Scheuer notes that the Afghan warlords will take anybody's money - but will breach contract, as their troops did at Tora Bora, when their objectives don't match with those they are purportedly working for.
In short, the CIA had knowledge that we could trust our Afghan allies only as far as we could throw them, but this knowledge was ignored, with the results being that Osama, if he was there, and a large portion of Al Qaeda operatives at Tora Bora escaped through a cordon manned by our Afghan auxiliaries.
So it's not really a case of Monday morning quarterbacking as much as it is a case of trying to tell the coach on Saturday that certain members of his team won't be playing out of the coach's playbook, and then getting defamed for his efforts when he makes it public that we haven't been utilizing our own intelligence product when planning our activities.
"results being that Osama, if he was there, and a large portion of Al Qaeda operatives at Tora Bora escaped through a cordon manned by our Afghan auxiliaries."
And we could have got 250,000 American troops into those mountains in a couple of days and had them strategically located so as to block every little goat trail out of Tora Bora, exactly how? We used the best option available to us at the time. As you may have noticed, we managed to overthrow the Taliban in a very short time with a minimum of American casualties using the tactics we used.
It is easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. Scheuer's job was to get bin Laden and he didn't do it. He has no standing to critique others, given his track record.
"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.