Sen. John Kerry has suggested several times that the Bush administration failed to kill or capture bin Laden because it turned the job over to Afghan warlords.

"He didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down Osama bin Laden" on the Afghan-Pakistan border at the end of 2001, Kerry said Friday in an interview with WISN-TV in Milwaukee. "He outsourced the job."

Bush administration officials have said they used a combination of Afghan fighters, American military advisers and U.S. air power to attack al-Qaida and Taliban forces in the remote, mountainous Tora Bora region.

Writing in The New York Times on Oct. 19, retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, said it isn't clear that bin Laden was in Tora Bora at the time and denied that the United States "outsourced" military action. "Afghans weren't left to do the job alone," Franks wrote. "Special forces from the United States and several other countries were there, providing tactical leadership and calling in air strikes."

Who's right?

Knight Ridder reporters Barry Schlachter of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Jonathan S. Landay and photographers Carl Juste and Peter Andrew Bosch of The Miami Herald were at Tora Bora during the battle, and photographer David Gilkey of the Detroit Free Press and reporter Drew Brown traveled there a year later, interviewed Afghan fighters, retraced al-Qaida escape routes and talked to Pakistani intelligence officers who were tracking al Qaida.

Their reporting found that Franks and other top officials ignored warnings from their own and allied military and intelligence officers that the combination of precision bombing, special operations forces and Afghan forces that had driven the Taliban from northern Afghanistan might not work in the heartland of the country's dominant Pashtun tribe.

While more than 1,200 U.S. Marines sat at an abandoned air base in the desert 80 miles away, Franks and other commanders relied on three Afghan warlords and a small number of American, British and Australian special forces to stop al-Qaida and Taliban fighters from escaping across the mountains into Pakistan.

"We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora . . . ," Franks wrote.

Military and intelligence officials had warned Franks and others that the two main Afghan commanders, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman, couldn't be trusted, and they proved to be correct. They were slow to move their troops into place and didn't attack until four days after American planes began bombing - leaving time for al-Qaida leaders to escape and leaving behind a rear guard of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek fighters.

"Ali and Zaman both assured our people that they had forces in blocking positions on the Spin Ghar (mountains) when there were, in fact, no people there," said a U.S. military official who played a key role in the campaign. "So besides taking Afghans at their word, we had no plans to bring up sufficient forces to make up for perfidy."

U.S. reconnaissance photos showed what appeared to be campfires at high altitudes along the trails across the mountains into Pakistan. The Afghans said the fires belonged to sheep herders. Instead, "they were exfiltrators, pure and simple," said an American military official.

Zaman and Ali began trying to negotiate an al-Qaida surrender even before they began their ground attack. Then, on the second day of the attack, Zaman declared a cease-fire. Ali and a third commander, Haji Zahir, who joined the attack at the last minute, resumed fighting after a few hours, and the U.S. bombing never stopped. But Zaman left open an escape route through the Waziri Tangi valley.

U.S. intelligence analysts estimated that 1,000 to 1,100 al-Qaida fighters, along with some of the group's top leaders, escaped the American dragnet at Tora Bora.

A Pakistani official later told Knight Ridder that intelligence reports suggested that some 4,000 al-Qaida members escaped and that 50 to 80 top leaders paid Zaman or Ali as much as $40,000 apiece for safe passage out of Tora Bora.

It isn't clear, however, whether bin Laden and his top aide, Ayman al Zawahiri, were among them, as Kerry has alleged. Bin Laden was last seen heading out of the Afghan city of Jalalabad toward Tora Bora in a convoy on Nov. 15, 2001. U.S. officials thought they'd heard him on a local radio transmission in Tora Bora in December, but later said they might have been mistaken.

© Copyright 2004 Knight-Ridder

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