Sen. Kerry Calls Bush-Rumsfeld Strategy "Risk-Averse"

On the day that President Obama delivered his message to the nation that the U.S. would send 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story of the troop build-up and a photo of cadets seated in the audience. Have you ever wondered what USMA cadets read? The cadet who figures most prominently in the photo is reading "Kill Bin Laden" (by Dalton Fury), a book I recently reviewed on AC back in October of this year.

Dalton Fury is the pen name of a ranking special forces operative who wrote "Kill Bin Laden" and was at Tora Bora when Al Qaeda forces were driven to ground in the mountain caves. Although the write told the story with classified information restrictions, "Dalton Fury" manages a really interesting narrative of the action, and also of events leading up to the action. Fury repeats what was once well known, but seems now little remembered, that the U.S. success in driving the Taliban from Kandahar depended on the participation of key warlords-two of whom figure prominently in "Kill Bin Laden." An inescapable fact in "Kill Bin Laden" is provided in the author's description of the physical landscape where Bin Laden is presumed to have been hiding out. For the best trained and toughest soldiers in America, it was difficult to navigate the cold, narrow, and forbidding passes weaving uphill through the multitude of mountain peaks in a no man's land where even the local mountain people were afraid to tread. Bin Laden and his forces retreated from advancing U.S. and Northern Alliance Forces to high ground and primitive but fortified caves.

So much is prologue. The point of this writing, though, is that Dalton Fury alludes to the failure of higher powers to send a blocking force to prevent the trapped Bin Laden from escaping to Pakistan and the refuge of South Waziristan, where the Pakistani Army has been for several weeks engaging Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorists.

During the past week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee came up with a belated and redundant report which concluded that the U.S. failed to capture or kill Bin Laden at Tora Bora, and that this somehow explains the current president's predicament with regard to Afghanistan. In other words, President Obama wouldn't have to make this difficult troop decision if it wasn't for the incompetent Bush-Rumsfeld failure to backstop the special ops.

The fact is that it would have been brilliant to have had such a force in place. It would not only have been brilliant-it would have been prescient, a biblical feat of the highest order, as if the hand of God had reached down and landed the troops in the perfect spot on one of the ubiquitous mountainsides. But whoever made the decision, and whoever failed to have troops in place to block Bin Laden's escape, faced a major decision. In just two months after the 9-11 attacks, U.S. and Northern Alliance Forces had swept through most of Afghanistan, an accomplishment that, in a less partisan time, would be considered one of the U.S. military's greatest victories. And then, in just the third month of December 2001, Special Forces, Northern and Southern Alliance troops had cornered Bin Laden in this forbidding mountain range, and were methodically hammering the caves with smart bombs, C-47 gunships, and artillery. Tora Bora wasn't exactly the right spot to mount a banzai charge, not unless one enjoys running infantry uphill in the open against raking machine-gun fire from above.

So the problem for military commanders and the defense secretary was how and whether to deploy Delta Force troops into mountains where helicopters could not find a place to land, where vehicles were trapped in places they could not maneuver in, where backup reinforcement troops landing in an unfamiliar terrain might have been exposed to RPG, machine-gun, and small arms fire.

What was needed in Tora Bora was either divine intervention or a Hollywood film script. Short of that, Rumsfeld and Bush might have to answer to the moms and dads of America for failed operations like Jimmy Carter's fiasco in the Iranian desert or Bill Clinton's bloody and costly indecision in Mogadishu.

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry has today written a "Letter to the Editor" of the Wall Street Journal to defend himself against the Wall Street Journal's criticism that Kerry once favored additional troops for Afghanistan, then changed his mind. Senator Kerry points to one of the passages in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Report to fire back: "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."

That's really putting your toe into the hot water, isn't it? The "classic sweep and block maneuver?" Joe Biden was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at that time, wasn't he? I can almost imagine him freezing and trembling on the mountainside while looking in the war textbook learning how to execute the "classic sweep and block maneuver." I'm not a military expert, either, but I thought perhaps that Kerry (and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) had got the wars mixed up and referred to General Norman Schwarzkopf's blitz in Iraq. That was perhaps the type of "classic sweep and block maneuver" that the Senator meant. And note the use of the phrase "TRY to prevent his escape." With the prospect of dead soldiers piling up on a mountainous moonscape of Afghanistan, you've got to do more than "try." If Senator Kerry and others on the Foreign Relations Committee were so anxious to commit reserve troops to Tora Bora, why didn't they just come out and scream it? Perhaps it was because Senators Kerry and Biden had no idea how it could be done without being reckless and getting people killed.

The same woulda', shoulda', coulda' logic would argue that President Obama's dithering and delay in military decision making allowed Al Qaeda forces to escape recently from South Waziristan Province back into sanctuaries in Afghanistan. Armchair generals that we are, we can wonder where the troops were who would backstop the Pakistani operation. Wouldn't it have been great if the Al Qaeda and other militants in South Waziristan were trapped in a pincer movement between U.S. troops in the Tora Bora valley and Pakistani troops in Pakistan? Going back even further, we can wonder why the Clinton administration did not take Bin Laden when Sudan offered to hand him over on a silver platter back in the 90s.

In his Wall Street Journal letter today, Senator Kerry reports that "it is now a well-established fact the Bush-Rumsfeld risk-averse strategy allowed the man behind September 11 to escape and remain an inspiration to fanatics worldwide." Risk-averse strategy? With the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime and the simultaneous war in Afghanistan, you can hardly accuse the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld plans of being "risk-averse. Well, I suppose it's completely justifiable for this new political leadership to bellow and thump its chest, especially since now we are embarked on Barack Obama's bold strategy of announcing a troop withdrawal in 18 months after a delayed decision of eleven months.

Sources: The Book "Kill Bin Laden", by Dalton Fury; my own review of that book on Associated Content, found at : http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2297921/kill_bin_laden.html?cat=38