forensic evidence had come to light to prove that bin Laden had died in that godforsaken place. I hoped that he had remained in his fortress to fight and defy the world and the invading infidels. After all, that’s what he advertised.
During those long months, I personally believed that a wounded bin Laden had fought a good fight until a precision-guided bomb, directed by an operator on a nearby ridgeline, punched his ticket to paradise. I planned to hold on to that theory until the intelligence community could prove I was wrong.
However, it was Usama bin Laden himself who finally did that. The terrorist leader appeared on television in a taped video late in October 2004, only days before the presidential election.
I knew immediately that the tape was the real thing. His posture, the voice, his thin body, and the aged beard that seemed frosted of snow were unmistakeable. Unfortunately, the man was still alive.
But… How?
Another critical piece of the puzzle surfaced in January 2007. The source was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had been one of the CIA’s favorite sons during the Afghan war with the Soviets before changing his stripes to become one of the most wanted men in the war on terror. Allegiances shift rapidly over there, and Hekmatyar was now the leader of the Hezb-e-Islami militant group.
Hekmatyar bragged during an interview with Pakistan TV that his men had helped bin Laden, two of his sons, and al-Zawahiri escape from Tora Bora. He claimed that after American and Afghan troops surrounded the cave complex, his own fighters “helped them get out of the caves and led them to a safe place.” Was he telling the truth or spreading the myth? Can you trust any warlord, much less one who is a dangerous terrorist?
After six years of pondering the significance of the Battle of Tora Bora, I see some things much clearer.
Perhaps the most difficult thing to watch was the painful education of the American military in the work of confronting fanatical Muslim extremists. We were naive back in December 2001 to think that Westerners could invade a Muslim country and rely on indigenous fighters to kill their Islamic brothers with tenacity and impunity.
That idea worked like a charm when we faced the common foe, the oppressive Taliban, which had ruled Afghanistan with an iron fist while enforcing the most rigid interpretations of the Quran.
However, at Tora Bora, the mujahideen weren’t fighting the Taliban, they were fighting al Qaeda and Usama bin Laden, which made the dynamics significantly different. We might as well have been asking for them to fight the Almighty Prophet Mohammed himself. What motivation did the Afghan Muslims possess for hunting down, raising their rifles, sighting in, and actually shooting an al Qaeda fighter, much less the revered leader?
I am convinced that not a single one of our muhj fighters wanted to be recognized in their mosque as the man who killed Sheikh bin Laden.
So beyond getting the Taliban off their necks, the Afghan military and tribal leaders had goals that were much different from our own. They were out to accumulate personal fortunes and political power, to clear the opium fields for business again and protect the drug distribution routes… not to avenge the Americans killed on 9/11.
The CIA and the British paid these warlords handsomely for their questionable loyalty, and in turn, they were expected to pay and equip the amateur fighters who filled the ranks of both the Northern and Eastern Alliances. Material blessings literally fell from the heavens for them, more than they could ever have dreamed. New weapons, ammunition, uniforms, tennis shoes, cold-weather clothing, and blankets were dropped in huge bundles from cargo planes. America was not doing this on the cheap.
The intent of the local warlords surpassed any desires of the global coalition wanting to kill bin Laden. They wanted as much military hardware as possible to stash away for future tribal conflicts. We armed them for future fights among themselves, and that day will come.
The astonishing amount of bombs that were dropped during the fight is an easy way to prove how determined our military services had become in killing terrorists. A rule was established early on that no aircraft was to fly all the way to Tora Bora and then return to its base with bombs still hung. Engagement Zones were created to be the final option on the target list, primarily places that we could not see from the OPs but likely locations of enemy fighters.
The zones were carefully established, although based on nonscientific methods. First we had to check with General Ali on the location of his fighters to make sure they were clear. Then we culled the assessments of Ali and our snipers about the current al Qaeda locations. From that came the extrapolation of where the fleeing enemy might be heading within the next twenty-four hours. The recommended coordinates were relayed to the TOC in Bagram for approval. Generally, the pilots got the coordinates before they launched, and if for some reason they were assigned a definite target before having to egress, the aircraft was free to drop its payload inside the established EZ. A controller was still handling the planes, but primarily to maintain traffic control so they were not running into each other and to ensure that there were no friendlies below them.
Hostile threats and target discrimination were not required in an EZ. Warriors or widows, orphans or machine- gunners, commanders or cooks, any ant-sized sign of movement during the day or human-sized heat source at night was fair game. A daily average of over one hundred bombs impacted inside the EZs. This harsh reality may not sit well with critics, but it speaks volumes about the willingness of American general officers to ignore political correctness and make the tough calls.
The guys in the TOC burned as much midnight oil as the guys in the mountains of Tora Bora, cycling through their own battle drill to support the fight with as many fighters, bombers, and gunships as they could wrestle away from the U.S. Central Command, which was running the war. This was PhD-level stuff and they were establishing doctrine on the fly.
Artillery experts Will, Todd, and an old Ranger buddy named Jim collaborated with intelligence chief Brian to plot the latest EZ coordinates on their digital maps. In all, over 1,200 CENTCOM targets were fatfingered, one at a time.
Ensuring that all this great stuff could be transmitted in real time back to CENTCOM in Florida and be made useful was a small crew of communicators. Smooth talkers Tony and Happ rigged up critical UHF antennas that allowed the fires experts to update aircraft coming into Afghan airspace on the way to Tora Bora. Sean, from the IT section, hardwired the place like Microsoft headquarters and constantly manipulated the incoming data.
Once a new free fire area was complete, the team rang up the liaison officer, call sign Rasta, at the Coalition Air Operations Center. Rasta, a navy pilot stuck with staff duty, also had the dubious duty of explaining to the CAOC commanding general why every plane in the theater always seemed to be heading to Tora Bora.
An enormous amount of U.S. taxpayer money and factory worker effort was expended at Tora Bora. Over 1,100 precision-guided bombs and more than 550 dumb bombs were dropped during the assault on al Qaeda’s hideout. In one single and quite busy twenty-four-hour period alone, 135 JDAMs were dropped. These totals do not include shells put through the deadly accurate 40mm chain guns and 105mm cannons of the AC-130 gunships. Those would number in the many thousands.
With such hell falling in a relatively small target area, it is easy to understand why some cold, hungry and shell-shocked al Qaeda fighters took a rain check on martyrdom and ran away. Perhaps they were thinking quietly,
A day after we returned from the mountains, several of us knelt around a map of the Tora Bora area and informally briefed Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey and Command Sgt. Maj. C. W. Thompson. When we were finished, Dailey stated, “This is something incredibly historical, completely out of the box for Delta, and a great tactical victory.”
Today, if you Google the words “Tora Bora,” in less than a second you will have at your fingertips an avalanche of documents. This number is extraordinary, but it is public-domain material and lists everything from news reports to bloggers’ opinions.
Surely, the U.S. Army could do better than that because of the rigid importance placed on identifying and documenting “Lessons Learned.” One might assume the Center for Army Lessons Learned would reveal a treasure trove of information about every battle conducted during Operation Enduring Freedom.
