On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. aircraft began bombing the training bases and strongholds of al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban across Afghanistan. The leaders who sent murderers to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon less than a month earlier and the rogue government that provided them sanctuary were running for their lives. President George W. Bush's expression of America's desire to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" seemed about to come true.
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Three months later, American civilian and military leaders celebrated what they viewed as a lasting victory with the selection of Hamid Karzai as the country's new leader. The war had been conceived as a swift campaign with a single objective: defeat the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda by capturing or killing bin Laden and other key leaders. A unique combination of airpower, Central Intelligence Agency and special operations forces teams, and indigenous allies had swept the Taliban from power and ousted al Qaeda from its safe haven, keeping American deaths to a minimum. But even in the initial glow, there were concerns: The mission had failed to capture or kill bin Laden.
Removing the al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency, and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.
This failure and its enormous consequences were not inevitable. By early December, 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. Cornered in some of the most forbidding terrain on Earth, he and several hundred of his men, the largest concentration of al Qaeda fighters, endured as many as 100 airstrikes a day. One 15,000-pound bomb, so huge it had to be rolled out the back of a C-130 cargo plane, shook the mountains for miles. Even bin Laden himself expected to die. He wrote his last will and testament on Dec. 14, instructing his wives not to remarry and apologizing to his children for devoting himself to jihad. But the al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. On or around Dec. 16, 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.
What happened in Tora Bora? A major with the Army's Delta Force, now retired and writing under the pen name Dalton Fury, was the senior U.S. military officer there, commanding about 90 special operations troops and support personnel charged with hunting down and capturing or killing bin Laden.
In interviews with committee staff, Fury explained that al Qaeda fighters arrayed in the mountains used unsecure radios, allowing U.S. forces to eavesdrop on al Qaeda, tracking their movements and gauging the effectiveness of the bombing. Even more valuable, a few days after arriving, one of the CIA operatives picked up a radio from a dead al Qaeda fighter. It gave the Americans a clear channel into the group's communications on the mountain. Bin Laden's voice was often picked up, along with frequent comments about the presence of the man referred to by his followers as "the sheikh."
For several days in early December, Fury's special ops troops moved up the mountains in pairs with fighters from the Afghan militias. The Americans used GPS devices and laser range finders to pinpoint caves and pockets of enemy fighters for the bombers. It was clear from what they could see and what they were hearing in the intercepted conversations that relentless bombing was taking its toll.
On December 9, a C-130 cargo plane dropped the 15,000-pound bomb, known as a Daisy Cutter, on the Tora Bora complex. The weapon had not been used since Vietnam and there were early fears that its impact had not been as great as expected. But later reports confirmed that the bomb struck with massive force. A captured al Qaeda fighter who was there later told American interrogators that men deep in caves had been vaporized in what he called "a hideous explosion." That day and others, Fury described intercepting radio communications in which al Qaeda fighters called for the "red truck to move wounded" and frantic pleas from a fighter to his commander.
Given the radio signals, Fury hoped his special operations forces were getting close to capture. They were not. The United States was relying on two relatively minor warlords from the Jalalabad area for Afghan support. Haji Hazarat Ali had a fourth-grade education and a reputation as a bully. He had fought the Soviets as a teenager in the 1980s and later joined the Taliban for a time. The other, Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, was a wealthy drug smuggler who had been persuaded by the United States to return from France. Together, they fielded a force of about 2,000 men, and there were questions from the outset about the competence and loyalties of the fighters. The two warlords and their men distrusted each other and both groups appeared to distrust their American allies.
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