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When bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora, fight was outsourced to Afghan fighters who refused to fight at night and accepted ceasefire with al-Qaeda

Jul 22, 2011 12:47 am By Marisol Seibold

Said one Special Forces solder, “I don’t think their heart was in it.”

That disaster, so early in the war, should have been a warning sign of things to come. Such behavior has largely characterized the dynamics between Western and Afghan forces over the past decade. “Bin Laden’s Tora Bora escape, just months after 9/11,” by Gordon Corera for BBC News, July 21:

Only a few months after 9/11, American troops located Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan – so how was he able to evade them?

As members of the British Special Boat Service (SBS) team listened in to conversations on a captured short wave radio, they heard a voice they believed to be their target.

Two of the team spotted a tall figure in a camouflage jacket moving with a 50-man protective detail, who went into a cave through a hidden entrance.

Only a few months after the 11 September 2001 attacks, Osama Bin Laden seemed to be cornered in the mountains of Afghanistan, close to the Pakistani border.

Tora Bora promised to be his final stand. So how did he escape?

The SBS soldiers had joined an American-led team alongside CIA and US Special Forces who had followed Bin Laden from Jalalabad into the White Mountains and finally to Tora Bora, a remote complex of caves.

Once the team approached the foot of the mountains, they took over a schoolhouse as a base.

Four men headed into the mountains, accompanied by 10 Afghans. It was the most rugged terrain many had ever experienced.

When they reached an outcrop and saw a large group of up to about 900 al-Qaeda figures, the battle for Tora Bora began.

The commander back at base, Gary Berntsen, issued orders to open fire. He only told headquarters after the fact.

The team called in air strikes over the next 56 hours.

“We threw everything at him. I didn’t even know we had that many B52 or B1s,” one of the Special Forces soldiers who was on the ground told the BBC, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Everybody was trying to get into the fight because”¦ he was there. I can tell you that we dropped so much munitions on this place that we actually changed the landscape. The map is different.”

‘Political calculations’

More soldiers joined the team, but it never numbered more than 100. Three sections made a push up the mountain.

Further conversations overheard on captured al-Qaeda radios indicated that Bin Laden was still alive. The tone of his intercepted communications changed.

“It became more of desperation that doom is coming,” recalls one American soldier. The Americans believed he was within a mile and a quarter (2 km) of one of the teams.

Members of that team wanted to push forward but were told to wait since they lacked numbers.

“Every now and again, we’d talk about mutiny and just moving up,” a member recalls.

The strategy, as with the whole Afghan campaign, was to limit the number of American boots on the ground.

Instead Afghan fighters would operate under the direction of the small CIA/Special Forces teams, supported by air power.

But at Tora Bora, the Afghan mujahideen proved unreliable allies. They refused to fight at night leaving al-Qaeda to reoccupy ground that had been painfully won.

At one point they agreed a ceasefire which may even have secretly assisted Bin Laden. “I don’t think they were properly trained,” recalls the anonymous Special Forces soldier. “And I don’t think their heart was in it.”

Berntsen asked for 800 US Rangers to be placed between Bin Laden and the border, or to enter the mountains from the Pakistani side. His request was denied.

“Once you have to ask Washington for assistance, then all sorts of political calculations enter in and”¦ unfortunately that’s what occurred,” Berntsen told the BBC….

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Filed Under: Afghanistan, Pakistan


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