Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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Given the official statements of the Taliban (ie: that Osama Bin Laden didn't cause 9/11), what exactly is your proposal?

Taliban were protecting Bin Laden, period. Their official stance on the subject is clearly false, and they were willing to go to war to provide sanctuary to Bin Laden. The main worry was that any such delays at this point would give Bin Laden more room to get away (and Bin Laden did escape: all the way to Pakistan).

So if anything, we should have pursued Bin Laden even more vigorously back then. The Taliban were successful in buying enough time for him to hide with their false diplomacy.

We were at least successful in destroying the Al Qaeda training centers in Afghanistan (successfully located, blown up, and dismantled). Maybe these bases will return now that we've left Afghanistan, but we at least rendered them unable to train new terrorists for the last 20 years or so (and the new Taliban regime officially doesn't want to sanction any such training sites anymore. They've got an ISIS-K problem because of it too)

> So if anything, we should have pursued Bin Laden even more vigorously back then. The Taliban were successful in buying enough time for him to hide with their false diplomacy.

The problem was, real intelligence on the whereabouts of Bin Laden and Al Qaida in general was extremely rare. It was the vigorousness with which we pursued Al Qaida that helped really poison the relationship with local Afghans. You had local elites claiming that their rivals were somehow related to Al Qaida, which usually resulted in innocent people being taken into custody, tortured and/or killed. You had some legitimate leads (but often on mid-level operatives at best) that resulted in extremely risky special forces operations in remote and treacherous terrain - often resulting in both US and civilian casualties. You do this enough and people hate you, you've got an insurgency.

> We were at least successful in destroying the Al Qaeda training centers in Afghanistan (successfully located, blown up, and dismantled).

Real "training centers" were something of a white whale for the military in Afghanistan. A lot of the supposed Al Qaida "training" was taking place in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, in particularly inhospitable terrain. We'd run military operations in these remote Nuristani valleys, US troops would die, we'd almost never capture anything of value, and local people would slowly get fed up with their husbands/children/etc. getting accidentally blown up in airstrikes.

The Battle of Tora Bora, taking place in December 2001, has been subject to US Senate debate and discussion.

Bin Laden wrote his last will and testament on December 14, 2001, coinciding with the battle. The commandos who stormed Tora Bora were met with fierce resistance... not by Taliban, but by US Troops who refused to drop bigger bombs or deploy sufficient forces to attack the mountainous terrain.

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Donald Rumsfeld himself was worried that too many troops in Afghanistan at this time would fuel anti-American sentiment. Our problem was half-assing it in the early days of the war, when it mattered.

https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/S%20Prt%20111-3...

When the Afghan forces complied with the Taliban / Al Qaeda cease fire, there was nothing for US troops to do anymore but let Bin Laden go. There wasn't sufficient strength to attack.

Perhaps intelligence on the ground was insufficient to allow a bigger military footprint at the time. But given the next 20 years of fighting and insurrection, a bit more force used in December 2001 could have prevented a lot of the force we used later.

Yes, we narrowly missed Bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001. But "just send more troops" and "use bigger bombs" betrays a lack of familiarity with combat in the mountainous and inhospitable parts of Afghanistan. There's only so much air power can do in these places. It's incredibly hard to insert troops into places like these. You need to be able to medevac the WIA and KIA when things go wrong. There were no roads. In 2001, we were often literally using Russian maps. The history of these big mountain operations in Afghanistan is basically one of "let's send more troops/use bigger bombs/etc. etc." and it never got us anywhere. These operations pretty much always failed and we almost never got whoever we were going after.

> The history of these big mountain operations in Afghanistan is basically one of "let's send more troops/use bigger bombs/etc. etc." and it never got us anywhere.

Except in the Battle of Tora Bora, where the commanders on the ground said that the 100 troops deployed to the area were insufficient to push into a heavily fortified mountainous region.

And they're right. If those 100 troops pushed in, they would have been massacred. More troops absolutely would have helped at that time.

Plenty of airplanes dropped plenty of bombs. But the use of air-deployed land mines was not authorized, which could have also helped (GATOR mines self-detonate after 15 days, to minimize risks to the local population after battle. They are further battery-operated, and are designed to run out of battery in case the self-detonation fails)

The gloves were still on. We could have easily used more force in that battle, but decided against it.

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Traditionally, you need to outnumber your opponent 3 to 1 if you wish to lay siege to an enemy in their home territory. At some point, just raw manpower is what you need.

As you said: we dropped plenty of bombs in that battle, but bombs aren't boots on the ground. You need people there to know if the bombs are in fact hitting their mark.

You're getting fixated on the specifics of Tora Bora. Zoom out and look at the other big mountain operations over the following 15 years; you'll hear similar excuses "we needed this technology/we needed more men at this spot." With that context it's easy to see that Tora Bora probably wouldn't have been a success even with GATOR mines or more men.

We are literally talking about a battle that scared Osama Bin Laden so much that he wrote his last will and testament during the battle.

Bin Laden thought he was going to die in that battle. We were close: just a little bit more would have done it.

Sure, we didn't know how close we were until afterwards. But when you consider what we did accomplish with just 100 boots on the ground + air support, it really makes you wonder what we could have done with 800 or 2000 men instead.

I'm not sure this conversation is going anywhere because (again, with context you'd realize this) narrowly missing the target by a day or two was par for the course with these types of engagements.

If you're interested in learning more, I'd strongly recommend Wes Morgan's excellent book "The Hardest Place."

agree with you, maybe they tried to protect Bin Laden.

But there are multiple questions which should be answered:

1. are we 110% sure that Bin Laden ordered the attack? I am not trying to defend him, but you know there are many organizations who can do that attack, including multiple organizations funded by CIA (don't forget Bin Laden was initially funded by CIA), maybe government could prevent attack but didn't prevent, because they were also interested in natural resources of Afghanistan?

2. Are we 120% sure we can capture and execute Bin Laden without civilian fatalities? if civilian fatalities can't be avoided, did we have numbers in mind, how many people will get killed?

3. Why western media didn't give enough voice to Taliban at that time? If enough people listened to them, maybe US could make public negotiation and if negotiation fails publicly, then everyone would definitely know Taliban is to blame for this war. In reality, US just said, we are super power, we can do whatever we want.

4. Are we sure war wasn't lobbied? You know, US sells lots of weapons, they sometimes need to test, are we sure that war wasn't lobbied? where did 2T$ go? Do you think all were eaten by corrupt Afghan government? even 10% of it would be 200B which would create 100 billionaires.

I am not defending Taliban or Bin Laden, just showing how decisions made was wrong and I still doubt US can make right decision. Now Afghanistan has lots of uneducated people, who lost their families, children. Do you think they would just forgive? Who can guarantee that they won't come over to US and start killing people?

> 1. are we 110% sure that Bin Laden ordered the attack?

Bin Laden attacked the USA in the 90s (the original twin tower attacks). Then issued a Fatwa declaring a Holy War against the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fataw%C4%81_of_Osama_bin_Laden).

Bin Laden's writings on 9/11 are well published, even on Western Media (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver).

There's no doubt in anybody's mind that Bin Laden was involved in 9/11.

> 2. Are we 120% sure we can capture and execute Bin Laden without civilian fatalities?

Of course not. We would have preferred for the Afghan government (aka: the Taliban) to cooperate with us. But they didn't.

> 3. Why western media didn't give enough voice to Taliban at that time?

We have Bin Laden's writings published and the Taliban's writings published. What exactly is missing from their argument that you want published?

> 4. Are we sure war wasn't lobbied?

Oh, Cheney was definitely a Warmonger. But that doesn't make the Afghan War a wrong move.

> Bin Laden attacked the USA in the 90s (the original twin tower attacks).

Thought it was the "other guy"..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramzi_Yousef

> are we 110% sure that Bin Laden ordered the attack?

Bin Laden made a video in '04 regarding the US presidential election at the time in which he implicitly claimed responsibility.

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