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.
"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."
Nonsense. Operation Anaconda was the effort to get bin Laden in Tora Bora. We did not have the troops in Afghanistan and we had no way of getting them up into those mountains in time to catch bin Laden. Scheuer did not tell us anything we did not already know about the Afghans.
There is no comparison between Tora Bora and Fallujah. Tora Bora occurred shortly after the war began in Afghanistan and we never had the thousands and thousands of troops in Afghanistan that would have been needed to surround Tora Bora. It took us many many months to transfer our troops and equipment from the USA to Kuwait and then into Iraq for the war.
The ground around Fallujah is flat and open. The land in Tora Bora is very difficult mountainous terrain.
There is no comparison between Tora Bora and Fallujah, yet even though American troops were surrounding Fallujah, al-Zarqawi escaped from Fallujah just as surely as did bin Laden did from Tora Bora. American troops in Tora Bora would probably not have kept bin Laden from escaping from Tora Bora.
Scheuer is a loser blowhard. I will trust the judgement of General Franks before I will trust that sniveling appeaser.
If the objective was to kill or capture Bin Laden or at least so disrupt his operations so that he could not launch any further terrorists attacks on the scale such as those perpetrated on 911, then we have succeeded very well. That was the reason for launching the attack on Afghanistan, not to overthrow the Taliban or to kill bin Laden.
"Scheuer's point is that we could have done better, and we could be doing better."
Scheuer is a Monday Morning Quarterback of the vilest sort. In a perfect world, everything would be perfect, but we do not live in a perfect world. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough.
If we would have waited to attack Afghanistan until after we had airlifted in the thousands of troops and tons of equipment needed to surround Tora Bora, then bin Laden may well have been long gone lone before we were ready to attack him.
If we had gone to the big footprint model of using all US troops to carry out the war in Afghanistan, we may well have provoked a negative response from the non-Taliban population of Afghanistan and become bogged down in a long war along the lines of that which did the Soviets in.
"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?"
I've read the transcripts of Scheuer's two interviews posted on this thread and Frum's article about Imperial Hubris. If you are not able to mount an intelligent defense of the appeaser, Scheuer, in your own words, admit defeat and wander off with your tail between your legs.