In the event of an attack we will be forced to take a against the enemy correct the mistake if any
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LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
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United States Senate,
Committee on Foreign Relations,
Washington, DC, November 30, 2009.
Dear Colleague: This report by the committee majority staff
is part of our continuing examination of the conflict in
Afghanistan. When we went to war less than a month after the
attacks of September 11, the objective was to destroy Al Qaeda
and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, and other
senior figures in the terrorist group and the Taliban, which
had hosted them. Today, more than eight years later, we find
ourselves fighting an increasingly lethal insurgency in
Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan that is led by many of
those same extremists. Our inability to finish the job in late
2001 has contributed to a conflict today that endangers not
just our troops and those of our allies, but the stability of a
volatile and vital region. This report relies on new and
existing information to explore the consequences of the failure
to eliminate bin Laden and other extremist leaders in the hope
that we can learn from the mistakes of the past.
Sincerely,
John F. Kerry,
Chairman.
TORA BORA REVISITED:
HOW WE FAILED TO GET BIN LADEN
AND WHY IT MATTERS TODAY
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Executive Summary
On October 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.
Two 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 hand-picked
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
while 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 decisions that opened the door for his escape
to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic
figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and
inspire fanatics worldwide. 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. Al Qaeda shifted its locus across the border into
Pakistan, where it has trained extremists linked to numerous
plots, including the July 2005 transit bombings in London and
two recent aborted attacks involving people living in the
United States. The terrorist group's resurgence in Pakistan has
coincided with the rising violence orchestrated in Afghanistan
by the Taliban, whose leaders also escaped only to re-emerge to
direct today's increasingly lethal Afghan insurgency.
This failure and its enormous consequences were not
inevitable. 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.
Cornered in some of the most forbidding terrain on earth, he
and several hundred of his men, the largest concentration of Al
Qaeda fighters of the war, endured relentless pounding by
American aircraft, as many as 100 air strikes 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. It seemed
only a matter of time before U.S. troops and their Afghan
allies overran the remnants of Al Qaeda hunkered down in the
thin, cold air at 14,000 feet.
Bin Laden expected to die. His last will and testament,
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