The United States appeared to have Al Qaeda on the ropes. But, on the U.S. side, all was not well. A dispute was raging among officials about how to conduct the battle. By late November, Crumpton--a soft-spoken Georgian widely regarded as one of the most effective CIA officers of his generation--feared that bin Laden might try to escape Tora Bora. He explained this to Bush and Cheney personally at the White House and presented satellite imagery showing that the Pakistani military did not have its side of the border covered. CIA Director George Tenet remembers Bush asking Crumpton if the Pakistanis had enough troops to seal the border. No, sir, the CIA veteran replied. No one has enough troops to prevent any possibility of escape in a region like that. Still, Crumpton thought the United States should try--and that meant more troops would be required.
Back in Kabul, Berntsen was thinking along the same lines. On the evening of December 3, one member of his team, a former Delta Force operator who had gone deep into Tora Bora, came to the Afghan capital to brief Berntsen about the lay of the land. He told Berntsen that taking out Al Qaedas hard core would require 800 Rangers, elite soldiers who had gone through the Armys most rigorous physical training. That night, Berntsen sent a lengthy message to CIA headquarters asking for 800 Rangers to assault the complex of caves where bin Laden and his lieutenants were believed to be hiding, and to block their escape routes. Crumpton says, I remember the message. I remember talking not only to Gary every day, but to some of his men who were at Tora Bora. Directly. And their request could not have been more direct, more clear, more certain: that we needed U.S. troops there. More men on the ground.
That bin Laden was at Tora Bora was not, by this point, a secret. The New York Times had reported it on November 25. Four days later, when asked by ABC News whether the Al Qaeda leader was at Tora Bora, Dick Cheney said, I think hes probably in that general area.
Meanwhile, the additional forces that Crumpton and Berntsen were requesting were certainly available. There were around 2,000 U.S. troops in or near the Afghan theater at the time. At the U.S. airbase known as K2 in Uzbekistan were stationed some 1,000 soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division, whose specialty is fighting in harsh terrain. Hundreds of those soldiers had already deployed to Bagram Air Force Base, 40 miles north of Kabul. In addition, 1,200 Marines were stationed at Forward Operating Base Rhino, near Kandahar, from the last week of November onward. Brigadier General James Mattis, the commander of the Marines in the Afghan theater, reportedly asked to send his men into Tora Bora, but his request was turned down. In the end, there were more journalists--about 100, according to Nic Robertson of CNN and Susan Glasser of The Washington Post, who both covered the battle--in and around Tora Bora than there were Western soldiers.
Yet, when Crumpton called General Tommy Franks to ask for more troops, Franks pushed back. The general, who had overall control of the Tora Bora operation, pointed out that the light-footprint approach--U.S. reliance on local proxies--had already succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban, and he argued that it would take time to get more U.S. troops to Tora Bora.
The U.S. force was to remain tiny throughout the battle. On December 7, on-the-ground responsibility for Tora Bora passed from Berntsen to a 37-year-old major in the elite and secretive Delta Force, who would later write a memoir using the pen name Dalton Fury. Under Furys command during the battle were 40 Delta operators from the black Special Forces, 14 Green Berets from the less secretive white Special Forces, six CIA operatives, a few Air Force specialists, including signals operators, and a dozen British commandos from the elite Special Boat Service. They were joined by three main Afghan commanders: beloved patriot Zaman Gamsharik, who had been living in exile in the comfortable environs of Dijon, France, before he returned to Afghanistan as the Taliban fell; beloved patriot Zahir, the 27-year-old son of a Jalalabad warlord; and Ali, the commander who had been helping Berntsen. The Afghan commanders disliked each other more than they did Al Qaeda. For the most important mission to date in the global war on terror, Fury later wrote, our nation was relying on a fractious bunch of AK-47-toting lawless bandits and tribal thugs who were not bound by any recognized rules of warfare.
Why was the Pentagon so unwilling to send more troops? Recently, I asked Franks to comment on his decision. He reiterated his preference for a light footprint and his concern about the time it would take to put additional troops on the ground. He also said that he could not be sure that bin Laden was at Tora Bora because of conflicting intelligence that alternately placed him in Kashmir, around Kandahar, and near the Afghan-Iranian border.
Lt. General Michael DeLong, Frankss top deputy, recalled in his 2004 memoir that the Pentagon did not want to put many American soldiers on the ground because of a concern that they would be treated like antibodies by the locals. The mountains of Tora Bora are situated deep in territory controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and any outsiders, he wrote. The reality is if we put our troops in there we would inevitably end up fighting Afghan villagers--creating bad will at a sensitive time--which was the last thing we wanted to do.
There may also have been a reluctance to send soldiers into harms way. The Pentagons risk aversion is now hard to recall following the years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the thousands of American soldiers who have died--but it was quite real. In the most recent U.S. war--the 1999 conflict in Kosovo--not a single American had been killed in combat. And, at that point in the Afghan war, more journalists had died than American soldiers. Fury says that the 14 Green Berets who were on the ground at Tora Bora from the white Special Forces were told to stay well short of even the foothills, some four kilometers from any action--pretty much out of harms way. The Green Berets did call in airstrikes but were not allowed to engage in firefights with Al Qaeda because of concerns that the battle would turn into a meat grinder.
Then there was Iraq. In late November, Donald Rumsfeld told Franks that Bush wants us to look for options in Iraq. Rumsfeld instructed the general to dust off the Pentagons blueprint for an Iraq invasion and brief him in a weeks time. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers would later write, I realized that one week was not giving Tom and his staff much time to sharpen the plan. Franks points out in his autobiography that his staff was already working seven days a week, 16-plus hours a day, as the Tora Bora battle was reaching its climax. Although Franks doesnt say so, it is impossible not to wonder if the labor-intensive planning ordered by his boss for another major war was a distraction from the one he was already fighting.
Franks briefed Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials about the war plan for Iraq on December 4. But both men agreed that the plan needed work. Rumsfeld gave Franks and his staff eight days to revise it. Well, General, he told Franks, you have a lot of work ahead of you. Today is Tuesday. Lets get together again next Wednesday.
On December 10, American signals-intelligence operators picked up an important intercept from Tora Bora: Father [bin Laden] is trying to break through the siege line. This was then communicated to the Delta operators on the ground. Around 4 p.m. that same day, Afghan soldiers said they had bin Laden in their sights, according to the official U.S. military history of the battle. Later that evening, Fury received a new piece of signals intelligence on bin Ladens whereabouts. The information was so precise that it appeared to pinpoint the Al Qaeda leaders location to within ten meters. At the time, Fury was in the schoolhouse that he had been using as a base. About 15 minutes later, he received another bit of intelligence--somewhat less precise--placing bin Laden two kilometers from the first location. To this day, Fury doesnt know which information was more recent and therefore more accurate, but he drove into the foothills and got to within about 1,900 meters of the first location.
Fury now found himself in a quandary. This was almost certainly the closest to bin Ladens position U.S. forces had ever been, but, at the same time, three of his men were pinned down in a ferocious firefight with some Al Qaeda foot soldiers. And, as dusk fell, Furys key Afghan ally, Hazarat Ali, had retreated from the battlefield back home to break his Ramadan fast. Fury was under explicit orders not to take the lead in the battle and only to act in a supporting role for the hundreds of Afghans in Hazarat Alis ragtag army. Now, he had no Afghan allies to guide him at night into the craggy moonscape of upper Tora Bora. Fury reluctantly made the decision to bail on that nights mission.
Muhammad Musa, who commanded 600 Afghan soldiers at Tora Bora, later said that he was not impressed by the U.S. forces on the ground. [They] were not involved in the fighting, he said. There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the air strikes. ... My personal view is, if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, Al Qaeda would not have had a way to escape. The Americans were my guests here, but they didnt know about fighting.
In fact, the five dozen or so Americans on the ground at Tora Bora fought well. There were just far too few of them to cordon off a huge, mountainous area and prevent Al Qaeda from escaping into Pakistan.
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