Franks Not Being Frank
By Jesse and Ezra do a great job of taking apart Tommy Franks’ NYT op-ed today. Franks’ editorial is both self-serving and self-indicting; he claims that there was no proof Osama was located at Tora Bora, but that many other Al Qaeda leaders were. Even if capturing Osama shouldn’t be the primary focus of the War on Terror, capturing and killing members of Al Qaeda certainly should be. Thus, there is still no defense for the relatively loose encirclement of Tora Bora.
Moreover, Franks makes the utterly implausible argument that Afghan forces were better equipped for the attack than Americans, because they knew the terrain. Franks is clearly being disingenous here; the Afghani warlord forces were no match for trained Al Qaeda cadres, regardless of where they fought. Only US special and light forces could have reliable pried Al Qaeda out in a reasonable period of time, and they weren’t used quickly enough. This was no secret by the time of the Tora Bora operation; Afghani warlords did quite well against Taliban forces, and very poorly against Al Qaeda itself. The attachment to Rumsfeld’s concept of revolutionary war probably also played a part in the American failure. We expected precision guided munitions to have a much greater effect than they actually did, and Al Qaeda positions that we repeatedly hit were not destroyed.
Franks knows this, because he revised the order of battle for the next large operation, ANACONDA, which relied much more heavily on US forces to dislodge Al Qaeda. Stephen Biddle has a nice history of the campaign here. Long story short, the US learned a lot from the Tora Bora campaign, which is good, but the defects in American tactics should have been apparent even before the Tora Bora operation.
Finally, Franks makes an almost comical effort to connect the War on Terror with Operation Iraqi Freedom. Tommy, we know; Iraq is a crucial part of the War on Terror NOW. The problem is that it didn’t have to be, and wouldn’t have been but for the bizarre desire of this administration to unite all of our enemies against us at the same time.