind of 9/11 was at Tora Bora during the American bombing before 

slipping away into Pakistan. 

Another confirmation came from the senior CIA paramilitary 

commander in Afghanistan at the time. Gary Berntsen was working at the CIA’s counterterrorist center in October 2001 when his 

boss summoned him to the front office and told him, ‘‘Gary, I want 

you killing the enemy immediately.’’ Berntsen left the next day for 

Afghanistan, where he assumed leadership of the CIA’s paramilitary operation against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His primary 

target was bin Laden, and he was confident that the Al Qaeda 

leader would make his last stand at Tora Bora. His suspicions were 

confirmed when he learned bin Laden’s voice had been intercepted 

there. 

From the outset, Berntsen says he was skeptical about relying on 

Afghan militias ‘‘cobbled together at the last minute’’ to capture or 

kill the man who ordered the 9/11 attacks. ‘‘I’d made it clear in my 

reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al 

Qaeda in Tora Bora,’’ he wrote in his own book, Jawbreaker, which 

was published in late 2005. He also knew that the special operations troops and CIA operatives on the scene were not enough to 

stop bin Laden from escaping across the mountain passes. In the 

8 

book, Berntsen uses exclamation points to vent his fears that the 

most wanted man in the world was about to slip out of our grasp. 

‘‘We needed U.S. soldiers on the ground!’’ he wrote. ‘‘I’d sent my 

request for 800 U.S. Army 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 slipping away!!’’ 

At one point, Berntsen recalled an argument at a CIA guesthouse in Kabul with Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the commander of U.S. 

special operations forces in Afghanistan at the time. Berntsen said 

he renewed his demand that American troops be dispatched to 

Tora Bora immediately. Following orders from Franks at U.S. Central Command (CentCom) headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base 

in Tampa, Florida, Dailey refused to deploy U.S. troops, explaining 

that he feared alienating Afghan allies. 

‘‘I don’t give a damn about offending our allies!’’ Berntsen shouted. ‘‘I only care about eliminating al Qaeda and delivering bin 

Laden’s head in a box!’’ 

Dailey said the military’s position was firm and Berntsen replied, 

‘‘Screw that!’’ 

For those like Franks, who later maintained that bin Laden 

might not have been at Tora Bora, Berntsen is respectfully scornful. ‘‘We could have ended it all there,’’ he said in an interview. 

Berntsen’s views were generally shared by Gary Schroen, another senior CIA operative in Afghanistan. Schroen, who had spent 

years cultivating ties to Afghanistan’s opposition elements, bemoaned the reliance on local tribal leaders to go after bin Laden 

and guard escape routes. ‘‘Unfortunately, many of those people 

proved to be loyal to bin Laden and sympathizers with the Taliban 

and they allowed the key guys to escape,’’ Schroen, who retired 

from the CIA, said in a television interview in May 2005. He added 

that he had no doubt that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. 

Franks’ second-in-command during the war, General DeLong, 

was convinced that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. In his memoir, Inside CentCom, DeLong described the massive, three-week bombing 

campaign aimed at killing Al Qaeda fighters in their caves at Tora 

Bora. ‘‘We were hot on Osama bin Laden’s trail,’’ he wrote. ‘‘He was 

definitely there when we hit the caves. Every day during the bombing, Rumsfeld asked me, ‘Did we get him? Did we get him?’ I would 

have to answer that we didn’t know.’’ The retired general said that 

intelligence suggested bin Laden had been wounded during the 

bombings before he escaped to Pakistan, a conclusion reached by 

numerous journalists, too. 

DeLong argued that large numbers of U.S. troops could not be 

dispatched because the area surrounding Tora Bora was controlled 

by tribes hostile to the United States and other outsiders. But he 

recognized that the Pakistani Frontier Corps, asked to block any 

escape attempt by bin Laden, was ill-equipped for the job. ‘‘To 

make matters worse, this tribal area was sympathetic to bin 

Laden,’’ he wrote. ‘‘He was the richest man in the area, and he had 

funded these people for years.’’ 

The book was published in September 2004, a year after DeLong 

retired from the Army. That fall, the failure to capture or kill bin 

Laden had become an issue in the presidential campaign. Franks 

9 

had retired from the Army in 2003 and he often defended the 

events at Tora Bora. On October 19, 2004, he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times saying that intelligence on the Al 

Qaeda leader’s location had been inconclusive. ‘‘We don’t know to 

this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 

2001,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he 

was in Kashmir. Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda 

operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin 

Laden was never within our grasp.’’ 

Two weeks after the Franks article was published and barely two 

months after publication of his own book, DeLong reversed the conclusion from his autobiography and echoed his former boss in an 

opinion article on November 1 in The Wall Street Journal. After defending the decision to rely heavily on local militia and the Pakistani Frontier Corps, DeLong wrote: ‘‘Finally, most people fail to 

realize that it is quite possible that bin Laden was never in Tora 

Bora to begin with. There exists no concrete intel to prove that he 

was there at the time.’’ 

DeLong said in an interview with committee staff that the contradiction between his book and the opinion article was the result 

of murky intelligence. ‘‘What I put in the book was what the intel 

said at the time,’’ he said. ‘‘The intel is not always right. I read it 

that he was there. We even heard that he was injured. Later intel 

was that he may or may not have been there. Did anybody have 

eyeballs on him? No. The intel stated that he was there at the 

time, but we got shot in the face by bad intel many times.’’ 

DeLong amplified the reasons for not sending American troops 

after bin Laden. ‘‘The real reason we didn’t go in with U.S. troops 

was that we hadn’t had the election yet,’’ he said in the staff interview, a reference to the installation of Hamid Karzai as the interim 

leader of Afghanistan. ‘‘We didn’t want to have U.S. forces fighting 

before Karzai was in power. We wanted to create a stable country 

and that was more important than going after bin Laden at the 

time.’’ 

‘‘A Controversial Fight’’ 

Military and intelligence officers at Tora Bora have provided 

ample evidence that bin Laden was there. Al Qaeda detainees have 

maintained that he was there. And the Pentagon’s own summary 

of evidence in the case against a former senior jihadi commander 

at Guantanamo Bay concluded the detainee helped bin Laden escape. But the most authoritative and definitive unclassified government document on bin Laden’s location in December 2001 is the official history of the United States Special Operations Command. 

The Special Operations Command, based alongside CentCom at 

MacDill Air Force Base, oversees the special forces of the Army, Air 

Force, Navy and Marine Corps. The heavy reliance on special operations forces during the first stages of the Afghan campaign meant 

that the command played a central role in executing the war plan. 

Its units included the Delta Force team on the scene at Tora Bora. 

In preparing the official history of the command, a team of historians working for the command interviewed military and intelligence officials from every branch of the armed forces. The unclasVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:46 Nov 30, 2009 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00015 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\DOCS\DOUG.TXT MikeBB PsN: MIKEB
10 

sified version of the history was published in 2007 and includes a 

lengthy section on the operations at Tora Bora. 

The section opens by saying that bin Laden and a large contingent of Al Qaeda troops had fled the area around Kabul for 

Nangahar Province and its provincial capital, Jalalabad, in early 

November. ‘‘Analysts within both the CIA and CentCom correctly 

speculated that UBL would make a stand along the northern peaks 

of the Spin Ghar Mountains at a place then called Tora Gora,’’ says 

the history. ‘‘Tora Bora, as it was redubbed in December, had been 

a major stronghold of AQ for years and provided routes into Pakistan.’’ The history said bin Laden had ‘‘undoubtedly’’ chosen to 

make his last stand there prior to the onset of winter, along with 

between 500 and 2,000 others, before escaping into Pakistan. 

In the concluding passage assessing the battle of Tora Bora, the 

historians from the Special Operations Command wrote: ‘‘What has 

since been determined with reasonable certainty was that UBL was 

indeed at Tora Bora in December 2001. All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9–14 December. The 

fact that SOF (special operations forces) came as close to capturing 

or killing UBL as U.S. forces have to date makes Tora Bora a controversial fight. Given the commitment of fewer than 100 American 

personnel, U.S. forces proved unable to block egress routes from 

Tora Bora south into Pakistan, the route that UBL most likely 

took.’’ 

Franks declined to respond to any questions about the discrepancies about bin Laden’s location or the conclusion of the Special 

Operations Command historians. ‘‘We really don’t have time for 

this,’’ one of his aides, retired Col. Michael T. Hayes, wrote in an 

email to the committee staff. ‘‘Focused on the future, not the past. 

Gen Franks made his decisions, based on the intel at the time.’’ 

2. THE AFGHAN MODEL: A FLAWED MASTERPIECE

OR JUST FLAWED? 

Writing in Foreign Affairs in the spring of 2002, the military analyst Michael O’Hanlon declared Operation Enduring Freedom ‘‘a masterpiece of military creativity and finesse.’’ The operation had been designed on the fly and 

O’Hanlon praised Rumsfeld, Franks and CIA Director 

George Tenet for devising a war plan that combined limited 

American power and the Afghan opposition to defeat the 

Taliban and Al Qaeda with only 30 U.S. casualties in the 

first five months. But O’Hanlon tempered his praise, calling the plan ‘‘a flawed masterpiece’’ because of the failure 

to capture or kill bin Laden and other enemy leaders. The 

resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in recent years, 

and the turmoil they have wrought in Afghanistan and 

Pakistan, raise the question of whether the plan was a 

flawed masterpiece—or simply flawed. 

The Afghan model required elite teams of American commandos 

and CIA paramilitary operatives to form alliances with Afghans 

who opposed the Taliban and had the militias to help topple the 

religious fundamentalists. Some of these Afghans were legitimate 

ethnic and tribal leaders who chafed at the restrictions of the 

11 

Taliban and the sanctuary it provided to Al Qaeda. Others were allies of convenience, Taliban rivals who held power by force and 

paid their men by collecting tolls and taxes on legitimate commerce 

and trafficking in heroin. By providing money and weapons, the 

U.S. forces helped the warlords destroy their rivals and expand 

their personal power. Many later entered the Afghan government 

and remain influential figures. The strategy was a short cut to victory that would have consequences for long-term stability in Afghanistan. 

When it came to bin Laden, the special operations forces relied 

on two relatively minor warlords from the Jalalabad area. Haji 

Hazarat Ali had a fourth-grade education and a reputation as a 

bully. He had fought the Soviets as a teenager in the 1980s and 

later joined the Taliban for a time. The other, Haji Zaman 

Ghamsharik, was a wealthy drug smuggler who had been persuaded by the United States to return from France. Ghamsharik 

also had fought the Soviets, but when the Taliban came to power, 

he had gone into exile in France. Together, they fielded a force of 

about 2,000 men, but there were questions from the outset about 

the competence and loyalties of the fighters. The two warlords and 

their men distrusted each other and both groups appeared to distrust their American allies. 

The Delta Force commandos had doubts about the willingness 

and ability of the Afghan militias to wage a genuine assault on 

Tora Bora almost from the outset. Those concerns were underscored each time the Afghans insisted on retreating from the mountains as darkness fell. But the suspicions were confirmed by events 

that started on the afternoon of December 11. 

Haji Ghamsharik approached Fury and told him that Al Qaeda 

fighters wanted to surrender. He said all they needed to end the 

siege was a 12-hour ceasefire to allow the fighters to climb down 

the mountains and turn in their weapons. Intercepted radio chatter 

seemed to confirm that the fighters had lost their resolve under the 

relentless bombing and wanted to give up, but Fury remained suspicious. 

‘‘This is the greatest day in the history of Afghanistan,’’ Ghamsharik told Fury. 

‘‘Why is that?’’ asked the dubious American officer. 

‘‘Because al Qaeda is no more,’’ he said. ‘‘Bin Laden is finished.’’ 

The Special Operations Command history records that CentCom 

refused to back the ceasefire, suspecting a ruse, but it said the special ops forces agreed reluctantly to an overnight pause in the 

bombing to avoid killing the surrendering Al Qaeda fighters. 

Ghamsharik negotiated by radio with representatives of Al Qaeda. 

He initially told Fury that a large number of Algerians wanted to 

surrender. Then he said that he could turn over the entire Al 

Qaeda leadership. Fury’s suspicions increased at such a bold promise. By the morning of December 12, no Al Qaeda fighters had appeared and the Delta Force commander concluded that the whole 

episode was a hoax. Intelligence estimates are that as many as 800 

Al Qaeda fighters escaped that night, but bin Laden stuck it out. 

Despite the unreliability of his Afghan allies, Fury refused to 

give up. He plotted ways to use his 40 Delta Force soldiers and the 

handful of other special ops troops under his command to go after 

12 

bin Laden on their own. One of the plans was to go at bin Laden 

from the one direction he would never anticipate, the southern side 

of the mountains. ‘‘We want to come in on the back door,’’ Fury explained later, pointing on a map to the side of the Tora Bora enclave facing Pakistan. The peaks there rose to 14,000 feet and the 

valleys and precipitous mountain passes were already deep in 

snow. ‘‘The original plan that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the Pakistan side, over the mountains and come 

in and get a drop on bin Laden from behind.’’ The audacious assault was nixed somewhere up the chain of command. Undeterred, 

Fury suggested dropping hundreds of landmines along the passes 

leading to Pakistan to block bin Laden’s escape. ‘‘First guy blows 

his leg off, everybody else stops,’’ he said. ‘‘That allows aircraft 

overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. 

Okay, there is a big large group of Al Qaeda moving south. They 

can engage that.’’ That proposal was rejected, too. 

About the time Fury was desperately concocting scenarios for 

going after bin Laden and getting rejections from up the chain of 

command, Franks was well into planning for the next war—the invasion of Iraq. 

A Shift in Attention and Resources 

On November 21, 2001, President Bush put his arm on Defense 

Secretary Rumsfeld as they were leaving a National Security Council meeting at the White House. ‘‘I need to see you,’’ the President 

said. It was 72 days after the 9/11 attacks and just a week after 

the fall of Kabul. But Bush already had new plans. 

According to Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack, the President 

said to Rumsfeld: ‘‘What kind of a war plan do you have for Iraq? 

How do you feel about the war plan for Iraq?’’ Then the President 

told Woodward he recalled saying: ‘‘Let’s get started on this. And 

get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to.’’ Back at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld convened a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to 

draft a message for Franks asking for a new assessment of a war 

with Iraq. The existing operations plan had been created in 1998 

and it hinged on assembling the kind of massive international coalition used in Desert Storm in 1991. 

In his memoir, American General, Franks later described getting 

the November 21 telephone call from Rumsfeld relaying the President’s orders while he was sitting in his office at MacDill Air Force 

Base in Florida. Franks and one of his aides were working on air 

support for the Afghan units being assembled to push into the 

mountains surrounding Tora Bora. Rumsfeld said the President 

wanted options for war with Iraq. Franks said the existing plan 

was out of date and that a new one should include lessons about 

precision weapons and the use of special operations forces learned 

in Afghanistan. 

‘‘Okay, Tom,’’ Rumsfeld said, according to Franks. ‘‘Please dust 

it off and get back to me next week.’’ 

Franks described his reaction to Rumsfeld’s orders this way: ‘‘Son 

of a bitch. No rest for the weary.’’ 

13 

For critics of the Bush administration’s commitment to Afghanistan, the shift in focus just as Franks and his senior aides were 

literally working on plans for the attacks on Tora Bora represents 

a dramatic turning point that allowed a sustained victory in Afghanistan to slip through our fingers. Almost immediately, intelligence and military planning resources were transferred to begin 

planning on the next war in Iraq. Though Fury, Berntsen and others in the field did not know what was happening back at 

CentCom, the drain in resources and shift in attention would affect 

them and the future course of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. 

‘‘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 

14 

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.’’ 

In the aftermath of bin Laden’s escape, there were accusations 

that militiamen working for the two warlords hired by the CIA to 

get him had helped the Al Qaeda leader cross into Pakistan. Michael Scheuer, who spent 15 years working on Afghanistan at the 

CIA and at one point headed the agency’s bin Laden task force, 

was sharply critical of the war plan from the start because of its 

reliance on Afghan allies of dubious loyalty. ‘‘Everyone who was 

cognizant of how Afghan operations worked would have told Mr. 

Tenet that he was nuts,’’ Scheuer said later. ‘‘And as it turned out, 

he was. ... The people we bought, the people Mr. Tenet said we 

would own, let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora in eastern 

Afghanistan into Pakistan.’’ 

The American forces never had a clear idea how many Al Qaeda 

fighters were arrayed against them. Estimates ranged as high as 

3,000 and as low as 500, but the consensus put the figure around 

1,000—at least until so many escaped during the fake surrender. 

15 

Regardless of the exact number of enemy fighters, assaulting Tora 

Bora would have been difficult and probably would have cost many 

American and Afghan lives. The Special Operations Command’s 

history offered this tightly worded assessment: ‘‘With large numbers of well-supplied, fanatical AQ troops dug into extensive fortified positions, Tora Bora appeared to be an extremely tough target.’’ 

For Dalton Fury, the reward would have been worth the risk. ‘‘In 

general, I definitely think it was worth the risk to the force to assault Tora Bora for Osama bin Laden,’’ he told the committee staff. 

‘‘What other target out there, then or now, could be more important 

to our nation’s struggle in the global war on terror?’’ 

3. AN ALTERNATIVE BATTLE PLAN

Rather than allowing bin Laden to escape, Franks and 

Rumsfeld could have deployed American troops already in 

Afghanistan on or near the border with Pakistan to block 

the exits while simultaneously sending special operations 

forces and their Afghan allies up the mountains to Tora 

Bora. The complex mission would have been risky, but 

analysis shows that it was well within the reach and capability of the American military. 

In the years following the Vietnam War, the U.S. military developed a doctrine intended to place new constraints on when the 

country went to war and to avoid a repeat of the disastrous and 

prolonged conflict in Southeast Asia. In its most simplistic form, 

the doctrine focused on applying overwhelming and disproportionate military force to achieve concrete political goals. It called 

for mobilizing the military and political resources necessary for 

ending conflicts quickly and leaving no loose ends. The concept was 

known informally as the Powell doctrine, named for General Colin 

Powell, who outlined his vision at the end of the Persian Gulf War 

in 1991. 

The Afghan model constructed by Rumsfeld and Franks in response to the attacks on September 11 stood the Powell doctrine 

on its head. The new template was designed to deliver a swift and 

economical knockout blow through airpower and the limited application of troops on the ground. Instead of overwhelming force, the 

Afghan model depended on airpower and on highly mobile special 

operations forces and CIA paramilitary teams, working in concert 

with opposition warlords and tribal leaders. It was designed as unconventional warfare led by indigenous forces, and Franks put a 

ceiling of 10,000 on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Despite the valor of the limited American forces, the doctrine failed 

to achieve one of its most concrete political goals—eliminating the 

leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The result has turned out 

to be nothing close to decisive victory followed by quick withdrawal. 

Assembling the size force required to apply overwhelming force 

across a country as large and rugged as Afghanistan would have 

taken many weeks. The only country in the region likely to provide 

the major bases required to prepare an invasion by tens of thousands of troops was Pakistan, and political sensitivities there 

would have made full cooperation both doubtful and risky for its 

16 

leadership. The Pakistanis provided limited bases for U.S. operations in the early stages of planning and the invasion; the footprint was kept small to avoid a public outcry. But soldiers and 

scholars alike have argued that there were sufficient troops available in Afghanistan and nearby Uzbekistan to mount a genuine assault on Osama bin Laden’s position at Tora Bora. And they could 

have been augmented within about a week by reinforcements from 

the Persian Gulf and the United States. 

The most detailed description of the assault option was laid out 

in an article in the journal Security Studies by Peter John Paul 

Krause of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Entitled ‘‘The 

Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora 

Bora,’’ the article described a large-scale operation called a block 

and sweep. The plan is simple enough: One group of American 

forces would block the likely exit avenues to Pakistan on the south 

side of Tora Bora while a second contingent moved against Al 

Qaeda’s positions from the north. Simplicity should not be mistaken for sure success: Variables like weather conditions, the effectiveness of the remaining Al Qaeda fighters and the ability to close 

the escape routes would have made the mission risky. The dangers 

of attacking fortified positions manned by hardened fighters would 

likely have resulted in significant U.S. casualties. 

The assault would not have required thousands of conventional 

forces. A large number of troops would have taken too long to deploy and alerted Al Qaeda to the approaching attack. ‘‘My opinion 

is that bin Laden would have left even earlier as soon as he received word that the U.S. troops were surrounding him,’’ Fury told 

the committee staff. ‘‘I think he only stayed as long as he did because he thought the mujahedin would not aggressively pursue 

him.’’ 

The preferred choice would have been a small, agile force capable 

of deploying quickly and quietly and trained to operate in difficult 

terrain against unconventional enemies. The U.S. military has 

large numbers of soldiers and Marines who meet those criteria— 

Delta Force, Green Berets, Navy Seals, Marine special operations 

units and Army Rangers and paratroopers. The effectiveness of 

U.S. special operations commandos, even in small numbers, was 

demonstrated on December 10. Two U.S. soldiers were able to get 

close enough to the Al Qaeda positions to call in air strikes for 17 

straight hours, forcing enemy fighters to retreat and enabling the 

Afghan militia to capture key terrain near bin Laden’s suspected 

location. It was an example of what a larger U.S. force could have 

accomplished, with support from available air power. 

The CIA’s Berntsen had requested a battalion of Rangers, about 

800 soldiers, and been turned down by CentCom. A battalion would 

have been a substantial increase in the U.S. presence, but it probably would not have been enough to both assault the stronghold 

from the north and block the exits on the south. Krause estimated 

that as few as 500 troops could have carried out the initial northern assault, with reinforcements arriving over the course of the 

battle. At least twice as many troops would have been required to 

execute the blocking mission on the southern, eastern and western 

reaches of Tora Bora. Krause proposed spreading about 1,500 

troops to capture or kill anyone trying to flee. O’Hanlon estimated 

17 

that closing off escape routes to Pakistan would have required 

1,000 to 3,000 American troops. In all, an initial force of roughly 

2,000 to 3,000 troops would have been sufficient to begin the blockand-sweep mission, with reinforcements following as time and circumstances allowed. 

Troops Were Ready to Go 

Assembling the troops to augment the handful of special ops 

commandos under Fury’s leadership at Tora Bora would have been 

a manageable task. Franks had set the ceiling of 10,000 U.S. troops 

to maintain a light footprint. Still, within that number there were 

enough ready and willing to go after bin Laden. In late November, 

about the time U.S. intelligence placed bin Laden squarely at Tora 

Bora, more than 1,000 members of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units, among the military’s most mobile arms, established a base southwest of Kandahar, only a few hours flight away. 

They were primarily interdicting traffic and supporting the special 

operations teams working with Afghan militias. Another 1,000 

troops from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division were split between 

a base in southern Uzbekistan and Bagram Air Base, a short helicopter flight from Tora Bora. The Army troops were engaged mainly in military police functions, according to reports at the time. 

Both forces are trained in unconventional warfare and could have 

been redeployed rapidly for an assault. Lt. Col. Paul Lacamera, 

commander of a 10th Mountain battalion, later said that his men 

had been prepared to deploy anywhere in Afghanistan since midNovember. ‘‘We weren’t just sitting there digging holes and looking 

out,’’ said Lacamera, whose actions in a later assault on Al Qaeda 

forces won him a Silver Star. ‘‘We were training for potential fights 

because eventually it was going to come to that.’’ 

The commander of the Marines outside Kandahar, Brig. Gen. 

James N. Mattis, told a journalist that his troops could seal off 

Tora Bora, but his superiors rejected the plan. Everyone knew that 

such an operation would have conflicted with the Afghan model 

laid down by Franks and Rumsfeld. But there were other reasons 

to hesitate. One former officer told the committee staff that the inability to get sufficient medical-evacuation helicopters into the 

rough terrain was a major stumbling block for those who considered trying to push for the assault. He also said there were worries 

that bad weather would ground transport helicopters or, worse, 

knock them out of the sky. 

In addition to the troops in country, a battalion of Army Rangers 

was stationed in the Persian Gulf country of Oman, and 200 of 

them had demonstrated their abilities by parachuting into an airfield near Kandahar at night in October. In Krause’s analysis, a 

battalion of about 800 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division at 

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could have been deployed to Tora Bora 

in less than a week, covering the 7,000 miles in C-17 transport aircraft. 

No one should underestimate the logistical difficulty and danger 

of deploying even specially trained troops into hostile territory at 

altitudes of 7,000 to 10,000 feet. Landing zones for helicopters 

would likely have come under fire from Al Qaeda positions and 

drop zones for paratroopers were few and far between in the jagged 

18 

terrain. But Chinook helicopters, the work horse for rapid deployments, proved capable of carrying combat troops above 11,000-foot 

mountain ranges as part of Operation Anaconda, a similar blockand-sweep mission carried out in February 2002 in eastern Afghanistan. 

Former U.S. military officers said that sending American troops 

into Tora Bora was discussed at various times in late November 

and early December of 2001. The CIA’s Afghan chief, Hank 

Crumpton, made specific requests to Franks for U.S. troops and 

urged President Bush not to rely on Afghan militias and Pakistani 

paramilitary troops to do the job. CentCom went so far as to develop a plan to put several thousand U.S. troops into Tora Bora. 

Commanders estimated that deploying 1,000 to 3,000 American 

troops would have required several hundred airlift flights by helicopters over a week or more. 

DeLong defended the decision not to deploy large numbers of 

American troops. ‘‘We didn’t have the lift,’’ he told the committee 

staff. ‘‘We didn’t have the medical capabilities. The further we went 

down the road, the easier the decision got. We wanted Afghanistan 

to be peaceful for Karzai to take over. Right or not, that was the 

thinking behind what we did.’’ 

The Afghan model proved effective in some instances, particularly when Afghan opposition forces working with American advisers were arrayed against poorly trained Taliban foot soldiers. The 

precision bombs and overwhelming airpower also played a major 

role in dispersing the Taliban forces and opening the way for the 

rapid takeover of the country, though critics now say scattering the 

Taliban simply allowed them to regroup later. In the early days at 

Tora Bora, the light footprint allowed a handful of CIA and special 

operations operatives to guide bombs that killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Al Qaeda fighters. But the model was ineffective when it 

came to motivating opposition militiamen of questionable skills and 

doubtful resolve to carry the fight to the biggest concentration of 

Al Qaeda fighters of the war, particularly when the jihadis were 

battling to protect their leader. Fewer than 100 special operations 

force soldiers and CIA operatives were unable to turn the tide 

against those odds. 

Some critics said bin Laden escaped because the United States 

relied too heavily on Afghan militias to carry the fight forward at 

Tora Bora and on Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps to block 

any escape. As Michael O’Hanlon pointed out, our allies did not 

have the same incentives to stop bin Laden and his associates as 

American troops. Nor did they have the technology and training to 

carry out such a difficult mission. The responsibility for allowing 

the most wanted man in the world to virtually disappear into thin 

air lies with the American commanders who refused to commit the 

necessary U.S. soldiers and Marines to finish the job. 

The same shortage of U.S. troops allowed Mullah Mohammed 

Omar and other Taliban leaders to escape. A semi-literate leader 

who fled Kandahar on a motorbike, Mullah Omar has re-emerged 

at the helm of the Taliban-led insurgency, which has grown more 

sophisticated and lethal in recent years and now controls swaths 

of Afghanistan. The Taliban, which is aligned with a loose network 

of other militant groups and maintains ties to Al Qaeda, has estabVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:46 Nov 30, 2009 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00024 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\DOCS\DOUG.TXT MikeBB PsN: MIKEB
19 

lished shadow governments in many of Afghanistan’s provinces and 

is capable of mounting increasingly complex attacks on American 

and NATO forces. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who helped 

develop the Obama administration’s Afghan policy, recently referred to the mullah’s return to power ‘‘one of the most remarkable 

military comebacks in modern history.’’ 

Ironically, one of the guiding principles of the Afghan model was 

to avoid immersing the United States in a protracted insurgency by 

sending in too many troops and stirring up anti-American sentiment. In the end, the unwillingness to bend the operational plan 

to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence 

and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden paved the 

way for exactly what we had hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency that has cost more lives than anyone estimates would have 

been lost in a full-blown assault on Tora Bora. Further, the dangerous contagion of rising violence and instability in Afghanistan 

has spread to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed ally of the United States 

which is now wracked by deadly terrorist bombings as it conducts 

its own costly military campaign against a domestic, Taliban-related insurgency. 

The Price of Failure 

Osama bin Laden’s demise would not have erased the worldwide 

threat from extremists. But the failure to kill or capture him has 

allowed bin Laden to exert a malign influence over events in the 

region and nearly 60 countries where his followers have established 

extremist groups. History shows that terrorist groups are invariably much stronger with their charismatic leaders than without 

them, and the ability of bin Laden and his terrorist organization 

to recover from the loss of their Afghan sanctuary reinforces the 

lesson. 

Eight years after its expulsion from Afghanistan, Al Qaeda has 

reconstituted itself and bin Laden has survived to inspire a new 

generation of extremists who have adopted and adapted the Al 

Qaeda doctrine and are now capable of attacking from any number 

of places. The impact of this threat is greatest in Pakistan, where 

Al Qaeda’s continued presence and resources have emboldened domestic extremists waging an increasingly bloody insurrection that 

threatens the stability of the government and the region. Its training camps also have spawned new attacks outside the region—militants trained in Pakistan were tied to the July 2005 transit system 

bombings in London and several aborted plots elsewhere in Europe. 

Closer to home, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says two recent suspected plots disrupted by U.S. authorities involved longtime residents of the United States who had traveled to Pakistan 

and trained at bases affiliated with Al Qaeda. One of the plots involved two Chicago men accused in late October of planning to attack the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet 

Mohammad. In the other, an Afghan-born man who drove a shuttle 

bus in Denver was arrested on suspicion of plans to detonate improvised explosives in the United States. Court papers said the 

man had been trained in weapons and explosives in Pakistan and 

had made nine pages of handwritten notes on how to make and 

handle bombs. 

20 

For American taxpayers, the financial costs of the conflict have been staggering. The first eight years cost an estimated $243 billion and about $70 billion has been appropriated for the current fiscal year—a figure that does not include any increase in troops. But 

the highest price is being paid on a daily basis in Afghanistan and 

Pakistan, where 68,000 American troops and hundreds of U.S. civilians are engaged in the ninth year of a protracted conflict and 

the Afghan people endure a third decade of violence. So far, about 

950 U.S. troops and nearly 600 allied soldiers have lost their lives 

in Operation Enduring Freedom, a conflict in which the outcome 

remains in grave doubt in large part because the extremists behind 

the violence were not eliminated in 2001. 

21 

NOTES

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. One 15,000-pound bomb: ‘‘Daisy Cutter bomb produced flurry of intel,’’ 

United Press International, December 12, 2001; Benjamin Lambeth, Air 

Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom, p 

149 (RAND, Santa Monica, 2005). 

2. Bin Laden expected to die: ‘‘Al-Majallah Obtains Bin Laden’s Will,’’ AlMajallah, October 27, 2002. 

3. Fewer than 100: Accounts of the small American troop presence and Tora 

Bora and the requests for reinforcements are plentiful. The CIA commander 

in Afghanistan at the time, Gary Berntsen, wrote in his book Jawbreaker: The 

Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda (Crown, New York, 2005) about his requests for 800 Army Rangers and his disputes with the military over its refusal to provide the troops. In his book, Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man, (St. Martin’s 

Press, New York, 2008) Dalton Fury said one of the key mistakes by U.S. 

commanders was not committing enough conventional troops to the battle at 

Tora Bora and not using U.S. forces to seal the escape routes. Writing an article, entitled ‘‘Lost at Tora Bora,’’ in The New York Times Magazine on September 11, 2005, Mary Anne Weaver said that Brig. Gen. James Mattis, the 

commander of at least 1,200 Marines at a base outside Kandahar in November 2001, was convinced his troops could seal off Tora Bora. Michael E. 

O’Hanlon said the U.S. Central Command made preparations for sending several thousand troops to Tora Bora but rejected the plan in ‘‘A Flawed Masterpiece,’’ Foreign Affairs, Volume 81 No. 3 (March/April 2002) p.57–58. 

4. On December 16: Berntsen, pp 307–308. The date of bin Laden’s escape remains imprecise. In his book, Fury concluded that bin Laden had fled Tora 

Bora by December 17, when U.S. troops entered the complex. Peter Bergen, 

the last American to interview bin Laden and highly regarded authority on 

Al Qaeda, told the committee staff that bin Laden left around December 14. 

Other accounts put the date on or around December 16, the end of Ramadan. 

5. Rumsfeld said at the time: O’Hanlon, p 57. For a thorough discussion of 

the Afghan model and its reliance on the CIA and special operations forces, 

see Henry A. Crumpton, ‘‘Intelligence and War 2001–2002,’’ Transforming 

U.S. Intelligence (Georgetown University Press, 2005). 

6. There were enough: Peter John Paul Krause, ‘‘The Last Good Chance: A 

Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora,’’ Security Studies, pp 644–684, 

Volume 17, 2008. Krause’s well-documented article is the most thorough examination of the alternatives available to military commanders at Tora Bora. 

For a broader overview of the Afghan model, see Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan 

and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy (Carlisle 

Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2003). 

7. For example, CIA: Committee staff interview with Fury, October 2009; 

Berntsen, pp 314–315. 

8. Franks’ second-in-command: Michael DeLong, Inside CentCom: The Unvarnished Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, pp 57–58 (Regnery 

Publishing, Chicago, 2004). 

9. ‘‘All source reporting: U.S. Special Operations Command History, p 101, 

sixth edition, March 2008 (www.socom.mil/SOCOMHome/Documents/ 

history6thedition.pdf). The history was first published in 2007, but the internet link here is to the most recent edition; the section on Tora Bora is unchanged from the 2007 version. 

10. In the middle of August: Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, The Man 

From Pakistan: The True Story of the World’s Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler, pp 263–264 (Twelve Books, New York, 2007). George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, p 266 (HarperCollins, New York, 2007). 

1. FLIGHT TO TORA BORA

11. The first reports: The 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of the National 

Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, pp 259–260. 

22 

12. Only a handful of senators: U.S. Senate records and committee staff interview. 

13. Less than a month: The 9/11 Commission Report, pp 261–263. 

14. Bin Laden’s movements: Hamid Mir, ‘‘Osama claims he has nukes: If US 

uses N-arms it will get same response,’’ Dawn, November 10, 2001.The article 

included a photo of Mir with bin Laden. Hamid Mir, ‘‘How Osama bin Laden 

escaped death four times after 9/11,’’ The News, September 11, 2007. Philip 

Smucker, ‘‘A day-by-day account of how Osama bin Laden eluded the world’s 

most powerful military machine,’’ The Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 

2002. 

15. After pressure: Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, pp 461–462 (The Penguin Press, New York, 2008). 

16. U.S. intelligence had: Tenet, p 225. 

17. Outside experts like: Committee staff interview with Peter Bergen, October 

2009. 

18. ‘‘He’s got a large: ABC News Prime Time, Diane Sawyer interview with Vice 

President Dick Cheney, November 29, 2001. 

19. Bin Laden’s presence: Fury; staff interviews with Fury and one of his colleagues who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about 

classified matters, October and November 2009. 

20. Fury, who still uses: Staff interview with Fury. 

21. Another special: Staff interview with the Delta Force participant referenced 

in Note 19. 

22. Afghan villagers: Staff interview with Fury. In another staff interview, a 

former CIA counter-terrorism officer confirmed elements of the information, 

including the agency’s use of push-button GPS devices. 

23. On December 9: ‘‘Daisy Cutter bomb produced flurry of intel;’’ Lambeth, p 

149; Fury, p 153, p 225; Berntsen, p 295. 

24. But later reports: Staff interview with the former CIA counter-terrorism officer who described the interrogation report of a detainee from Tora Bora. 

25. At one point: Staff interview with Fury; various press reports. 

26. ‘‘There is no doubt: Fury, p 281, a view he repeated in his staff interview. 

27. A ‘‘summary of: ‘‘U.S. holding man who allegedly helped terror leader flee 

Tora Bora,’’ Associated Press, March 23, 2005. 

28. Another confirmation: Berntsen, p 86. 

29. ‘‘We needed U.S. soldiers: Ibid., pp 306–307. 

30. ‘‘We could have: Richard Leiby, ‘‘Knocking on Osama’s Cave Door,’’ The 

Washington Post, February 16, 2006. 

31. ‘‘Unfortunately, many: NBC News Meet the Press, Tim Russert interview 

with Gary Schroen, May 10, 2005. 

32. In his memoir: DeLong, pp 56–59. 

33. ‘‘To make matters: Ibid. 

34. On October 19: Tommy Franks, ‘‘War of Words’’, The New York Times, October 19, 2004. 

35. Two weeks after: Michael DeLong, ‘‘Setting the Record Straight on Tora 

Bora,’’ The Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2004. 

36. DeLong said: Committee staff interview with DeLong, October 2009. 

37. The section opens: U.S. Special Operations Command History, p 97. 

38. In the concluding: Ibid., p 101. 

39. Franks declined: E-mail response from Michael T. Hayes, admin@tommy 

franks.com, October 27, 2009. 

23 

2. THE AFGHAN MODEL: A FLAWED MASTERPIECE OR JUST FLAWED?

40. Writing in Foreign Affairs: O’Hanlon, pp 47–63. 

41. When it came: Weaver, ‘‘Lost at Tora Bora;’’ Smucker, ‘‘A day-by-day account 

of how Osama bin Laden eluded the world’s most powerful military machine.’’ 

42. Haji Ghamsharik: Fury, pp 217–218. 

43. The Special Operations: U.S. Special Operations Command History, p 100; 

staff interview with Fury. 

44. Despite the unreliability: Staff interview with Fury; CBS New 60 Minutes, 

‘‘Elite Officers Recalls Bin Laden Hunt,’’ October 5, 2008. 

45. According to Bob: Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, p 8 (Simon & Shuster, 

New York, 2008). 

46. In his memoir: Tommy Franks, American Soldier, p 315 (Regan Books, New 

York, 2004). 

47. In his memoir: Tenet, pp 226–227. 

48. According to author: Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside 

America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, pp 58–59 (Simon & Shuster, 

New York, 2006). 

49. On December 14: Fury, pp 270–275. 

50. ‘‘I think it was: PBS Frontline, ‘‘Campaign Against Terror,’’ October 2, 2002. 

51. Bin Laden himself: Bin Laden audio and translation provided by the Intel 

Center at http://www.intelcenter.com. 

52. ‘‘Everyone who was: PBS Frontline, ‘‘Campaign Against Terror.’’ 

53. The Special Operations: U.S. Special Operations Command History, p 97. 

54. ‘‘In general: Staff interview with Fury. 

3. AN ALTERNATIVE PLAN

55. In the years following: Michael A. Cohen, ‘‘The Powell Doctrine’s Enduring 

Relevance,’’ World Politics Review, July 22, 2009. 

56. The most detailed: Krause, ‘‘The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. 

Operations at Tora Bora.’’ 

57. ‘‘My opinion: Staff interview with Fury. 

58. The effectiveness of U.S. special: U.S. Special Operations Command History, p 100. 

59. Krause proposed: Krause, pp 657–661. 

60. O’Hanlon estimated: O’Hanlon, p 57. 

61. Assembling the troops: Ibid., p 53, 58; Krause, pp 655–657; various press 

accounts. 

62. Lt. Col. Paul Lacamera: Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape, p 83 (Potomac Books, Washington DC, 2004). 

63. The commander of the Marines: Weaver, ‘‘Lost at Tora Bora.’’ The Pentagon declined to make General Mattis, who remains on active duty, available 

to the committee for an interview. 

64. One former officer: Staff interview with DeLong. 

65. Former U.S. military: Committee staff interviews with former intelligence 

and military officers who requested anonymity because the matter remains 

classified, October and November 2009. 

66. DeLong defended: Staff interview with DeLong. 

67. Bruce Riedel: Scott Shane, ‘‘A Dogged Taliban Chief Rebounds, Vexing 

U.S.,’’ The New York Times, October 11, 2009. 

68. Closer to home: David Johnston and Eric Schmitt, ‘‘Small Terrorism Plots 

Pose Threat, Officials Say,’’ The New York Times, November 1, 2009. 

(25) 

1This article originally appeared in FOREIGN AFFAIRS magazine, May/June 2002, Volume 81, 

Number 3. It is reproduced here with permission. Michael E. O’Hanlon is Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. His most recent book is Defense Policy Choices 

for the Bush Administration, 2001–2005. 2 Bob Woodward and Dan Balz, ‘‘At Camp David, Advise and Dissent,’’ The Washington Post, 

January 31, 2002, p. A1; Bill Keller, ‘‘The World According to Powell,’’ THE NEW YORK TIMES

MAGAZINE, November 25, 2001, pp. 61–62. 

A P P E N D I X E S 

APPENDIX I.—‘‘A Flawed Masterpiece,’’ Michael E. O’Hanlon, 

Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002 

A FLAWED MASTERPIECE1

Michael E. O’Hanlon 

ASSESSING THE AFGHAN CAMPAIGN

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the U.S. armed forces were seen as an 

overmuscled giant, able to win wars through brute strength but often lacking in daring and cleverness. This basic strategy worked during the two world wars, making 

the United States relatively tough to challenge. But it failed in Vietnam, produced 

mediocre results in Korea, and worked in the Persian Gulf War largely because the 

terrain was ideally suited to American strengths. 

What a difference a new century makes. Operation Enduring Freedom has been, 

for the most part, a masterpiece of military creativity and finesse. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Central Command (centcom) head General Tommy 

Franks, and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet devised a plan for using 

limited but well-chosen types of American power in conjunction with the Afghan opposition to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda. Secretary of State Colin Powell helped 

persuade Pakistan to sever its ties with the Taliban, work with Afghanistan’s 

Northern Alliance, provide the bases and overflight rights needed by U.S. forces, 

and contribute to the general war effort. Besides pushing his national security team 

to develop an innovative and decisive war-fighting strategy, President George W. 

Bush rallied the American people behind the war effort and established a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, making it far easier for the United 

States to work militarily in Central Asia. The U.S. effort to overthrow the Taliban 

deprived al Qaeda of its sanctuary within Afghanistan and left its surviving leaders 

running for their lives.2

At their peak, the U.S. forces involved in the war effort numbered no more than 

60,000 (about half of which were in the Persian Gulf), and Western allies added no 

more than 15,000. But the U.S.-led military campaign has hardly been small in 

scale. By the end of January, the United States had flown about 25,000 sorties in 

the air campaign and dropped 18,000 bombs, including 10,000 precision munitions. 

The number of U.S. sorties exceeded the number of U.S. sorties flown in the 1999 

Kosovo war, and the United States dropped more smart bombs on Afghanistan than 

NATO dropped on Serbia in 1999. In fact, the total number of precision munitions 

expended in Afghanistan amounted to more than half the number used in Operation 

Desert Storm. (In addition, more than 3,000 U.S. and French bombs were dropped 

on surviving enemy forces in March during Operation Anaconda, in which some 

1,500 Western forces and 2,000 Afghans launched a major offensive against about 

1,000 enemy troops in the mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan.) 

If the U.S. strategy has had many virtues, however, it has also had flaws. Most 

important, it has apparently failed to achieve a key war goal: capturing or killing 

Osama bin Laden and other top enemy leaders. Such hunts are inherently difficult, 

26 

but the prospects for success in this case were reduced considerably by U.S. reliance 

on Pakistani forces and Afghan militias for sealing off enemy escape routes and conducting cave-to-cave searches during critical periods. If most al Qaeda leaders stay 

at large, the United States and other countries will remain more vulnerable to terrorism than they would be otherwise—perhaps significantly so. 

But on balance, Operation Enduring Freedom has been very impressive. It may 

wind up being more notable in the annals of American military history than anything since Douglas MacArthur’s invasion at Inchon in Korea half a century ago. 

Even Norman Schwarzkopf’s famous ‘‘left hook’’ around Iraqi forces in Operation 

Desert Storm was less bold; had it been detected, U.S. airpower still could have protected coalition flanks, and American forces could have outrun Iraqi troops toward 

most objectives on the ground. By contrast, Operation Enduring Freedom’s impressive outcome was far from preordained. Too much American force (e.g., a protracted 

and punishing strategic air campaign or an outright ground invasion) risked uniting 

Afghan tribes and militias to fight the outside power, angering the Arab world, destabilizing Pakistan, and spawning more terrorists. Too little force, or the wrong 

kind of force, risked outright military failure and a worsening of Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis—especially given the limited capabilities of the small militias that 

made up the anti-Taliban coalition. 

ZEROING IN

Beginning on October 7, Afghans, Americans, and coalition partners cooperated to 

produce a remarkable military victory in Afghanistan. The winning elements included 15,000 Northern Alliance fighters (primarily from the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic 

groups), 100 combat sorties a day by U.S. planes, 300–500 Western special operations forces and intelligence operatives, a few thousand Western ground forces, and 

thousands of Pashtun soldiers in southern Afghanistan who came over to the winning side in November. Together they defeated the Taliban forces, estimated at 

50,000 to 60,000 strong, as well as a few thousand al Qaeda fighters. 

Various Western countries, particularly several NATO allies and Australia, played 

important roles as well. A formal NATO role in the war was neither necessary nor 

desirable, given the location of the conflict and the need for a supple and secretive 

military strategy. Still, NATO allies stood squarely by America’s side, invoking the 

alliance’s Article V mutual-defense clause after September 11, and demonstrated 

that commitment by sending five awacs aircraft to help patrol U.S. airspace. Forces 

from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Canada appear to have frequently 

contributed to the effort in Afghanistan; forces from Denmark, Norway, and Germany also participated in Operation Anaconda in March. Allied aircraft flew a total 

of some 3,000 sorties on relief, reconnaissance, and other missions. As noted, France 

dropped bombs during Operation Anaconda, and the United Kingdom fired several 

cruise missiles on the first day of battle as well. Numerous countries, including the 

Netherlands, Italy, and Japan, deployed ships to the Arabian Sea. The cooperation 

continues today, as major Western allies constitute the backbone of the un-authorized stability force in Kabul. 

The short war has had several phases. The first began on October 7 and lasted 

a month; the second ran through November and saw the Taliban lose control of the 

country; the third was characterized by intensive bombing of suspected al Qaeda 

strongholds in the Tora Bora mountain and cave complex in December; the fourth 

began with the inauguration of Hamid Karzai as interim prime minister and continues to date. 

During the first part of the war, Taliban forces lost their large physical assets 

such as radar, aircraft, and command-and-control systems, but they hung on to 

power in most regions. Most al Qaeda training camps and headquarters were also 

destroyed. Although Taliban forces did not quickly collapse, they were increasingly 

isolated in pockets near the major cities. Cut off from each other physically, they 

were unable to resupply or reinforce very well and had problems communicating effectively. 

In the first week of the war, U.S. aircraft averaged only 25 combat sorties a day, 

but they soon upped that total to around 100. (Some 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles 

were fired in the early going; a total of about 100 had been used by December.) The 

United States comparably increased the number of airlift, refueling, and other support missions. U.S. air strikes by b-52 and b-1 bombers operating out of Diego Garcia typically involved six sorties a day; other land-based aircraft, primarily f-15es 

and ac-130 gunships from Oman, flew about as much. Planes from the three U.S. 

aircraft carriers based in the Arabian Sea provided the rest of the combat punch. 

Reconnaissance and refueling flights originated from the Persian Gulf region and 

Diego Garcia. Some air support and relief missions also came from, or flew over, 

27 

Central Asia, where U.S. Army soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division helped 

protect airfields. 

Most air attacks occurred around Afghanistan’s perimeter, because the rugged 

central highlands were not a major operating area for the Taliban or al Qaeda. By 

the middle of October, most fixed assets worth striking had already been hit, so 

combat sorties turned to targeting Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the field. Aircraft 

continued to fly at an altitude of at least 10,000 feet, because the Pentagon was 

fearful of antiaircraft artillery, Soviet sa-7 and sa-13 portable antiaircraft missiles, 

and some 200–300 Stinger antiaircraft missiles presumed to be in Taliban or al 

Qaeda possession. But most precision-guided weapons are equally effective regardless of their altitude of origin, provided that good targeting information is available—as it was in this case, thanks to U.S. troops on the ground. 

The first month of the war produced only limited results and had many defense 

and strategic analysts worried about the basic course of the campaign. Some of 

those critics began, rather intemperately and unrealistically, to call for a ground invasion; others opposed an invasion but thought that a substantial intensification of 

efforts would prove necessary. 

In phase two, beginning in early November, that intensification occurred. But it 

was due not so much to an increased number of airplanes as to an increase in their 

effectiveness. By then, 80 percent of U.S. combat sorties could be devoted to directly 

supporting opposition forces in the field; by late November, the tally was 90 percent. 

In addition, the deployment of more unmanned aerial vehicles and Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (jstars) aircraft to the region helped the 

United States maintain continuous reconnaissance of enemy forces in many places. 

Most important, the number of U.S. special operations forces and CIA teams working with various opposition elements increased greatly. In mid-October, only three 

special operations ‘‘A teams,’’ each consisting of a dozen personnel, were in Afghanistan; in mid-November, the tally was 10; by December 8, it was 17. This change 

meant the United States could increasingly call in supplies for the opposition, help 

it with tactics, and designate Taliban and al Qaeda targets for U.S. air strikes using 

global positioning system (gps) technology and laser range finders. The Marine 

Corps also began to provide logistical support for these teams as the war advanced. 

As a result, enemy forces collapsed in northern cities such as Mazar-i-Sharif and 

Taloqan over the weekend of November 9–11. Taliban fighters ran for their lives, 

provoking their leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, to broadcast a demand that his 

troops stop ‘‘behaving like chickens.’’ Kabul fell soon afterward. By November 16, 

Pentagon officials were estimating that the Taliban controlled less than one-third 

of the country, in contrast to 85 percent just a week before. Reports also suggested 

that Muhammad Atef, a key al Qaeda operative, was killed by U.S. bombs in midNovember. Kunduz, the last northern stronghold of enemy forces where several 

thousand Taliban and al Qaeda troops apparently remained, fell on November 24– 

25. 

In late November, more than 1,000 U.S. marines of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units established a base about 60 miles southwest of Kandahar, which 

the Taliban continued to hold. They deployed there directly from ships in the Arabian Sea, leapfrogging over Pakistani territory at night (to minimize political difficulties for the government of President Pervez Musharraf) and flying 400 miles inland to what became known as Camp Rhino. Their subsequent resupply needs were 

largely met using Pakistani bases. Once deployed, they began to interdict some road 

traffic and carry out support missions for special operations forces. 

Meanwhile, Pashtun tribes had begun to oppose the Taliban openly. By November, they were accepting the help of U.S. special forces, who had previously been 

active principally in the north of the country. Two groups in particular—one led by 

Hamid Karzai, the other by another tribal leader, Gul Agha Shirzai—closed in on 

Kandahar. Mullah Omar offered to surrender in early December but in the end fled 

with most of his fighters, leaving the city open by December 8–9. Pockets of Taliban 

and al Qaeda resistance, each with hundreds of fighters or more, remained in areas 

near Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, Kandahar, and possibly elsewhere, but the Taliban no 

longer held cities or major transportation routes. 

Why this part of the campaign achieved such a rapid and radical victory remains 

unclear. Taliban forces presumably could have held out longer if they had hunkered 

down in the cities and put weapons near mosques, hospitals, and homes, making 

their arsenal hard to attack from the air. Opposition fighters were too few to defeat 

them in street-to-street fighting in most places, and starving out the Taliban would 

have required the unthinkable tactic of starving local civilian populations as well. 

Most likely, the Taliban got caught in positions outside major cities that they 

could neither easily escape nor defend. Once the Afghan opposition began to engage 

the enemy seriously in November and Taliban forces returned fire, they revealed 

28 

their positions to American special operations personnel who could call in devastating air strikes. Sometimes they were tricked into revealing their locations over 

the radio. Even trench lines were poor defenses against 2-ton bombs delivered within 10 to 15 meters of their targets. Just what Taliban fighters could have done differently, once stranded in that open terrain, is unclear. They might have been better 

advised either to go on the offensive or to try to escape back into urban settings 

under cover of night or poor weather, although many U.S. reconnaissance assets 

work well under such conditions. But both approaches would have been difficult and 

dangerous, especially for a relatively unsophisticated military force such as the 

Taliban. 

The third main phase of the war began in early December. By this time, U.S. intelligence had finally pinpointed much of al Qaeda’s strength near Jalalabad, in 

eastern Afghanistan. In particular, al Qaeda forces, including Osama bin Laden, 

were supposedly holed up in the mountain redoubts of Tora Bora. Traveling with 

perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 foreign fighters, most of them fellow Arabs, bin Laden could 

not easily evade detection from curious eyes even if he might elude U.S. overhead 

reconnaissance. Thus, once Afghan opposition fighters, together with CIA and special operations forces, were deployed in the vicinity, U.S. air strikes against the 

caves could become quite effective. By mid-December, the fight for Tora Bora was 

over. Most significant cave openings were destroyed and virtually all signs of live 

al Qaeda fighters disappeared. Sporadic bombing continued in the area, and it was 

not until mid-January that a major al Qaeda training base, Zawar Kili, was destroyed. But most bombing ended by late 2001. 

So why did bin Laden and other top al Qaeda leaders apparently get away? The 

United States relied too much on Pakistan and its Afghan allies to close off possible 

escape routes from the Tora Bora region. It is not clear that these allies had the 

same incentives as the United States to conduct the effort with dogged persistence. 

Moreover, the mission was inherently difficult. By mid-December, the Pentagon felt 

considerably less sure than it had been of the likely whereabouts of bin Laden, even 

though it suspected that he and most of his top lieutenants were still alive. 

Although estimates remain rough, Taliban losses in the war were considerable. 

According to New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof, as many as 8,000 to 

12,000 were killed—roughly 20 percent of the Taliban’s initial fighting capability. 

Assuming conservatively at least two wounded for every person killed, Taliban 

losses could have represented half their initial fighting strength, a point at which 

most armies have traditionally started to crumble. Another 7,000 or more were 

taken prisoner. Kristof’s tally also suggests that Afghan civilian casualties totaled 

only about 1,000, a mercifully low number despite several wrongly targeted U.S. 

bombings and raids during the war. Although a couple of those U.S. mistakes probably should have been prevented, they do not change the basic conclusion that the 

war caused relatively modest harm to innocents. 

U.S. forces had lost about 30 personnel by the middle of March: about a dozen 

on the battlefield (8 during Operation Anaconda) and the rest in and around Afghanistan through accidents. Most were Marine Corps and Army troops, but other 

personnel were lost as well, including a CIA operative. The casualty total was 50 

percent greater than those of the invasions of Grenada and Haiti in the 1980s but 

less than the number of troops killed in Somalia in 1992–93. 

FOLLOW THE LEADER

On the whole, Operation Enduring Freedom has been masterful in both design 

and execution. Using specially equipped CIA teams and special operations forces in 

tandem with precision-strike aircraft allowed for accurate and effective bombing of 

Taliban and al Qaeda positions. U.S. personnel also contributed immensely to helping the Northern Alliance tactically and logistically. By early November, the strategy had produced mass Taliban retreats in the north of the country; it had probably 

caused many Taliban casualties as well. 

More notably, the U.S. effort helped quickly galvanize Pashtun forces to organize 

and fight effectively against the Taliban in the south, which many analysts had considered a highly risky proposition and centcom had itself considered far from certain. Had these Pashtun forces decided that they feared the Northern Alliance and 

the United States more than the Taliban, Afghanistan might have become effectively partitioned, with al Qaeda taking refuge exclusively in the south and the war 

effort rendered largely futile. Convincing these Pashtun to change sides and fight 

against the Taliban required just the right mix of diplomacy, military momentum 

and finesse, and battlefield assistance from CIA and special operations teams. 

Yet despite the overall accomplishments, mistakes were made. The Pentagon’s 

handling of the al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was one 

29 

of them. Whether these men should have been designated as prisoners of war can 

be debated. Neither group fought for a recognized government, and al Qaeda fighters satisfied virtually none of the standard criteria associated with soldiers. The 

Bush administration’s decision not to designate the detainees as pows is thus understandable, particularly since it did not want to be forced to repatriate them once 

hostilities in Afghanistan ended. But it probably would have been wiser to accord 

the detainees pow rights initially, until a military tribunal could determine them 

ineligible for pow status, as the Geneva Conventions stipulate. 

The pow issue aside, the administration’s initial reluctance to guarantee the basic 

protections of the Geneva Conventions to Taliban soldiers and its continued refusal 

to apply them to al Qaeda were unwise. These decisions fostered the impression 

that the detainees were not being treated humanely. This perception was wrong, but 

it became prevalent. Rumsfeld had to go on the defensive after photos circulated 

around the world showing shackled prisoners kneeling before their open-air cells; 

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard Myers talked somewhat hyperbolically about how the detainees might gnaw through hydraulic cables on airplanes 

if not forcibly restrained; and some Pentagon officials even suggested that the detainees did not necessarily deserve Geneva treatment, given the crimes of al Qaeda 

on September 11. But Rumsfeld’s comments came too late, and America’s image in 

the Arab world in particular took another hit. 

The big U.S. mistake, however, concerned the hunt for top al Qaeda leaders. If 

Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Zubaydah, and other top al Qaeda officials are found to have survived, the war will have failed to achieve a top objective. 

Rather than relying on Afghan and Pakistani forces to do the job in December near 

Tora Bora, Rumsfeld and Franks should have tried to prevent al Qaeda fighters 

from fleeing into Pakistan by deploying American forces on or near the border. U.S. 

troops should also have been used in the pursuit of Mullah Omar and remnants of 

the Taliban, even though this mission was less important than the one against al 

Qaeda leaders. 

Admittedly, there were good reasons not to put many Americans in Afghanistan. 

First, Washington feared a possible anti-American backlash, as Rumsfeld made 

clear in public comments. Complicating matters, the United States would have had 

a hard time getting many tens of thousands of troops into Afghanistan, since no 

neighboring country except Pakistan would have been a viable staging base—and 

Pakistan was not willing to play that role. 

But even though Rumsfeld’s reasoning was correct in general, it was wrong for 

Tora Bora. Putting several thousand U.S. forces in that mountainous, inland region 

would have been difficult and dangerous. Yet given the enormity of the stakes in 

this war, it would have been appropriate. Indeed, centcom made preparations for 

doing so. But in the end, partly because of logistical challenges but perhaps partly 

because of the Pentagon’s aversion to casualties, the idea was dropped. It is supremely ironic that a tough-on-defense Republican administration fighting for vital 

national security interests appeared almost as reluctant to risk American lives in 

combat as the Clinton administration had been in humanitarian missions—at least 

until Operation Anaconda, when it may have been largely too late. 

Furthermore, local U.S. allies were just not up to the job in Tora Bora. Pakistan 

deployed about 4,000 regular army forces along the border itself. But they were not 

always fully committed to the mission, and there were too few well-equipped troops 

to prevent al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from outflanking them, as many hundreds 

of enemy personnel appear to have done. Afghan opposition forces were also less 

than fully committed, and they were not very proficient in fighting at night. 

What would have been needed for the United States to perform this mission? To 

close off the 100 to 150 escape routes along the 25-mile stretch of the Afghan-Pakistani border closest to Tora Bora would have required perhaps 1,000 to 3,000 American troops. Deploying such a force from the United States would have required several hundred airlift flights, followed by ferrying the troops and supplies to frontline 

positions via helicopter. According to centcom, a new airfield might have had to be 

created, largely for delivering fuel. Such an operation would have taken a week or 

more. But two Marine Corps units with more than 1,000 personnel were already in 

the country in December and were somewhat idle at that time. If redeployed to Tora 

Bora, they could have helped prevent al Qaeda’s escape themselves. They also could 

have been reinforced over subsequent days and weeks by Army light forces or more 

marines, who could have closed off possible escape routes into the interior of Afghanistan. Such an effort would not have assured success, but the odds would have 

favored the United States. 

How much does it matter if bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and their cohorts go free? 

Even with its top leaders presumably alive, al Qaeda is weaker without its Afghan 

sanctuary. It has lost training bases, secure meeting sites, weapons production and 

30 

storage facilities, and protection from the host-country government. But as terrorism 

expert Paul Pillar has pointed out, the history of violent organizations with charismatic leaders, such as the Shining Path in Peru and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party 

(pkk) in Turkey, suggests that they are far stronger with their leaders than without 

them. The imprisonment of Abimael Guzma ́n in 1992 and Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 

did much to hurt those organizations, just as the 1995 assassination of Fathi 

Shikaki of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad weakened that group significantly. Some 

groups may survive the loss of an important leader or become more violent as a result—for example, Hamas flourished after the Israelis killed ‘‘the Engineer’’ Yahya 

Ayyash in 1996. But even they may have a hard time coming up with new tactics 

and concepts of operations after such a loss. 

If bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and other top al Qaeda leaders continue to evade capture, they may have to spend the rest of their lives on the run. And their access 

to finances may be sharply curtailed. But they could still inspire followers and design future terrorist attacks. If successful, their escape would be a major setback. 

EVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

Even though advocates of the famous ‘‘revolution in military affairs’’ have generally felt frustrated over the past decade, a number of important military innovations appeared in Operation Enduring Freedom. They may not be as revolutionary 

as blitzkrieg, aircraft-carrier war, and nuclear weapons, but they are impressive 

nonetheless. Advocates of radical change have tended to underestimate the degree 

to which the U.S. military can and does innovate even without dramatic transformation. 

Several developments were particularly notable. First, there was the widespread 

deployment of special operations forces with laser rangefinders and gps devices to 

call in extremely precise air strikes. Ground spotters have appeared in the annals 

of warfare for as long as airplanes themselves, but this was the first time they were 

frequently able to provide targeting information accurate to within several meters 

and do so quickly. 

Second, U.S. reconnaissance capabilities showed real improvement. Unmanned 

aerial vehicles (uavs), together with imaging satellites and jstars, maintained frequent surveillance of much of the battlefield and continuous coverage of certain specific sites—providing a capability that General Myers described as ‘‘persistence.’’ 

Also notable were advances in battlefield communications. The networks established between uavs, satellites, combat aircraft, and command centers were faster 

than in any previous war, making ‘‘persistence’’ even more valuable. The networks 

were not always fast enough, especially when the political leadership needed to intercede in specific targeting decisions. Nor were they available for all combat aircraft in the theater; for example, the Air Force’s ‘‘Link 16’’ data links are not yet 

installed on many strike aircraft. But they did often reduce the time between detecting a target and destroying it to less than 20 minutes. 

Perhaps most historic was the use of CIA-owned Predator uavs to drop weapons 

on ground targets. Aside from cruise missiles, this was the first time in warfare that 

an unmanned aircraft had dropped bombs in combat, in the form of ‘‘Hellfire’’ airto-ground missiles. There were also further milestones in the realm of precision 

weapons, which for the first time in major warfare constituted the majority of bombs 

dropped. They were dropped from a wide range of aircraft, including carrier-based 

jets, ground-based attack aircraft, and b-52 as well as b-1 bombers. The bombers 

were used effectively as close-air support platforms, loitering over the battlefield for 

hours until targets could be identified. They delivered about 70 percent of the war’s 

total ordnance. 

In addition to the laser-guided bomb, the weapon of choice for the United States 

quickly became the joint direct attack munition (jdam). First used in Kosovo, it is 

a one-ton iron bomb furnished with a $20,000 kit that helps steer it to within 10 

to 15 meters of its target using gps and inertial guidance. It is not quite as accurate 

as a laser-guided bomb but is much more resistant to the effects of weather. In the 

Kosovo war, only the b-2 could deliver it, but now the jdam can be dropped by most 

U.S. attack aircraft. By the end of January, the United States had dropped more 

than 4,000 laser-guided bombs and more than 4,000 jdams as well. 

Other ordnance was also important. Up to 1,000 cluster bombs were used, with 

accuracy of about 30 meters once outfitted with a wind-correcting mechanism. Although controversial because of their dud rate, cluster bombs were devastating 

against Taliban and al Qaeda troops unlucky enough to be caught in the open. A 

number of special-purpose munitions were used in smaller numbers, including cavebusting munitions equipped with nickel-cobalt steel-alloy tips and special software; 

these could penetrate up to 10 feet of rock or 100 feet of soil. 

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The ability to deliver most U.S. combat punch from the air kept the costs of war 

relatively modest. Through January 8, the total had reached $3.8 billion, while the 

military costs of homeland security efforts in the United States had reached $2.6 

billion. The bills in Afghanistan included $1.9 billion for deploying troops, $400 million for munitions, $400 million for replacing damaged or destroyed equipment, and 

about $1 billion for fuel and other operating costs. 

LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE

What broad lessons emerge from this conflict? First, military progress does not 

always depend on highly expensive weapons platforms. Many important contemporary trends in military technology and tactics concern information networks and 

munitions more than aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles. To take an extreme example, b-52 bombers with jdam were more useful in Operation Enduring Freedom than 

were the stealthy b-2s. Second, human skills remain important in war, as demonstrated best by the performance of special operations forces and CIA personnel. 

The basic infantry skills, foreign language abilities, competence and care in using 

and maintaining equipment, and physical and mental toughness of U.S. troops contributed to victory every bit as much as did high-tech weaponry. 

Third, military mobility and deployability should continue to be improved. The 

Marine Corps did execute an impressive ship-to-objective maneuver, forgoing the 

usual ship-to-shore operation and moving 400 miles inland directly. But most parts 

of the Army still cannot move so quickly and smoothly. Part of the solution may 

be the Army’s long-term plans for new and lighter combat equipment. (The Marine 

Corps’ v-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft may be useful, too, at least in modest numbers 

and once proven safe.) But the Army could also emulate the Marine Corps’ organization, training, and logistics where possible—and soon. The task is hardly hopeless; 

Army forces were tactically quite mobile and impressive in Operation Anaconda. 

Finally, the war showed that more joint-service experimentation and innovation 

are highly desirable, given that the synergies between special operations forces on 

the ground and Air Force and Navy aircraft in the skies were perhaps the most important keys to victory. 

How do these lessons match up with the Bush administration’s Quadrennial Defense Review of September 30, 2001, and its long-term budget plan of February 4, 

2002? The administration has basically preserved the force structure and weapons 

modernization plan that it inherited from the Clinton administration, added missile 

defense and one or two other priorities—and thrown very large sums of money into 

the budget. The Bush administration envisions a national security budget (Pentagon 

spending plus nuclear weapons budgets for the Department of Energy) that will 

grow to $396 billion in 2003 and $470 billion in 2007. (It was $300 billion when 

Bush took office and is $350 billion in 2002.) The war on terrorism cannot explain 

this growth; its annual costs are currently expected to be less than $10 billion after 

2003. That $470 billion figure for 2007 is a whopping $100 billion more than the 

Clinton administration envisioned for the same year in its last budget plan. 

For many critics who tend to focus on weapons procurement, the problem with 

Bush’s plan is that it protects the traditional weapons priorities of the military services without seeking a radical enough transformation of the U.S. armed forces. But 

this common criticism is only half right. The Bush administration has an aggressive 

program for so-called defense transformation, principally in research, development, 

and experimentation, where it envisions spending an additional $100 billion between 2002 and 2007. If anything, these plans are slightly too generous and ambitious. 

In fact, the problem is the traditional one: the unwillingness to set priorities and 

to challenge the military services to do so as well, especially in the procurement accounts. Despite the lack of a superpower rival, the administration proposes replacing most major combat systems with systems often costing twice as much, and doing 

so throughout the force structure. This plan would drive up the procurement budget 

to $99 billion by 2007 from its present level of $60 billion. 

A more prudent modernization agenda would begin by canceling at least one or 

two major weapons, such as the Army’s Crusader artillery system. But the more important change in philosophy would be to modernize more selectively in general. 

Only a modest fraction of the armed forces need to be equipped with the most sophisticated and expensive weaponry. That high-end or ‘‘silver bullet’’ force would be 

a hedge against possible developments such as a rapidly modernizing Chinese military. The rest of the force should be equipped primarily with relatively inexpensive, 

but highly capable, existing weaponry carrying better sensors, munitions, computers, and communications systems. For example, rather than purchase 3,000 

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joint-strike fighters, the military would buy only 1,000 of those and then add aircraft such as new f-16 Block 60 fighters to fill out its force structure. 

Other parts of the proposed Bush plan deserve scrutiny, too. After several successive years of increases, military pay is now in fairly good shape. In most cases, compensation is no longer poor by comparison with private-sector employment; as such, 

the administration’s plans for further large increases go too far. The proposed research and development budgets, meanwhile, exceed the already hefty increases 

promised by Bush during his presidential campaign; given that research and development were not severely cut during the 1990s, such growth seems excessive now. 

Finally, the Pentagon needs to reform the way it provides basic services such as 

military health care, housing, and various base operations. Unfortunately, if budgets 

get too big, the Pentagon’s incentives to look for efficiencies often weaken. On balance, the planned increases in defense spending are roughly twice as much as necessary for the years ahead. 

A final assessment of Operation Enduring Freedom depends on whether bin 

Laden and his top lieutenants have escaped Afghanistan. It could be a while before 

anyone knows; indeed, Rumsfeld has speculated that U.S. troops could remain in 

Afghanistan into 2003. A verdict will also have to await a better sense of where Afghanistan is headed. Whatever the stability of the post-Taliban government, it is 

doubtful that the Taliban and al Qaeda will ever control large swaths of the country 

again. But if pockets of terrorists remain in the country, or if Afghanistan again descends into civil war, the victory will be incomplete. In the former case, Afghanistan 

could still be an important if diminished asset for al Qaeda; in the latter, the U.S. 

image throughout the Islamic world may take another blow as critics find more fuel 

for their claims that Americans care little about the fate of Muslim peoples. 

To prevent such outcomes, Washington needs to work hard with other donors to 

make reconstruction and aid programs succeed in Afghanistan. The Bush administration also needs to rethink its policy on peacekeeping. Its current unwillingness 

to contribute to a stability force for Afghanistan is a major mistake that U.S. allies 

may not be able to redress entirely on their own. A force of 20,000 to 30,000 troops 

is clearly needed for the country as a whole; several thousand troops in Kabul will 

probably not suffice. 

That said, the situation in Afghanistan has improved enormously since October 

7—and so has U.S. security. The Afghan resistance, the Bush administration, its 

international coalition partners, the U.S. armed forces, and the CIA have accomplished what will likely be remembered as one of the greater military successes of 

the twenty-first century. 

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APPENDIX II.—United States Special Operations 

Command History, 6th Edition 


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