Senate Report Revisits Osama bin Laden's Great Escape

Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the military began bombing al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. It was the start of a campaign orchestrated by the CIA and Special Forces troops that quickly ousted the ruling Taliban from power but led to an insurgency that continues today.

Just nine weeks into the campaign, a group of fewer than 100 commandos came tantalizingly close to killing or capturing Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the mountains of Tora Bora before bin Laden fled over the boarder into the tribal regions of Pakistan. The al Qaeda leader feared that his death was so imminent that he drafted a will, instructing his wives not to remarry and apologizing to his children for pursuing a life of jihad.

The failure to stop the al Qaeda leader amid those inhospitable peaks in eastern Afghanistan "allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide," concludes a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report issued earlier this week. The report was made public just days before President Obama announced plans to send an additional 30,000 troops to "finish the job" in Afghanistan.

Long a controversial episode in the opening months of the war on terrorism, the events at Tora Bora have frequently surfaced as a cudgel for critics to challenge tactical decisions made by former President George W. Bush, retired Gen. Tommy Franks, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The report, a scathing indictment of the three men, was requested by the Foreign Relations Committee's chairman, Sen. John Kerry, who frequently raised the issue of the Tora Bora battle during his own run for the White House against Bush in 2004.

"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," the report concludes.

Additional U.S. forces—requested by commanders on the scene but rejected by the Pentagon—could have blocked routes that bin Laden and his entourage are believed to have used to escape the battlefield. "The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines," the report says.

While largely ignoring the Tora Bora report, some Republicans pointed to other failed attempts to kill bin Laden, dating back to the Clinton administration. The Wall Street Journal opined that it was "remarkable" that Kerry's report faulted decisions to send more troops to Tora Bora while the Massachusetts senator was himself pushing for limits on U.S. troop commitments under the Obama administration.

Though most of the information contained in the report has already surfaced in the public domain, it does aim to settle disputed aspects of the events. Franks and Vice President Dick Cheney have raised doubts as to whether bin Laden was present at Tora Bora. Franks refused to talk with the committee staff preparing the report, but an aide to the retired general wrote investigators in an E-mail: "We really don't have time for this. Focused on the future, not the past."

The report, based on publicly available information and interviews with military commanders, intelligence officials, and others present at the battle, claims that the available evidence "removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora." The Senate report relies also on a Special Operations Command history of the Tora Bora fight that "determined with reasonable certainty'' that bin Laden was at the mountaintop enclave.

The Special Operations Command history was released in 2007, but while it is a public document, it has received little attention in the media. The summary of events from the military study, combined with the Senate report, provides fascinating detail about the specifics of the battle.