…as in, our forces knew where he was in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains (or so says a Senate report release today) but then failed to move in on him. Why? Oh, maybe there was a good “Law & Order” rerun on that night. Or maybe we were totally gonna go, but then got sucked into a game of Halo and, well, there went the night.Right? Wrong. The blame for this epic mistake lands squarely on the shoulders of the higher ups.
The report, entitled, “Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get Bin Laden and Why It Matters Today” (alternate title: “How We Managed to Screw the Pooch Yet Again in the Middle East and Why They Still Might be Kinda Miffed At Us About It.”) lays it out nicely for us. It’s a pretty sweet read (and by sweet, I mean cringe-inducing), and at 49 pages, a quick one too.
If you’re wondering exactly what the hell happened and who was responsible, here’s an abbreviated blow-by-blow (released just as President Obama is to share his plans for troops in Afghanistan):
By early December 2001, Bin Laden’s world had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora.
Note: At this point, US troops were bombing the bejeezus out of the region. So Bin Laden was essentially cornered.
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.
Got it? The guy knows his jig is up.
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.(…) 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.
Also ixnayed were requests for troops to block paths running through the mountain to Pakistan. And that worked out really welll for Bin Laden, who retains his top spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list:
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.

Still in the wind....
What the…?!?! Who would make such a moronic decision?
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.
Oh. Right. Those two. But why?
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.
Oh, come on. First off, the report tells us that there were already enough troops there to successfully carry out what needed to be done — get Bin Laden. Furthermore, I’m wondering what happened to this fear of an “anti-American backlash” by the time the decision to attack Iraq (for no legitimate reason whatsoever) rolled around? What obscured their clear vision of things?