By spring 2002, less than a year after the initial U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, President George W. Bush decided to pull most of America’s Special Operations Forces and CIA paramilitary operatives off the hunt for Osama bin Laden so they could be redeployed for a possible war in Iraq. I’ve written about this before, but I did not know the extent to which the war in Iraq contributed to our loss of bin Laden until I read this piece from the Washington Post: ---------
The American campaign [in Afghanistan] was conducted primarily from the air. Despite the pleas from CIA operatives, U.S. officials were reluctant to send in ground troops to flush out bin Laden. They told officers on the ground in Afghanistan that Pakistani troops would help them, cutting off bin Laden if he tried to cross into their country.
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First, why would the Bush administration rely on a foreign government to capture Osama bin Laden, only weeks after 9/11? Second, of all the foreign governments to rely on, why would it be Pakistan, the country that during the seven-year period leading up to 9/11 was actively funding, arming, and advising Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban regime that harbored Osama bin Laden? But it gets worse:
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But in early December, over lunch at his palace in Islamabad, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made it clear to U.S. officials that he did not want to commit troops unless the Americans would help transport them to the border by air. According to Wendy Chamberlin, then the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Musharraf told her and Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command: “I’d put the troops in trucks, but that’ll take weeks. Could you give me air support?”
Franks would not comment for this article, but according to Chamberlin he was noncommittal about air support. Only later did she learn that the general was already “planning for Iraq,” she said. “Even if he could have helped out, he was already starting to have to reshuffle.”
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