Posted on 10/31/2004 5:35:20 PM PST by Former Military Chick
NEW YORK Knight Ridder's Washington bureau has provided some of the best reporting on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, often by relying on non-official sources and its staffers' own observation and investigation. In that way, the bureau has usually avoided simple "he said/she said" summations.
Today, in a story sent to Knight Ridder newspapers, the bureau examined the current, and perhaps crucial, election debate in the aftermath of the new Osama bin Laden video: Did the U.S. military let the terrorist leader escape in Tora Bora nearly three years ago?
Sen. John Kerry has declared that United States failed to kill or capture bin Laden because it "outsourced" the job to Afghan warlords.
Bush administration officials have said they used a combination of Afghan fighters, American military advisers, and air power in Tora Bora. Writing in The New York Times on Oct. 19, retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, said it isn't even clear that bin Laden was in Tora Bora at the time and denied that he "outsourced" military action.
Today Knight Ridder asked: Who's right?
The report revealed that two KR reporters and two photographers were at Tora Bora during the battle, and photographer David Gilkey of the Detroit Free Press and reporter Drew Brown traveled there a year later, interviewed Afghan fighters, retraced al-Qaida escape routes and talked to Pakistani intelligence officers who were tracking al Qaida.
"Their reporting," KR recalled today, "found that Franks and other top officials ignored warnings from their own and allied military and intelligence officers that the combination of precision bombing, special operations forces and Afghan forces that had driven the Taliban from northern Afghanistan might not work in the heartland of the country's dominant Pashtun tribe.
"While more than 1,200 U.S. Marines sat at an abandoned air base in the desert 80 miles away, Franks and other commanders relied on three Afghan warlords and a small number of American, British and Australian special forces to stop al-Qaida and Taliban fighters from escaping across the mountains into Pakistan.
"Military and intelligence officials had warned Franks and others that the two main Afghan commanders, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman, couldn't be trusted, and they proved to be correct. They were slow to move their troops into place and didn't attack until four days after American planes began bombing -- leaving time for al-Qaida leaders to escape and leaving behind a rear guard of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek fighters.
"Ali and Zaman both assured our people that they had forces in blocking positions on the Spin Ghar (mountains) when there were, in fact, no people there," said a U.S. military official who played a key role in the campaign. "So besides taking Afghans at their word, we had no plans to bring up sufficient forces to make up for perfidy."
"U.S. intelligence analysts estimated that 1,000 to 1,100 al-Qaida fighters, along with some of the group's top leaders, escaped the American dragnet at Tora Bora.
"A Pakistani official later told Knight Ridder that intelligence reports suggested that some 4,000 al-Qaida members escaped and that 50 to 80 top leaders paid Zaman or Ali as much as $40,000 apiece for safe passage out of Tora Bora."
But the Knight Ridder report did acknowledge that there is no proof that bin Laden was among the escapees. "It isn't clear, however, whether bin Laden and his top aide, Ayman al Zawahiri, were among them, as Kerry has alleged," the report concluded. "Bin Laden was last seen heading out of the Afghan city of Jalalabad toward Tora Bora in a convoy on Nov. 15, 2001. U.S. officials thought they'd heard him on a local radio transmission in Tora Bora in December, but later said they might have been mistaken."
You have to respect their dedicated journalism. Why, that's almost as impressive a determination to get to the root of a story as finding some alleged Vietcong guerillas to attest to the heroism of the great bwana, John F. Kerry!
This story is almost as good as their story to get to the root of the Kerry military records.
The organization that doesn't rely on he said/she said situations, sure seems to rely on what alot of "sources" said for this story.
The newspaper of my hometown is a Knight-Ridder paper and I had to stop it months ago because they are way over the top biased for Kerry.
.
Notice who they used as their sources, Pakistanis, and their own people. Hm, where is the objective and reliable sources.
Can you believe how the left is so intent on totally SMEARING THE GREAT MEN AND WOMEN OF THE MILITARY. This is more of a hit piece on Tommy Franks and the military than Bush, Bush was not there just like in the NYT story last Monday.
You know, this story might be a bit more interesting if they had actually shown pictures of the mountains of Tora Bora and explained WHY you couldn't send ground troops in to "capture" terrorists. They weren't dealing with little tiny hills. They would have been slaughtered.
And do these reporters have an idea as to how many troops would have to be there to not only make a difference, but conduct force-protection?
We used Afghani fighters only because of political decisions made and mandated to our military. As a consequence, we had a lot of High Value Targets slip away into the night thanks entirely to our corrupt "allies."
We should have made Tora Bora an entirely U.S. operation. Instead, we bowed to political pressure, political correctness and rightfully reaped political insanity.
It's because of this political insanity that we have had to deal with Moqtada al-Sadr over and over and over again. It's because of this political insanity that only now are we unloading on Fallujah the way we should have from the start. And it's because of this political insanity that we are now seeing copycat abductions and threats of beheading in Afghanistan when it was previously limited to Iraq.
For tens of thousands of years, war was defined as all-out fighting and victory was defined as surrender by the enemy. So long as we lose sight of those simple things, the insanity we're seeing in three provinces in Iraq will forever dog our troops.
I love and respect President Bush. I will be voting for him on November 2nd. But, by God, he needs to pick a commander in Iraq who can take care of these jackals that keep nipping at our troops' heels.
I love the quote from Kerry during the Tora Bora opperation that basically praised our actions of using locals. I heard it while whatching some Sunday news show today, and the Dimwitt operative looked so very uncomfortable. It was priceless.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.