"CIA had knowledge that we could trust our Afghan allies only as far as we could throw them,"
This is not some top-secret information that the CIA had; this is common knowledge about the Afghan tribes and has been known in the West since at least the Afghan Wars with the British.
It is not as if there were a bunch of different options we had up in Tora Bora. There was no way that we would have been able to get thousands of US troops up into those mountains in short order in position to block any escape of small groups of militants moving by night on small trails.
What, you mean like we tried to do during Operation Anaconda?
Wrong answer - the military started applying lessons learned during Anaconda. The point Scheuer made was that those lessons were already known.
If you've been following the battle of Fallujah, you'll have seen that it's American troops providing the security cordon, not locals. Different location, same lesson, right answer.
That we didn't have the ground assets in place to provide the security cordon ourselves at Tora Bora is a direct result of the way we fought the war in Afghanistan. If the objective was to overthrow the Taleban, it has been, I think, an unqualified success. If the objective was to kill or capture Bin Laden, given his recent 'press release', it is, to this point, a failure. Scheuer's point is that we could have done better, and we could be doing better.
If you want to call that Monday morning quarterbacking, so be it. Since you don't appear to be willing to avail yourself of the actual material under discussion (Imperial Hubris), could you tell me why I'm obliged to devote a good portion of my time to elucidating the matter for you?
Scheuer's job was to get bin Laden and he didn't do it.
You're killing me.