Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

One wonders if Franks is so out front defending Bush on this one because Franks himself is implicated in the distracted hypothesis, given that we know he was already working on Iraq at the Tora Bora stage. For those who haven't see this link, it captures it very nicely:

http://www.topdog04.com/000781.html

Strange and wierd as it is, there is no sign of life from Bid Laden other than crackily audio tapes of the past 3 years.
So, in essence, we were not sure he is alive.
Then in final week before election, a video surfaces, 1st in over 3 years.

Funny, is it not; if it were not so sad.
Most should be asking:
1.) so he is alive after all, we failed at Tora Bora.
2.) Bush does not really care about Osama, captured or dead.
3.) The tape is sent as election fortifier to let American people know "I am still here".
4.) Is the tape really a plus for Republicans?
Showing failure; or "yes", you need our protection still.
5.) Is the tape a October surprise? benefits whom?

NOTE: Many were expecting a capture of Osama as a October surprise; is a video just as good?

Yes, we'd all like to get Osama. And, yes, he's just a figure-head when the more important enemy is a world-wide network of Islamofascists this is deeply ingraining themselves into non-Islamic societies, passing themselves off as non-Islamic in nature and custom. We all forget that it's not just Osama, that it's not just a recent rise in Islamic radicalism, but a network of cooperating organizations and individuals that are operating right within our midst, a conspiracy that is many years in the making, spans the globe, and has its foundations throughout the Islamic world, and sponsored and abetted by Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other militant Islamic governments. Tora Bora is a side-show. If Osama would have been captured or destroyed (if he was even there), it would have solved nothing in the fight that we face...and the fight that we are ill-equipped to win.

Follow-on: for those of you who want some insight into the "real" fight before us, please review: http://www.rotten.com/library/conspiracy/al-qaeda-and-the-assassins/outreach

"One wonders if Franks is so out front defending Bush on this one because Franks himself is implicated in the distracted hypothesis,"

I suspect Franks is out front because it's his decisions that are being questioned. One wonders why the various critics are pretending they're not second-guessing uniformed decision-makers at CentCom when they obviously are.

"While more than 1,200 U.S. Marines sat at an abandoned air base in the desert 80 miles away . . ."

Wow. A whole battalion, eh? That'd sew up the perimeter all right. Clueless.

Isn't NonPartisan surplusage?

Cecil, the second-guessing is of the decision by bush and the civilian leadership to: a.) reject assistance by NATO (imagine if we had NATO troops at Tora Bora instead of warlord troops); b.) confusing the objective (the objective, in the state-centric way of the backbone administration, became Taliban-specific, rather than Taliban and AQ); and c.) therefore not tasking sufficient troops for a mission that had 90% support of the american public.

Now, if on top of that, more soldiers were available in the theatre and not used, that's a problem too, but the criticism goes higher than Franks....

Howard,

Show me the NATO troops. More importantly, show me how they were going to get there. Trying to move a large military force into Afghanistan (where everything has to be flown in, over vast distances and marginally friendly nations, with limited airfields) is difficult. Getting them to Tora Bora, and keeping them in supply, is more so. It's also forbidding terrain, and a lousy climate.

Franks was in charge of the AOR, and he's supposed to request the forces he needs to do the job. If he requested them and was denied, that's one issue. Otherwise, he's clearly the one on the hot seat.

They maybe should have tried harder to get in more US troops--I don't know. But there's no way they could have gotten enough to make an airtight cordon in the time available. Using local troops was a very effective way of getting more troops there fast, and there still weren't enough to seal the area, even if all their loyalties had been undivided. (And the news article pretending a battalion of Marines would have made the difference is just ludicrous.) If they'd taken the time to mass more troops, would fewer of the Al Qaeda types have gotten away? Or more?

Armchair strategists should realize they're second-guessing operational decisions of a combatant commander in the middle of a war. (And let's face it, three months from the 9/11 to bombing the last holdouts in Afghanistan isn't too shabby.) Those who want to apportion blame should perhaps first submit their own complete operations order, and let the professionals pick it apart. I doubt they'd come off too well in the exchange.

Cecil Turner suggests that we are second-guessing the decisions of a combatant commander in the middle of a war. But there's a more fundamental thing we're second-guessing.

We're second-guessing the appointment of Franks to do these jobs. It appears he wasn't up to it.

And perhaps the biggest thing is that he should have known he couldn't do the jobs assigned with the resources available, and he should have resigned. The accepted way for the army to refuse a ludicrous assignment is for a string of generals to resign rather than take command to do that job.

Franks accepted the assignment against his better judgement, according to various generals who prefer to remain nameless. They say he should have resigned, and he didn't.

Bush chose Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld chose Franks because he was the yes-man who'd agree to do what he said. It's Bush's responsibility.

Cecil, admittedly, it's tough living in a democracy when your decisions can be second-guessed, but c'est la vie.

As for the specifics: look, i'm not a military planner. here's the simple fact: NATO, for the first time in its history, offered assistance for an action outside of Europe. We said thanks, but no thanks. We didn't say, jeez, the logistics seem too difficult. We didn't say, well, you're not offering us enough troops. We said we'll take care of this ourselves.

And the way we chose to take care of this ourselves was through insufficient american military personnel due to a fear of casualties (it wasn't until the great iraqi adventure that the backbone administration decided that the american public was no longer casualty-averse) supplemented by outsourcing the shortage to local warlords.

That's a failure at the top, and if, in the course of addressing that failure, we need to say that tommy franks failed too, fine, tommy franks failed too. He's already retired, though: the people whom we can still hold accountable are bush and rumsfeld, and tomorrow we will see if they are.

Cecil, i also meant to note (but hit "post" too quickly) that at the precise time of the Tora Bora battle, Franks was busy drawing up plans for the iraqi cakewalk....

"We're second-guessing the appointment of Franks to do these jobs. It appears he wasn't up to it."

Yeah, taken as a whole, that whole "outsourced" Afghan campaign was pretty crappy. And three weeks is waaayyy too long to run over Iraq. If this is a sample of Franks detracting, I guess I can stop wondering why the more level-headed don't take it up.

"As for the specifics: look, i'm not a military planner."

Howard, I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but that was fairly obvious.

"NATO, for the first time in its history, offered assistance for an action outside of Europe. We said thanks, but no thanks. We didn't say, jeez, the logistics seem too difficult."

The problems were all logistics. It wasn't a matter of not having enough troops (nor do I believe fear of casualties was the decider, though we certainly have been guilty of that in the past)--scaring up a few brigades wasn't a major problem--getting them to Tora Bora was. NATO added nothing to the Afghan campaign. They have few deployable troops, and generally rely on the US to deploy them. Now, if you could have gotten them to volunteer for Iraq . . .

One article: BUSH'S LAST YEAR by James Fallows in Atlantic Monthly.

Paints an unflattering picture of the urgency attached to catching UBL and his henchmen.

"at the precise time of the Tora Bora battle, Franks was busy drawing up plans for the iraqi cakewalk...."

If you could make a realistic improvement in either plan, even with the benefit of hindsight, I'd allow that as a reasonable criticism. But I don't think you can.

Since Bush is supposedly our "CEO President", I'll just say what I would expect to hear in a business envoronment:

"I don't care about excuses. I care about results."

Tommy Franks was given pretty much a blank check and he came up empty. Failure is not respected in the boardroom.

And tomorrow, the Board of Directors meets to decide on whether we need a new CEO. Hopefully, they'll be looking at results and not excuses.

Sorry Mrs. Patient, if you think you could have done the surgery in a better way so that your husband lived, maybe YOU could tell me how to do that.

Hah, didn't think you could.

You know, surgery's a tricky business, what with all the blood and the patient's complications you know...

Athenian democracy showed -- too severely no doubt -- that democracies can hold generals accountable: they executed those who had failed to rescue the drowning after the battle of Arginousae near the end of the Peloponnesian War.

Well someone else has pointed out that NATO offered troop support before we invaded Afghanistan, so I will merely ask how many paths out of Tora Bora had to be covered. Hint: You didn't have to cover the entire perimeter.

Cecil, i don't buy the logistics argument for a second (i'm not sure why you think it's such a big deal; as many have noted, we got our troops over there, and lots of different media outletes got people over there, and we could have figured out how to get NATO troops over there too; i'll also note that here was a mission supported by 90% of Americans and by many all around the world - of course we could have solved the logistical issues. it's not like the mission was to mars), nor do i buy the not many troops. The Afghan warlords didn't add many troops either.

The notion that it wasn't distracting to anyone to be tasked with planning a new mission while the previous mission isn't complete doesn't require a military planner to debunk.

And as for what i would have done differently, i should have thought i already made that clear: i would have committed more troops to Afghanistan (i'll leave out what country they came from) and i wouldn't have invaded iraq, thereby shifting valuable resources, including management time.

"Sorry Mrs. Patient, if you think you could have done the surgery in a better way so that your husband lived,"

Oh, we lost in Afghanistan? Better tell that to the Taliban, they seem to be missing their country. Bin Laden seemed to be bummed about an election there also.

"Cecil, i don't buy the logistics argument for a second"

Yes, I know. Which is why you can't come up with an improvement to Franks's plan that'd survive a laugh test at CentCom. (Hint: NATO troops wouldn't.)

"The notion that it wasn't distracting to anyone to be tasked with planning a new mission while the previous mission isn't complete doesn't require a military planner to debunk."

Well, then, you should be able to point out an error it caused. Or even just an error.

"Oh, we lost in Afghanistan? Better tell that to the Taliban, they seem to be missing their country. Bin Laden seemed to be bummed about an election there also. Posted by Cecil Turner?

When your guys are still being killed, kidnapped, and beheaded, most reality based people would say that you are still at war.

"When your guys are still being killed, kidnapped, and beheaded, most reality based people would say that you are still at war."

"Reality-based," eh? By that metric we're always at war. But I don't think it really matters in this case, because most of us will agree we're still at war. It's the "losing" bit that's hard to credit.

Well, Cecil, it would really be nice, since you're so convinced that getting NATO troops, or even more American troops, to Afghanistan was such a logistical impossibility, if you could adduce at least one legitimate reason why other than trying to sound like a centcom insider.

Let's see: planning error number one for the iraqi war. The failure to plan for the postwar (you do know the "to come" slide story, don't you?)

Planning error number two: assuming that defeating the taliban was our mission in Afghanistan, thereby not completing our mission.

i could go on, but this is getting circular. If you really believe, cecil, that we live in the best of all worlds, i'm not going to talk you and your close personal friends at centcom out of it.

"Well, Cecil, it would really be nice, since you're so convinced that getting NATO troops, or even more American troops, to Afghanistan was such a logistical impossibility"

Hmm. Don't recall saying that, Howard. Said it was hard to get folks to *Tora Bora*. And, of course, every person sent into Afghanistan was competing with others for airlift space (with the exception of that Marine unit, which helicoptered in off their boat IIRC).

So, would it have been smarter to send in a couple regiments of Marines, or the 10th Mountain Division, instead of those Special Forces and CIA types? Dunno. But it'd have been a *lot* slower. And a lot more folks would likely have been killed before the end. Would that have been a good thing?

"i could go on, but this is getting circular."

It's a circle-something. If I may be so bold, I'd recommend staying with issues like "wrong mission." (Even if that requires laying out what you think the real mission should have been.) "Adding NATO troops" or other operational advice requires some knowledge of military planning, and weighing the tradeoffs (which are significant).

Even a strong Kerry supporter (like me) may want to cut BushCo a little slack here. This was only 6-7 weeks since the start of the war. We accomplished a hellava lot by working with the warlords, at little expense.

But you may need to call in Dick Cheney to bust these military guys. A guy wrote in the WSJ today, he was 2nd in command at Tora Bora. He basically said we didn't get Osama (if he was there) because we had to be sensitive to our Afghan and Pakistani allies. We couldn't just throw a lot our troops into the border region without antagonizing our newfound friends. So we let them handle it. He also said our mission was to defeat the Taliban and AQ, not to capture one man.

Who knew in Nov. 2001 that this was the LAST we would see of Osama for 3 years???

But having said that, I don't think Kerry is out of line for saying that we blew it, starting at the top. This was a Rumsfeld operation. He could have provided more forces, with more Americans at the tip of the spear, if the mission was to get Osama, a mission the Afghanis were not that interested in.

Cecil wrote: "It's the 'losing' bit that's hard to credit."

Cecil, when our hand-picked leader controls not much more than a single city, when he can't even count on his own troops to protect him, when the drug trade has risen to new heights and 50% of the GDP of Afghanistan is coming from that money, when that money has corrupted matters to the point that the drug lords are openly boasting that they control the local police and government, when the warlords have regained control of much of the country, when the Taliban is resurgent in southern Iraq, and when there is no sign of improvement in any of these issues, then yes, I would say we are losing.

Cecil wrote: "It's the 'losing' bit that's hard to credit."

Cecil, when our hand-picked leader controls not much more than a single city, when he can't even count on his own troops to protect him, when the drug trade has risen to new heights and 50% of the GDP of Afghanistan is coming from that money, when that money has corrupted matters to the point that the drug lords are openly boasting that they control the local police and government, when the warlords have regained control of much of the country, when the Taliban is resurgent in southern Iraq, and when there is no sign of improvement in any of these issues, then yes, I would say we are losing.

Oh, and Cecil? Absent any evidence of credentials of your own, it would seem to me that the title of "armchair strategist" could just as easily be applied to you, particularly since you've demonstrated not a single iota of any particular knowledge of strategy, tactics, or operations.

It may be true that Bush thought that the Taliban was our enemy. The plain fact is that the Taliban did not arrange the Cole bombing, the bombing in Africa, or 9/11, bin Laden did. He is the enemy. He and his web of financial connections and henchmen. We get bin Laden and we start unraveling the network piece by piece. Kill bin Laden, and we have an easier task of finding the money.

Second, the Taliban is still in business.

Third, the Rumsfeld doctrine was tested in Afghanistan and the failure to accomplish the mission showed either that Rumsfeld was wrong, or that Franks was incompetent. We not only didn't catch a mass murderer, we not only let him go, we did not learn anything from the disaster.

Fourth: the money. We could have bought Pakistan for the price of our Iraq adventure. Bin Laden would have come with the territory. Bush is incompetent.

Raygunnot said, "This was a Rumsfeld operation. He could have provided more forces, with more Americans at the tip of the spear, if the mission was to get Osama, a mission the Afghanis were not that interested in."

But the mission was a success! Therefore the mission was not to get Osama.

And it makes sense the mission should not have been to get Osama. For all we knew Osama might have left afghanistan at any time. In six weeks he could be anywhere. As it turns out we think he stayed in afghanistan. Maybe he thought of himself as the bait that could bring us in there, so they could treat us like they did the russians. But he didn't have to stay. If the mission had been to get him, he could have made us look stupid by, say, showing up briefly in france just after we went in.

The mission should not have been to destroy Osama's training camps. Osama had two types of training. One was for spies and saboteurs, the other was for infantry. The infantry course used edited US Marine manuals, and that's the one that needed the big training camps. How important were Osama's marines? Not much. They were a convenient target, butif we'd ignored them they couldn't have accomplished much. Marines with no artillery, armor, or air support. As it turned out they fought well but it would have been many years before they could become a force that could topple an arab government. The CIA-type training courses could be set up anywhere.

So what was the mission? I contend that the mission was to do something that would look to the american people like we were doing something. People were upset about 9/11 and wanted to see results. We got highly visible results. Lots of airstrikes. More media people getting footage than US soldiers. We drove Saddam out of afghanistan, into rural pakistan. We got the Taliban guys to change their name. We killed a lot of people and didn't count how many. Liberals complained about the cluster bombs. (Apparently designed to leave a lot of unexploded bomblets around, 10% is a lot to leave unexploded by accident.) Liberals complained about the starvation. Etc. All of which convirmed that we were doing something important and effective.

Clearly, the most important mission in afghanistan was PR. The fewer troops used, the better. The less money spent, the better. If Osama hung around and got captured or killed that would be great, but we couldn't really hope for it. If afghanistan wound up with a liberal democracy that would be great too but we couldn't expect that. Mostly, we gave half the afghan warlords weapons and money and bribed them to go after the other half, and they put on a good show. When the show was over the survivors realigned however they chose.

The show's over but the critics are still arguing about what it meant.

"I would say we are losing."
"Clearly, the most important mission in afghanistan was PR. The fewer troops used, the better. "

Gents, if those are examples of "reality-based," I'd suggest you need to change your trademark.

"The mission should not have been to destroy Osama's training camps."

This is the closest thing to sensible in the lot. But saying what the mission shouldn't have been, without saying *what it should have been,* isn't terribly convincing.

The Afghan campaign fits nicely with the Administration's focus on state terror sponsors.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040602.html

Obviously you don't like that strategy. But until you come up with a competing one, it's trying to "beat something with nothing."

And pretending we could have whistled up a few brigades of NATO troops at Tora Bora, or that the WoT is a PR exercise, is not helping your case any.

Cecil wrote: "Gents, if those are examples of 'reality-based,' I'd suggest you need to change your trademark."

If that's your idea of a substantive response, I'd suggest you stop posting here. You're not impressing us by simply being contrarian and issuing ad hominem attacks. If you've got a problem with the facts I presented, by all means let me know. Otherwise, I will continue to assume that you don't respond because you simply have no valid response to make.

In looking over your eight posts above, you provide not a single substantive argument. Until you do, I have no intention of wasting any more time on you.