At the recent Taste in Ferguson event organizers set up a table with 13 flowers, a quiet memorial to the last American soldiers to die in Afghanistan. Their deaths were a bitter ending to a long, frustrating conflict, and Congress is rightly holding hearings on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it wasn’t President Biden that lost the war in Afghanistan. It was President Bush, twenty years ago, by allowing Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to escape. We’ve been dealing with the consequences ever since.
We invaded Afghanistan for one reason: to destroy al Qaeda, to kill or capture bin Laden and every al Qaeda terrorist we could. To make them pay for killing 3,000 Americans and send a warning to terrorists everywhere. Instead, bin Laden and hundreds of al Qaeda fighters were able to escape. Al Qaeda spread around the world. It took us another decade to find and kill bin Laden.
Much of the world viewed it as a victory for the terrorists and a defeat for the United States. Bush promised we would hunt down and kill bin Laden and al Qaeda and we failed. al Qaeda was able to strike our homeland and get away with it. In Afghanistan al Qaeda went head to head with the largest, most powerful military in the world and held its own before slipping away to Pakistan.
Except, al Qaeda didn’t go head to head with the world’s largest military. The US Military was barely present during the invasion of Afghanistan. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, had a new theory of warfare. With our technological superiority we didn’t have to rely on large deployments of troops. Instead we could win with our superior air power and a minimal number of “boots on the ground.” 9/11 gave Rumsfeld an opportunity to prove his approach. Instead of the U.S. Military invading Afghanistan, Rumsfeld chose to rely on Afghani militia fighters supported by our airpower, with just a few thousand US troops on the ground.
As the fighting progressed Bin Laden and his troops retreated to Tora Bora, a mountainous area along the border of Pakistan. By some estimates 90% of all of al Qaeda was at Tora Bora, as many as four to six hundred al Qaeda fighters. The US had a unique opportunity to kill bin Laden and virtually wipe al Qaeda off the map. But less than 100 US Commandos were deployed at Tora Bora. You read that right, less than 100 US troops, along a thousand Afghani militia. The United States, with the largest standing army in the world, only deployed .008% of its available forces in one of the most important battles in US history.
The Commando commander, not trusting the Afghani militia, repeatedly asked for significantly more US troops to seal off the Pakistan border to prevent al Qaeda’s escape. The requests were all denied. After several days of fighting the Afghani militia called a cease fire, allowing bin Laden and his fighters to escape to Pakistan, exactly as the commander had feared.
We had a once in a lifetime opportunity to destroy al Qaeda, to kill or capture its leadership and most of its fighters. To show terrorists around the world what would happen if they attacked our homeland. And we failed. Bin Laden and hundreds of al Qaeda fighters got away. They killed 3,000 Americans and got away with it. Not because our military wasn’t up to the task. Because Donald Rumsfeld was more interested in proving his theory right than in making absolutely sure we destroyed al Qaeda.
By any measure this is one of the greatest strategic miscalculations in US military history. And when it happened, we as a nation barely talked about it. It was just too painful to acknowledge and doing so would have even further helped al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts. But now the war is over; it’s time for a reckoning on this terrible failure of leadership. We have these abstract conversations about the danger of idealogues and the potential cost to our country. Donald Rumsfeld was an idealogue, more interested in proving his ideology right than he was in destroying bin Laden. The cost to our country was the global spread of al Qaeda, almost three thousand US lives and more than a trillion dollars.
So yes, hold Biden accountable for his handling of the pullout from Afghanistan. But more importantly, we need to hold Bush and Rumsfeld accountable for letting bin Laden and al Qaeda get away twenty years ago.