Status Update: Still Searching for bin Laden

(Dec. 22) -- More than eight years after al-Qaida's 9/11 attack on the United States, the terrorist group's leader, Osama bin Laden, remains at large, widely considered to be living in remote tribal areas of Pakistan. Most experts agree that the United States' best opportunity to kill or capture bin Laden came in the earliest days of the U.S.-led response in Afghanistan, when bin Laden fled from Kabul to Jalalabad to Tora Bora. Now, Peter Bergen, the author of "The Osama Bin Laden I Know," has written a definitive account of the U.S.-orchestrated attack on Tora Bora for The New Republic. Bin Laden's escape, the author writes, is "one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history."

What happened?

As Bergen tells it, it was "no accident bin Laden had chosen to retreat to Tora Bora." He knew the mountainous area intimately, having used it as a base to launch (U.S.-funded) attacks on the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan more than a decade earlier.

A small group of U.S. special forces tracked bin Laden to Tora Bora and in late November 2001 called in airstrikes, which inflicted massive damage on the al-Qaida forces. Meanwhile, in Washington, there were questions about an attack. Old CIA hands feared that bin Laden would try to escape over the mountains to Pakistan and doubted Pakistani troops could stop him. The small American team on the ground asked for 800 Army Rangers to flush al-Qaida out. That request was denied by Gen. Tommy Franks, Bergen reports, and Franks instead chose to enlist fractious Afghan leaders to help coordinate the attack with few U.S. troops.

Bergen raises several reasons, none of which he believes are satisfactory, for why more U.S. troops weren't deployed, including fear of casualties and a steadfast strategic belief in a "light footprint." Bergen writes that by late November, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld already was asking Franks to "look for options in Iraq," which switched the emphasis from Afghanistan at the campaign's most critical moment.

Bergen's critique, to be sure is a common one. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry voiced similar critiques in his unsuccessful presidential bid against then-incumbent President George W. Bush. During his campaign four years later, Sen. Barack Obama also chided the Bush administration for its failure to capture bin Laden; his opponent, Sen. John McCain, also faulted Bush.

But some believe that it's wrong to blame the Bush administration for bin Laden's escape. In a post on Foreign Policy magazine's Web site, Peter Feaver writes that the problem with Bergen's critique "is that it conveniently forgets that the reason bin Laden was 'trapped' in Tora Bora in the first place is that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks and CIA Director George Tenet defied both the conventional war plans and the conventional wisdom to mount the very light-footprint campaign that [many] are complaining about. If Rumsfeld and Franks and Tenet had used the conventional war plan that involved a heavy U.S. ground presence ... the invasion of Afghanistan would have happened some time in 2002, if then."

By then, bin Laden surely would have escaped.

But even if Feaver is right, there's no denying the Afghanistan campaign failed in at least one fundamental aspect: It did not result in the capture the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. Subsequently, bin Laden has remained elusive. The United States' reputed ally, Pakistan, recently rebuffed a request from Washington to crack down on a Taliban leader within its territory. And there is little indication, despite ongoing drone attacks, that the Obama administration is getting any closer to bin Laden -- a failure the president may well have to answer for come re-election time.

As for bin Laden, last we saw him was on a September 2007 video. Bergen writes, he "looked healthy and rested and confident, like a man who had been granted a new lease on life and was planning to make the most of it."