Tora Bora, Ctd.

Did we miss our chance to kill bin Laden in Tora Bora?

Peter Feaver makes a good point:

My problem with the Tora Bora critique -- both its generalized form and the particular form advanced by Glasser -- is that it conveniently forgets that the reason bin Laden was "trapped" in Tora Bora in the first place is that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks and CIA Director George Tenet defied both the conventional war plans and the conventional wisdom to mount the very light-footprint campaign that Glasser et al. are complaining about. If Rumsfeld and Franks and Tenet had used the conventional warplan that involved a heavy U.S. ground presence instead of the rapidly deployable light-footprint that Glasser denounces, the invasion of Afghanistan would have happened some time in 2002, if then. If Rumsfeld and Franks and Tenet had listened to the conventional wisdom during the early weeks when the light-footprint approach appeared to be faltering, they would have abandoned the Afghan effort long before the battle in Tora Bora.

I don't think this is a completely accurate rendering of the situation - the Senate Foreign Relations report says there were adequate troops inside Afghanistan to trap bin Laden but we simply choose not to send them into the mountains.

Still, Feaver's point strikes me as valid. We'd have never even gotten close to bin Laden if we didn't use the unconventional approach employed by Rumsfeld and Franks. And while we're playing hypotheticals, here's another one - what if we had listened to Rumsfeld even more closely and pulled our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq shortly after invading both countries, instead of sticking around to nation build? How much worse off would we be, especially in Afghanistan?

(AP Photos)