THE ROVING EYE How Bush blew it in Tora
Bora By Pepe Escobar
"And
again, I don't know where he is. I - I'll repeat what I
said. I truly am not that concerned about him." -
President George W Bush, March 13, 2002
"Gosh, I don't think I ever said I'm not
worried about Osama bin Laden. That's kind of one of
those exaggerations." - President
Bush, October 13
"Now my opponent is
throwing out the wild claim that he knows where bin
Laden was in the fall of 2001 and that our military
passed up the chance to get him in Tora Bora. This is an
unjustified criticism of our military commanders in the
field." - President Bush, October
25
So where is the October surprise? The US
presidential election is less than a week away, and
still he refuses a great Hollywood-style entrance - or a
Lazarus-like resurrection from his cave. The whole world
is asking: where is Osama bin Laden?
Don't ask
the Pakistanis. "No one knows where bin Laden is,"
Pakistan's Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan said
last Sunday. So maybe we should ask the Pentagon.
According to a number of leaks by Pentagon officials,
bin Laden is hiding in South Waziristan, in the
Pakistani tribal areas, not far from the Toba Kakar
mountain range in Baluchistan province. Khan seemed to
be startled by this revelation: "We are getting in touch
with them [the Pentagon] to clarify this matter." Don't
ask the Pakistani military. Major General Shaukat Sultan
has said they have been pursuing all of the Pentagon's
leads, to no avail. So maybe we should ask Pakistani
President General Pervez Musharraf. In a recent
interview with NBC he referred to "some broad
indications" to proclaim he was "reasonably sure" that
bin Laden is alive and absolutely sure he would be
captured or killed. But he "didn't know his location".
Musharraf also said that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) is working "very closely" with the
Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) in the hunt
for bin Laden and al-Qaeda. So maybe the ISI knows
something Musharraf doesn't. ISI officials in Karachi
told Asia Times Online correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad
"they have no clue" where both bin Laden and his No 2,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, might be. But they reconfirmed they
are in Afghanistan. Other sources in Peshawar, very
close to the tribal areas, told this correspondent bin
Laden has been "for months" on the Afghan side of the
border, because the Pakistani tribal areas "are infested
with FBI and ISI operatives".
According to
Musharraf, "there's no pressure" on him by the White
House and the Pentagon to find bin Laden. "What
pressure? he asked in his NBC interview. "Their
[al-Qaeda] leadership, a few high level, and others mid
and low level have been arrested - then we have attacked
them in the mountains. We have attacked three of their
very big sanctuaries in the valleys in the South
Waziristan agency in tribal areas - but they're on the
run now. And they're in smaller groups. Maybe there are
a few more concentrations, which we don't know. But they
are on the run, as far as al-Qaeda is concerned, they're
on their own, surely."
Trekking in Tora
Bora So bin Laden won't surface as an October
surprise. He won't be captured and exhibited
"Saddam-in-chains" style as another Bush hunting trophy.
Funny, when we think that he should have surfaced as a
November surprise - way back in 2001.
On
November 17, 2001, as the Taliban regime was
self-disintegrating, Osama bin Laden, his family and a
convoy of 25 Toyota Land Cruisers left Jalalabad in
eastern Afghanistan headed toward the mountains of Tora
Bora. In late November, surrounded by his fiercest and
most loyal Yemeni mujahideen in a cold Tora Bora cave,
bin Laden delivered a stirring speech. One of his
fighters, Abu Bakar, later captured by Afghan
mujahideen, said bin Laden exhorted them to "hold your
positions firm and be ready for martyrdom. I'll be
visiting you again very soon."
A few days later,
around what would probably have been November 30, bin
Laden, along with four Yemeni mujahideen, left Tora Bora
toward the village of Parachinar, in the Pakistani
tribal areas. They walked undisturbed all the way - and
then disappeared forever.
By the time the
merciless American B-52 bombing raids were about to
begin, bin Laden had already left Tora Bora - as a
number of Afghan mujahideen confirmed to Asia Times
Online at the time. They said they had seen him on the
other side of the frontline in late November. Hazrat
Ali, the warlord and then so-called minister of "law and
order" in the Eastern Shura (traditional decision-making
council) in Afghanistan, was outsourced by the Pentagon
to go after bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Tora Bora. He
bagged a handful of suitcases full of cash. He put on a
show for the cameras. And significantly, he was barely
in touch with the few Special Forces on the ground.
The crucial point is that while bin Laden was
already in Pakistan, General Tommy Franks at US Central
Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, was being
directed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to
concentrate on toppling Saddam Hussein. According to Bob
Woodward's Plan of Attack, on "December 1, a
Saturday, Rumsfeld sent through the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff a Top Secret planning order to
Franks asking him to come up with the commander's
estimate to build the base of a new Iraq war plan. In
two pages the order said Rumsfeld wanted to know how
Franks would conduct military operations to remove
Saddam from power, eliminate the threat of any possible
weapons of mass destruction, and choke off his suspected
support of terrorism."
Also in early December,
Pir Baksh Bardiwal, the man responsible for intelligence
operations in eastern Afghanistan, was absolutely
puzzled: why didn't the Pentagon block all the obvious
exit trails from Tora Bora, when all of Hazrat Ali's
mujahideen, paid by the US, knew them by heart? Only a
few Arab al-Qaeda fighters were captured in Tora Bora -
after bin Laden had left (later they were sent to
Guantanamo, along with hundreds of Afghan bystanders).
Most of the al-Qaeda fighters that remained in Tora Bora
died in battle, as "martyrs", buried under the rubble
caused by bunker-buster bombs. As far as the American
military was concerned, Pir Baksh was adamant: "Al-Qaeda
escaped right out from under their feet."
So it
was a major Pentagon blunder. It was a major
Rumsfeld-Franks blunder. It was a major White House
blunder. And there were two reasons for it: 1) The
Pentagon outsourced the war in eastern Afghanistan to
the wrong warlords, who were collecting suitcases full
of cash with one hand and spreading disinformation with
the other. 2) The White House's and the Pentagon's
attention were already directed toward toppling Saddam.
This all amounts to Senator John Kerry being
fundamentally correct when he charges on the campaign
trail that Bush blew it in Tora Bora. This is not a
"wild claim", as Bush puts it: it's a serious charge
that debunks the whole myth of Bush as a strong and
resolute commander-in-chief of the "war on terror".
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THE ROVING EYE 
