(The blog formerly known as) All Things Counter Terrorism

Without having read the report, my initial reaction is: why release it now?

A late 2009 report citing a 2007 SOCOM historical overview based on 2002 reporting from events in late 2001. I’ll comment more after I read the report, but it immediately smells of politics. Complaining that we didn’t get bin Ladin in Tora Bora, considering all the prior missed opportunities, seems silly.

From a practical stand-point, how many men would be required to seal a mountainous border criss-crossed with centuries old smuggling routes in the winter at an altitude and in an environment that was kicking the butts of hardened Special Forces operatives?

(As an aside, I’ve always found General Franks’ doubt about bin Laden being in the region, as mentioned in the article as questionable and it was one of the reasons I read his biography. He never touched on the issue. The same issue was seen later with Operation Anaconda when more ground troops weren’t put in place and al Qaida elements again escaped across the border into Pakistan.)

The failure to use U.S. forces to blockade the lines of retreat from Tora Bora into Pakistan has many facets. On one hand the high-level theoretical pros/cons of capturing/killing bin Laden or Mullah Omar. On the other a more direct (and equally difficult to measure) facet, instead of being captured on the battlefield by U.S. forces, hundreds of alleged combatants at Tora Bora were captured by Pakistani forces and turned over to the U.S. before transfer to Guantanamo. Capture by Pakistani forces has led to claims that those combatants were innocents sold to the U.S. by Pakistani bounty hunters and contributed to their subsequent release from Guanatanamo, return to the battlefield resulting in the death of more civilians and military members.

Nothing new is contained in the Senate report. The recommendation to put more U.S. troops on the ground and seal the border with Pakistan certainly isn’t new or insightful. Saying that the hammer worked but the anvil was absent is obvious, as is the assessment that capturing or killing UBL or Mullah Mohammad Omar would have been, to mock Martha Stewart, a good thing.

I’m not impressed. Blaming the current resurgence in the Taliban in AF on not capturing UBL in Tora Bora is completely theoretical. You may as well blame it on increased recruiting because of Guantanamo Bay or U.S. support for Israel (wait, that’s been done also). What’s next, a report that assesses that the increase in casualties in AF is due to the migration of tactics, training and technology from the insurgency in Iraq based on the steep increase in IED casualties in Afghanistan?

AQ leadership fled in all directions from Afghanistan — Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan — you can’t seal all the borders. Senior leadership has been killed or captured — Ibn Sheikh al Libi, Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, Juma Namangani, etc, etc, etc — and yet AQ lives on. Who contributes more to the current AF insurgency, AQ or local groups who weren’t the focus of the Battle of Tora Bora (HIG? Haqqani? PK ISI?)

This is a useless political rag that is nothing more than finger pointing at the military “flaws” in AF during the Bush Administration and a little added “proof” to defuse any negative flak that will come from those who are going to disagree with the Obama Administration putting more troops into Afghanistan.

The composition and numbers of fighters at Tora Bora is a completely separate debate. You could spend countless debating the framework for the debate.

For example, do ETIP fighters count as AQ forces? If the majority of Taliban forces fled south from Jalalabad to defend Kandahar, do you consider Afghans who fought at Tora Bora to be supporting AQ or still part of the Taliban? If your commander isn’t a formal member of al Qaeda, but is coordinating his actions and maneuvers with the al Qaeda commander, are you a part of al Qaeda forces?

What would *your* definition be for a member of al Qaeda forces in Tora Bora?