On October 7, 2001, U.S. aircraft began bombing the training bases and strongholds of Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban across Afghanistan. The leaders who sent murderers to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon less than a month earlier and the rogue government that provided them sanctuary were running for their lives. President George W. Bush’s expression of America’s desire to get Osama bin Laden ‘‘dead or alive’’ seemed about to come true.

Two months later, American civilian and military leaders celebrated what they viewed as a lasting victory with the selection of Hamid Karzai as the country’s new hand-picked leader. The war had been conceived as a swift campaign with a single objective: defeat the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda by capturing or killing bin Laden and other key leaders. A unique combination of airpower, Central Intelligence Agency and special operations forces teams and indigenous allies had swept the Taliban from power and ousted Al Qaeda from its safe haven while keeping American deaths to a minimum. But even in the initial glow, there were concerns: The mission had failed to capture or kill bin Laden.

Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.

Al Qaeda shifted its locus across the border into Pakistan, where it has trained extremists linked to numerous plots, including the July 2005 transit bombings in London and two recent aborted attacks involving people living in the United States. The terrorist group’s resurgence in Pakistan has coincided with the rising violence orchestrated in Afghanistan by the Taliban, whose leaders also escaped only to re-emerge to direct today’s increasingly lethal Afghan insurgency.

This failure and its enormous consequences were not inevitable. By early December 2001, Bin Laden’s world had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora. Cornered in some of the most forbidding terrain on earth, he and several hundred of his men, the largest concentration of Al Qaeda fighters of the war, endured relentless pounding by American aircraft, as many as 100 air strikes a day. One 15,000-pound bomb, so huge it had to be rolled out the back of a C-130 cargo plane, shook the mountains for miles. It seemed only a matter of time before U.S. troops and their Afghan allies overran the remnants of Al Qaeda hunkered down in the thin, cold air at 14,000 feet.

Bin Laden expected to die. His last will and testament, written on December 14, reflected his fatalism. ‘‘Allah commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole,’’ he wrote, according to a copy of the will that surfaced later and is regarded as authentic. ‘‘Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.’ How many times did I wake up to find myself reciting this holy verse!’’ He instructed his wives not to remarry and apologized to his children for devoting himself to jihad.

But the Al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies, and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes. On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.

The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan. There were enough U.S. troops in or near Afghanistan to execute the classic sweep-and-block maneuver required to attack bin Laden and try to prevent his escape. It would have been a dangerous fight across treacherous terrain, and the injection of more U.S. troops and the resulting casualties would have contradicted the risk- averse, ‘‘light footprint’’ model formulated by Rumsfeld and Franks. But commanders on the scene and elsewhere in Afghanistan argued that the risks were worth the reward.

After bin Laden’s escape, some military and intelligence analysts and the press criticized the Pentagon’s failure to mount a full-scale attack despite the tough rhetoric by President Bush. Franks, Vice President Dick Cheney and others defended the decision, arguing that the intelligence was inconclusive about the Al Qaeda leader’s location. But the review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants underlying this report removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora. For example, the CIA and Delta Force commanders who spent three weeks at Tora Bora as well as other intelligence and military sources are certain he was there. Franks’ second-in-command during the war, retired Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, wrote in his autobiography that bin Laden was ‘‘definitely there when we hit the caves’’—a statement he retracted when the failure became a political issue. Most authoritatively, the official history of the U.S. Special Operations Command determined that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. ‘‘All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9–14 December,’’ said a declassified version of the history, which was based on accounts of commanders and intelligence officials and published without fanfare two years ago.

The reasons behind the failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and its lasting consequences are examined over three sections in this report. The first section traces bin Laden’s path from southern Afghanistan to the mountains of Tora Bora and lays out new and previous evidence that he was there. The second explores new information behind the decision not to launch an assault. The final section examines the military options that might have led to his capture or death at Tora Bora and the ongoing impact of the failure to bring him back ‘‘dead or alive.’’

1. FLIGHT TO TORA BORA

Whether Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora in late 2001 has been the topic of heated debate since he escaped Afghanistan to the tribal belt of Pakistan. The evidence is convincing that the Al Qaeda leader was in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in that critical period. The information comes from U.S. military officers at Tora Bora, from detainees who were in the camps with bin Laden, from the senior CIA officer in Afghanistan at the time, and from the official history of the special operations forces. Based on that evidence, it is clear that the Al Qaeda leader was within reach of U.S. troops three months after the attacks on New York and Washington.

In the middle of August 2001, two Pakistani nuclear scientists sat down in a mud-walled compound on the outskirts of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, the spiritual and tactical headquarters of Taliban fundamentalists who controlled most of the country. Seated with them were bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who was his chief deputy and strategist. The four men spent two days discussing Al Qaeda’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons before bin Laden and Zawahiri abruptly excused themselves and left the compound. Before departing, bin Laden promised the Pakistanis that something momentous was going to happen soon.

American intelligence had already picked up indications that something momentous was coming. George Tenet, who was Director of Central Intelligence at the time, later testified before the 9/ 11 Commission that the ‘‘system was blinking red’’ from July 2001 until the actual attacks. The first reports of possible attacks on the United States had been picked up in June and the warnings increased steadily from then on. On July 12, Tenet went to Capitol Hill to provide a top-secret briefing for Senators about the rising threat of an imminent attack. Only a handful of Senators turned up in S-407, the secure conference room in the Capitol, to hear the CIA Director warn that he was extremely worried that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were preparing an attack on U.S. soil. Tenet told them the attack was not a question of if, but when.

Less than a month later, on August 6, President Bush’s daily briefing repeated the warning under the ominous headline ‘‘Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in U.S.’’ The text described previous plots carried out by Al Qaeda against American targets overseas and said the FBI had uncovered ‘‘patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.’’ At the time, President Bush later told the 9/11 Commission that he regarded the warning as historical in nature. The Commission’s voluminous report said its investigators ‘‘found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an Al Qaeda attack in the United States.’’

Bin Laden’s movements in the days surrounding September 11 remain sketchy. Some facts have emerged from reputable journalists, U.S. military and intelligence sources and Afghans who said they saw the Al Qaeda leader at various points along his path to Tora Bora. He was spotted in Khost in eastern Afghanistan around September 11. On November 8, he and Zawahiri met in Kabul with Hamid Mir, a respected Pakistani journalist. By then, U.S. special operations forces and Northern Alliance troops were closing in on the Afghan capital.

The Al Qaeda leaders had risked the trip to attend a memorial service honoring the Uzbek militant leader Juma Khan Namangani, who had been killed in a U.S. airstrike. Before Kabul fell, bin Laden and Zawahiri traveled 5 hours east to the ancient trading center of Jalalabad. From there, by all reliable accounts, they went to ground at Tora Bora, one of bin Laden’s old haunts from the days of fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. Tora Bora is a district about 30 miles southeast of Jalalabad. Rather than a single place, the name covers a fortress-like section of the White Mountains that stretches about six miles long and six miles wide across a collection of narrow valleys, snow-covered ridgelines and jagged peaks reaching 14,000 feet. During the 1980s, when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, bin Laden turned the site into a formidable stronghold. He built a rough road from Jalalabad and brought in heavy equipment to fortify the natural caves and dig new ones. He supervised the excavation of connecting tunnels so fighters could move unseen between locations in the fights against Soviet troops.

After the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989, bin Laden left Afghanistan and eventually set up the operations of his fledgling terrorist organization in the northeastern African nation of Sudan. After pressure from the United States, Sudan expelled bin Laden in 1996 and he flew with his wives and children to Jalalabad on a chartered jet. Upon his return to Afghanistan, bin Laden began expanding the fortress at Tora Bora, building base camps at higher elevations for himself, his wives and numerous children, and other senior Al Qaeda figures. Some rooms were reported to be concealed 350 feet inside the granite peaks. The mountainsides leading to those upper reaches were steep and pitted with well-built bunkers cloaked in camouflage. In the years that followed, Bin Laden got to know the surrounding geography well from spending hours on long hikes with his children. His familiarity with the worn trails used over the centuries by traders and smugglers to traverse the few miles into Pakistan would serve him well.

The United States rightly anticipated that bin Laden would make his last stand at Tora Bora. The precise dates of his arrival and departure are hard to pin down, but it’s clear that U.S. intelligence picked up his trail well before he got there. The CIA had evidence that bin Laden was headed for the mountain redoubt by early November, according to Tenet, the former CIA Director. Outside experts like Peter Bergen, the last American to interview bin Laden, estimate that he arrived by the end of November, along with 1,000 to 1,500 hardened fighters and bodyguards. In a television interview on November 29, 2001, Vice President Cheney said he believed the Al Qaeda leader was in the general area of Tora Bora. ‘‘He’s got a large number of fighters with him probably, a fairly secure personal security force that he has some degree of confidence in, and he’ll have to try to leave, that is, he may depart for other territory, but that’s not quite as easy as it would have been a few months ago,’’ Cheney said.

The Sheikh Arrives

Bin Laden’s presence was more than conjecture. A major with the Army’s Delta Force, who is now retired and uses the pen name Dalton Fury, was the senior U.S. military officer at Tora Bora, commanding about 90 special operations troops and support personnel. He and his fellow commandos from the elite and secretive Delta Force arrived in early December, setting up headquarters in a former schoolhouse near the mountains alongside a handful of CIA operatives who were already there. The Americans were there to direct airstrikes on Tora Bora and work with Afghan militias assembled by two local warlords who had been paid by the CIA to help flush out bin Laden and the Al Qaeda contingent. The Delta Force soldiers were disguised to blend in with the Afghan militia, wearing local clothing, growing bushy beards and sometimes carrying the same types of weapons.

Fury recounted his experiences in a book, Kill Bin Laden, which was published in 2008. He expanded on them in interviews with committee staff. Both the book and the interviews left no doubt that Fury’s team knew bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora and that he was eager to go get him. In the interviews, he explained that Al Qaeda fighters arrayed in the mountains used unsecure radios, which meant their communications were easily intercepted by his team and by a sophisticated listening post a few miles from the mountain. As a result, the Delta Force and CIA operatives had real-time eavesdropping capabilities on Al Qaeda almost from their arrival, allowing them to track movements and gauge the effectiveness of the bombing. Even more valuable, a few days after arriving, one of the CIA operatives picked up a radio from a dead Al Qaeda fighter. The radio gave the Americans a clear channel into the group’s communications on the mountain. Bin Laden’s voice was often picked up, along with frequent comments about the presence of the man referred to by his followers as ‘‘the sheikh.’’ Fury, who still uses his pen name to protect his identity, said there was no doubt the voice on the radios was bin Laden. ‘‘The CIA had a guy with them called Jalal and he was the foremost expert on bin Laden’s voice,’’ he said. ‘‘He worked on bin Laden’s voice for seven years and he knew him better than anyone else in the West. To him, it was very clear that bin Laden was there on the mountain.’’

Another special operations expert who speaks fluent Arabic and heard the intercepted communications in real time in Afghanistan told the committee staff that it was clearly bin Laden’s voice. He had studied the Al Qaeda leader’s speech pattern and word choices before the war and he said he considered the communications a perfect match.

Afghan villagers who were providing food and other supplies for the Al Qaeda fighters at Tora Bora also confirmed bin Laden’s presence. Fury said some of the villagers were paid by the CIA for information about precise locations of clusters of fighters that could be targeted for bombing runs. The locals also provided fragmentary information on bin Laden’s movements within the Al Qaeda compound, though the outsiders never got near the sheikh. The cooperating villagers were given rudimentary global positioning devices and told to push a button at any spot where they saw significant numbers of fighters or arms caches. When the locals turned in the devices to collect their payments, the GPS coordinates recorded by pushing the buttons were immediately passed along to targeting officers, who programmed the coordinates into bombing runs.

For several days in early December, Fury’s special ops troops moved up the mountains in pairs with fighters from the Afghan militias. The Americans used GPS devices and laser range finders to pinpoint caves and pockets of enemy fighters for the bombers. The Delta Force units were unable to hold any high ground because the Afghans insisted on retreating to their base at the bottom of the mountains each night, leaving the Americans alone inside Al Qaeda territory. Still, it was clear from what they could see and what they were hearing in the intercepted conversations that relentless bombing was taking its toll.

On December 9, a C-130 cargo plane dropped a 15,000-pound bomb, known as a Daisy Cutter, on the Tora Bora complex. The weapon had not been used since Vietnam, and there were early fears that its impact had not been as great as expected. But later reports confirmed that the bomb struck with massive force. A captured Al Qaeda fighter who was there later told American interrogators that men deep in caves had been vaporized in what he called ‘‘a hideous explosion.’’ That day and others, Fury described intercepting radio communications in which Al Qaeda fighters called for the ‘‘red truck to move wounded’’ and frantic pleas from a fighter to his commander, saying ‘‘cave too hot, can’t reach others.’’ At one point, the Americans listened on the radio as bin Laden exhorted his men to keep fighting, though he apologized ‘‘for getting them trapped and pounded by American airstrikes.’’ On December 11, Fury said bin Laden was heard on the radio telling his men that he had let them down and it was okay to surrender. Fury hoped the battle was over, but he would soon determine that it was part of an elaborate ruse to allow Al Qaeda fighters to slip out of Tora Bora for Pakistan.

Fury is adamant that bin Laden was at Tora Bora until mid-December. ‘‘There is no doubt that bin Laden was in Tora Bora during the fighting,’’ he wrote in Kill Bin Laden. ‘‘From alleged sightings to the radio intercepts to news reports from various countries, it was repeatedly confirmed that he was there.’’

Other Voices, Same Conclusion

Fury was not alone in his conviction. In some cases, confirmation that bin Laden was at Tora Bora has come from detainees at Guantanamo Bay. A ‘‘summary of evidence’’ prepared by the Pentagon for the trial of an unnamed detainee says flatly that the man ‘‘assisted in the escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora.’’ The detainee was described as one of bin Laden’s commanders in the fight against the Soviets. The document, which was released to the Associated Press in 2005 through a Freedom of Information request, was the first definitive statement by the Pentagon that the mastermind of 9/11 was at Tora Bora during the American bombing before slipping away into Pakistan.

Another confirmation came from the senior CIA paramilitary commander in Afghanistan at the time. Gary Berntsen was working at the CIA’s counterterrorist center in October 2001 when his boss summoned him to the front office and told him, ‘‘Gary, I want you killing the enemy immediately.’’ Berntsen left the next day for Afghanistan, where he assumed leadership of the CIA’s paramilitary operation against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His primary target was bin Laden, and he was confident that the Al Qaeda leader would make his last stand at Tora Bora. His suspicions were confirmed when he learned bin Laden’s voice had been intercepted there.

From the outset, Berntsen says he was skeptical about relying on Afghan militias ‘‘cobbled together at the last minute’’ to capture or kill the man who ordered the 9/11 attacks. ‘‘I’d made it clear in my reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al Qaeda in Tora Bora,’’ he wrote in his own book, Jawbreaker, which was published in late 2005. He also knew that the special operations troops and CIA operatives on the scene were not enough to stop bin Laden from escaping across the mountain passes. In the book, Berntsen uses exclamation points to vent his fears that the most wanted man in the world was about to slip out of our grasp. ‘‘We needed U.S. soldiers on the ground!’’ he wrote. ‘‘I’d sent my request for 800 U.S. Army Rangers and was still waiting for a response. I repeated to anyone at headquarters who would listen: We need Rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!!’’

At one point, Berntsen recalled an argument at a CIA guesthouse in Kabul with Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the commander of U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan at the time. Berntsen said he renewed his demand that American troops be dispatched to Tora Bora immediately. Following orders from Franks at U.S. Central Command (CentCom) headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, Dailey refused to deploy U.S. troops, explaining that he feared alienating Afghan allies. ‘‘I don’t give a damn about offending our allies!’’ Berntsen shouted. ‘‘I only care about eliminating al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden’s head in a box!’’ Dailey said the military’s position was firm and Berntsen replied, ‘‘Screw that!’’

For those like Franks, who later maintained that bin Laden might not have been at Tora Bora, Berntsen is respectfully scornful. ‘‘We could have ended it all there,’’ he said in an interview. Berntsen’s views were generally shared by Gary Schroen, another senior CIA operative in Afghanistan. Schroen, who had spent years cultivating ties to Afghanistan’s opposition elements, bemoaned the reliance on local tribal leaders to go after bin Laden and guard escape routes. ‘‘Unfortunately, many of those people proved to be loyal to bin Laden and sympathizers with the Taliban and they allowed the key guys to escape,’’ Schroen, who retired from the CIA, said in a television interview in May 2005. He added that he had no doubt that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. Franks’ second-in-command during the war, General DeLong, was convinced that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. In his memoir, Inside CentCom, DeLong described the massive, three-week bombing campaign aimed at killing Al Qaeda fighters in their caves at Tora Bora. ‘‘We were hot on Osama bin Laden’s trail,’’ he wrote. ‘‘He was definitely there when we hit the caves. Every day during the bombing, Rumsfeld asked me, ‘Did we get him? Did we get him?’ I would have to answer that we didn’t know.’’ The retired general said that intelligence suggested bin Laden had been wounded during the bombings before he escaped to Pakistan, a conclusion reached by numerous journalists, too.

DeLong argued that large numbers of U.S. troops could not be dispatched because the area surrounding Tora Bora was controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and other outsiders. But he recognized that the Pakistani Frontier Corps, asked to block any escape attempt by bin Laden, was ill-equipped for the job. ‘‘To make matters worse, this tribal area was sympathetic to bin Laden,’’ he wrote. ‘‘He was the richest man in the area, and he had funded these people for years.’’

The book was published in September 2004, a year after DeLong retired from the Army. That fall, the failure to capture or kill bin Laden had become an issue in the presidential campaign. Franks had retired from the Army in 2003 and he often defended the events at Tora Bora. On October 19, 2004, he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times saying that intelligence on the Al Qaeda leader’s location had been inconclusive. ‘‘We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir. Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.’’

Two weeks after the Franks article was published and barely two months after publication of his own book, DeLong reversed the conclusion from his autobiography and echoed his former boss in an opinion article on November 1 in The Wall Street Journal. After defending the decision to rely heavily on local militia and the Pakistani Frontier Corps, DeLong wrote: ‘‘Finally, most people fail to realize that it is quite possible that bin Laden was never in Tora Bora to begin with. There exists no concrete intel to prove that he was there at the time.’’

DeLong said in an interview with committee staff that the contradiction between his book and the opinion article was the result of murky intelligence. ‘‘What I put in the book was what the intel said at the time,’’ he said. ‘‘The intel is not always right. I read it that he was there. We even heard that he was injured. Later intel was that he may or may not have been there. Did anybody have eyeballs on him? No. The intel stated that he was there at the time, but we got shot in the face by bad intel many times.’’ DeLong amplified the reasons for not sending American troops after bin Laden. ‘‘The real reason we didn’t go in with U.S. troops was that we hadn’t had the election yet,’’ he said in the staff interview, a reference to the installation of Hamid Karzai as the interim leader of Afghanistan. ‘‘We didn’t want to have U.S. forces fighting before Karzai was in power. We wanted to create a stable country and that was more important than going after bin Laden at the time.’’

‘‘A Controversial Fight’’

Military and intelligence officers at Tora Bora have provided ample evidence that bin Laden was there. Al Qaeda detainees have maintained that he was there. And the Pentagon’s own summary of evidence in the case against a former senior jihadi commander at Guantanamo Bay concluded the detainee helped bin Laden escape. But the most authoritative and definitive unclassified government document on bin Laden’s location in December 2001 is the official history of the United States Special Operations Command.

The Special Operations Command, based alongside CentCom at MacDill Air Force Base, oversees the special forces of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. The heavy reliance on special operations forces during the first stages of the Afghan campaign meant that the command played a central role in executing the war plan. Its units included the Delta Force team on the scene at Tora Bora. In preparing the official history of the command, a team of historians working for the command interviewed military and intelligence officials from every branch of the armed forces. The unclassified version of the history was published in 2007 and includes a lengthy section on the operations at Tora Bora.

The section opens by saying that bin Laden and a large contingent of Al Qaeda troops had fled the area around Kabul for Nangahar Province and its provincial capital, Jalalabad, in early November. ‘‘Analysts within both the CIA and CentCom correctly speculated that UBL would make a stand along the northern peaks of the Spin Ghar Mountains at a place then called Tora Gora,’’ says the history. ‘‘Tora Bora, as it was redubbed in December, had been a major stronghold of AQ for years and provided routes into Pakistan.’’ The history said bin Laden had ‘‘undoubtedly’’ chosen to make his last stand there prior to the onset of winter, along with between 500 and 2,000 others, before escaping into Pakistan. In the concluding passage assessing the battle of Tora Bora, the historians from the Special Operations Command wrote: ‘‘What has since been determined with reasonable certainty was that UBL was indeed at Tora Bora in December 2001. All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9–14 December. The fact that SOF (special operations forces) came as close to capturing or killing UBL as U.S. forces have to date makes Tora Bora a controversial fight. Given the commitment of fewer than 100 American personnel, U.S. forces proved unable to block egress routes from Tora Bora south into Pakistan, the route that UBL most likely took.’’

Franks declined to respond to any questions about the discrepancies about bin Laden’s location or the conclusion of the Special Operations Command historians. ‘‘We really don’t have time for this,’’ one of his aides, retired Col. Michael T. Hayes, wrote in an email to the committee staff. ‘‘Focused on the future, not the past. Gen Franks made his decisions, based on the intel at the time.’’

2. THE AFGHAN MODEL: A FLAWED MASTERPIECE OR JUST FLAWED?

Writing in Foreign Affairs in the spring of 2002, the military analyst Michael O’Hanlon declared Operation Enduring Freedom ‘‘a masterpiece of military creativity and finesse.’’ The operation had been designed on the fly and O’Hanlon praised Rumsfeld, Franks and CIA Director George Tenet for devising a war plan that combined limited American power and the Afghan opposition to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda with only 30 U.S. casualties in the first five months. But O’Hanlon tempered his praise, calling the plan ‘‘a flawed masterpiece’’ because of the failure to capture or kill bin Laden and other enemy leaders. The resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in recent years, and the turmoil they have wrought in Afghanistan and Pakistan, raise the question of whether the plan was a flawed masterpiece—or simply flawed.

The Afghan model required elite teams of American commandos and CIA paramilitary operatives to form alliances with Afghans who opposed the Taliban and had the militias to help topple the religious fundamentalists. Some of these Afghans were legitimate ethnic and tribal leaders who chafed at the restrictions of the Taliban and the sanctuary it provided to Al Qaeda. Others were allies of convenience, Taliban rivals who held power by force and paid their men by collecting tolls and taxes on legitimate commerce and trafficking in heroin. By providing money and weapons, the U.S. forces helped the warlords destroy their rivals and expand their personal power.

Many later entered the Afghan government and remain influential figures. The strategy was a short cut to victory that would have consequences for long-term stability in Afghanistan. When it came to bin Laden, the special operations forces relied on two relatively minor warlords from the Jalalabad area. Haji Hazarat Ali had a fourth-grade education and a reputation as a bully. He had fought the Soviets as a teenager in the 1980s and later joined the Taliban for a time. The other, Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, was a wealthy drug smuggler who had been persuaded by the United States to return from France. Ghamsharik also had fought the Soviets, but when the Taliban came to power, he had gone into exile in France. Together, they fielded a force of about 2,000 men, but there were questions from the outset about the competence and loyalties of the fighters. The two warlords and their men distrusted each other and both groups appeared to distrust their American allies.

The Delta Force commandos had doubts about the willingness and ability of the Afghan militias to wage a genuine assault on Tora Bora almost from the outset. Those concerns were underscored each time the Afghans insisted on retreating from the mountains as darkness fell. But the suspicions were confirmed by events that started on the afternoon of December 11.

Haji Ghamsharik approached Fury and told him that Al Qaeda fighters wanted to surrender. He said all they needed to end the siege was a 12-hour ceasefire to allow the fighters to climb down the mountains and turn in their weapons. Intercepted radio chatter seemed to confirm that the fighters had lost their resolve under the relentless bombing and wanted to give up, but Fury remained suspicious. ‘‘This is the greatest day in the history of Afghanistan,’’ Ghamsharik told Fury.

‘‘Why is that?’’ asked the dubious American officer. ‘‘Because al Qaeda is no more,’’ he said. ‘‘Bin Laden is finished.’’ The Special Operations Command history records that CentCom refused to back the ceasefire, suspecting a ruse, but it said the special ops forces agreed reluctantly to an overnight pause in the bombing to avoid killing the surrendering Al Qaeda fighters. Ghamsharik negotiated by radio with representatives of Al Qaeda. He initially told Fury that a large number of Algerians wanted to surrender. Then he said that he could turn over the entire Al Qaeda leadership. Fury’s suspicions increased at such a bold promise. By the morning of December 12, no Al Qaeda fighters had appeared and the Delta Force commander concluded that the whole episode was a hoax. Intelligence estimates are that as many as 800 Al Qaeda fighters escaped that night, but bin Laden stuck it out.

Despite the unreliability of his Afghan allies, Fury refused to give up. He plotted ways to use his 40 Delta Force soldiers and the handful of other special ops troops under his command to go after bin Laden on their own. One of the plans was to go at bin Laden from the one direction he would never anticipate, the southern side of the mountains. ‘‘We want to come in on the back door,’’ Fury explained later, pointing on a map to the side of the Tora Bora enclave facing Pakistan. The peaks there rose to 14,000 feet and the valleys and precipitous mountain passes were already deep in snow. ‘‘The original plan that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the Pakistan side, over the mountains and come in and get a drop on bin Laden from behind.’’ The audacious assault was nixed somewhere up the chain of command. Undeterred, Fury suggested dropping hundreds of landmines along the passes leading to Pakistan to block bin Laden’s escape. ‘‘First guy blows his leg off, everybody else stops,’’ he said. ‘‘That allows aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. Okay, there is a big large group of Al Qaeda moving south. They can engage that.’’ That proposal was rejected, too.

About the time Fury was desperately concocting scenarios for going after bin Laden and getting rejections from up the chain of command, Franks was well into planning for the next war—the invasion of Iraq.

A Shift in Attention and Resources

On November 21, 2001, President Bush put his arm on Defense Secretary Rumsfeld as they were leaving a National Security Council meeting at the White House. ‘‘I need to see you,’’ the President said. It was 72 days after the 9/11 attacks and just a week after the fall of Kabul. But Bush already had new plans.

According to Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack, the President said to Rumsfeld: ‘‘What kind of a war plan do you have for Iraq? How do you feel about the war plan for Iraq?’’ Then the President told Woodward he recalled saying: ‘‘Let’s get started on this. And get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to.’’ Back at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld convened a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draft a message for Franks asking for a new assessment of a war with Iraq. The existing operations plan had been created in 1998 and it hinged on assembling the kind of massive international coalition used in Desert Storm in 1991.

In his memoir, American General, Franks later described getting the November 21 telephone call from Rumsfeld relaying the President’s orders while he was sitting in his office at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. Franks and one of his aides were working on air support for the Afghan units being assembled to push into the mountains surrounding Tora Bora. Rumsfeld said the President wanted options for war with Iraq. Franks said the existing plan was out of date and that a new one should include lessons about precision weapons and the use of special operations forces learned in Afghanistan.

‘‘Okay, Tom,’’ Rumsfeld said, according to Franks. ‘‘Please dust it off and get back to me next week.’’

Franks described his reaction to Rumsfeld’s orders this way: ‘‘Son of a bitch. No rest for the weary.’’

For critics of the Bush administration’s commitment to Afghanistan, the shift in focus just as Franks and his senior aides were literally working on plans for the attacks on Tora Bora represents a dramatic turning point that allowed a sustained victory in Afghanistan to slip through our fingers. Almost immediately, intelligence and military planning resources were transferred to begin planning on the next war in Iraq. Though Fury, Berntsen and others in the field did not know what was happening back at CentCom, the drain in resources and shift in attention would affect them and the future course of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. ‘‘We’re Going to Lose Our Prey’’

In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, former CIA Director Tenet said it was evident from the start that aerial bombing would not be enough to get bin Laden at Tora Bora. Troops needed to be in the caves themselves, he wrote, but the Afghan militiamen were ‘‘distinctly reluctant’’ to put themselves in harm’s way and there were not enough Americans on the scene.

He said that senior CIA officials lobbied hard for inserting U.S. troops. Henry Crumpton, the head of special operations for the CIA’s counterterrorism operation and chief of its Afghan strategy, made direct requests to Franks. Crumpton had told him that the back door to Pakistan was open and urged Franks to move more than 1,000 Marines who had set up a base near Kandahar to Tora Bora to block escape routes. But the CentCom commander rejected the idea, saying it would take weeks to get a large enough U.S. contingent on the scene and bin Laden might disappear in the meantime.

At the end of November, Crumpton went to the White House to brief President Bush and Vice President Cheney and repeated the message that he had delivered to Franks. Crumpton warned the President that the Afghan campaign’s primary goal of capturing bin Laden was in jeopardy because of the military’s reliance on Afghan militias at Tora Bora. Crumpton showed the President where Tora Bora was located in the White Mountains and described the caves and tunnels that riddled the region. Crumpton questioned whether the Pakistani forces would be able to seal off the escape routes and pointed out that the promised Pakistani troops had not arrived yet. In addition, the CIA officer told the President that the Afghan forces at Tora Bora were ‘‘tired and cold’’ and ‘‘they’re just not invested in getting bin Laden.’’

According to author Ron Suskind in The One Percent Solution, Crumpton sensed that his earlier warnings to Franks and others at the Pentagon had not been relayed the President. So Crumpton went further, telling Bush that ‘‘we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.’’ He recommended that the Marines or other U.S. troops be rushed to Tora Bora.

‘‘How bad off are these Afghani forces, really?’’ asked Bush. ‘‘Are they up to the job?

‘‘Definitely not, Mr. President,’’ Crumpton replied. ‘‘Definitely not.’’

Flight from Tora Bora

On December 14, the day bin Laden finished his will, Dalton Fury finally convinced Ali and his men to stay overnight in one of the canyons that they had captured during daylight. Over the next three days, the Afghan militia and their American advisers moved steadily through the canyons, calling in airstrikes and taking out lingering pockets of fighters. The resistance seemed to have vanished, prompting Ali to declare victory on December 17. Most of the Tora Bora complex was abandoned and many of the caves and tunnels were buried in debris. Only about 20 stragglers were taken prisoner. The consensus was that Al Qaeda fighters who had survived the fierce bombing had escaped into Pakistan or melted into the local population. Bin Laden was nowhere to be found. Two days later, Fury and his Delta Force colleagues left Tora Bora, hoping that someone would eventually find bin Laden buried in one of the caves.

There was no body because bin Laden did not die at Tora Bora. Later U.S. intelligence reports and accounts by journalists and others said that he and a contingent of bodyguards departed Tora Bora on December 16. With help from Afghans and Pakistanis who had been paid in advance, the group made its way on foot and horseback across the mountain passes and into Pakistan without encountering any resistance.

The Special Operations Command history noted that there were not enough U.S. troops to prevent the escape, acknowledging that the failure to capture or kill bin Laden made Tora Bora a controversial battle. But Franks argued that Tora was a success and he praised both the Afghan militias and the Pakistanis who were supposed to have protected the border. ‘‘I think it was a good operation,’’ he said in an interview for the PBS show Frontline on the first anniversary of the Afghan war. ‘‘Many people have said, ‘Well, gosh, you know bin Laden got away.’ I have yet to see anything that proves bin Laden or whomever was there. That’s not to say they weren’t, but I’ve not seen proof that they were there.’’ Bin Laden himself later acknowledged that he was at Tora Bora, boasting about how he and Zawahiri survived the heavy bombing along with 300 fighters before escaping. ‘‘The bombardment was round-the-clock and the warplanes continued to fly over us day and night,’’ he said in an audio tape released on February 11, 2003. ‘‘Planes poured their lava on us, particularly after accomplishing their main missions in Afghanistan.’’

In the aftermath of bin Laden’s escape, there were accusations that militiamen working for the two warlords hired by the CIA to get him had helped the Al Qaeda leader cross into Pakistan. Michael Scheuer, who spent 15 years working on Afghanistan at the CIA and at one point headed the agency’s bin Laden task force, was sharply critical of the war plan from the start because of its reliance on Afghan allies of dubious loyalty. ‘‘Everyone who was cognizant of how Afghan operations worked would have told Mr. Tenet that he was nuts,’’ Scheuer said later. ‘‘And as it turned out, he was. ... The people we bought, the people Mr. Tenet said we would own, let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan into Pakistan.’’

The American forces never had a clear idea how many Al Qaeda fighters were arrayed against them. Estimates ranged as high as 3,000 and as low as 500, but the consensus put the figure around 1,000—at least until so many escaped during the fake surrender. Regardless of the exact number of enemy fighters, assaulting Tora Bora would have been difficult and probably would have cost many American and Afghan lives. The Special Operations Command’s history offered this tightly worded assessment: ‘‘With large numbers of well-supplied, fanatical AQ troops dug into extensive fortified positions, Tora Bora appeared to be an extremely tough target.’’ For Dalton Fury, the reward would have been worth the risk. ‘‘In general, I definitely think it was worth the risk to the force to assault Tora Bora for Osama bin Laden,’’ he told the committee staff. ‘‘What other target out there, then or now, could be more important to our nation’s struggle in the global war on terror?’’

3. AN ALTERNATIVE BATTLE PLAN

Rather than allowing bin Laden to escape, Franks and Rumsfeld could have deployed American troops already in Afghanistan on or near the border with Pakistan to block the exits while simultaneously sending special operations forces and their Afghan allies up the mountains to Tora Bora. The complex mission would have been risky, but analysis shows that it was well within the reach and capability of the American military. In the years following the Vietnam War, the U.S. military developed a doctrine intended to place new constraints on when the country went to war and to avoid a repeat of the disastrous and prolonged conflict in Southeast Asia. In its most simplistic form, the doctrine focused on applying overwhelming and disproportionate military force to achieve concrete political goals. It called for mobilizing the military and political resources necessary for ending conflicts quickly and leaving no loose ends. The concept was known informally as the Powell doctrine, named for General Colin Powell, who outlined his vision at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

The Afghan model constructed by Rumsfeld and Franks in response to the attacks on September 11 stood the Powell doctrine on its head. The new template was designed to deliver a swift and economical knockout blow through airpower and the limited application of troops on the ground. Instead of overwhelming force, the Afghan model depended on airpower and on highly mobile special operations forces and CIA paramilitary teams, working in concert with opposition warlords and tribal leaders. It was designed as unconventional warfare led by indigenous forces, and Franks put a ceiling of 10,000 on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Despite the valor of the limited American forces, the doctrine failed to achieve one of its most concrete political goals—eliminating the leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The result has turned out to be nothing close to decisive victory followed by quick withdrawal. Assembling the size force required to apply overwhelming force across a country as large and rugged as Afghanistan would have taken many weeks. The only country in the region likely to provide the major bases required to prepare an invasion by tens of thousands of troops was Pakistan, and political sensitivities there would have made full cooperation both doubtful and risky for its leadership. The Pakistanis provided limited bases for U.S. operations in the early stages of planning and the invasion; the footprint was kept small to avoid a public outcry. But soldiers and scholars alike have argued that there were sufficient troops available in Afghanistan and nearby Uzbekistan to mount a genuine assault on Osama bin Laden’s position at Tora Bora. And they could have been augmented within about a week by reinforcements from the Persian Gulf and the United States.

The most detailed description of the assault option was laid out in an article in the journal Security Studies by Peter John Paul Krause of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Entitled ‘‘The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora,’’ the article described a large-scale operation called a block and sweep. The plan is simple enough: One group of American forces would block the likely exit avenues to Pakistan on the south side of Tora Bora while a second contingent moved against Al Qaeda’s positions from the north. Simplicity should not be mistaken for sure success: Variables like weather conditions, the effectiveness of the remaining Al Qaeda fighters and the ability to close the escape routes would have made the mission risky. The dangers of attacking fortified positions manned by hardened fighters would likely have resulted in significant U.S. casualties.

The assault would not have required thousands of conventional forces. A large number of troops would have taken too long to deploy and alerted Al Qaeda to the approaching attack. ‘‘My opinion is that bin Laden would have left even earlier as soon as he received word that the U.S. troops were surrounding him,’’ Fury told the committee staff. ‘‘I think he only stayed as long as he did because he thought the mujahedin would not aggressively pursue him.’’

The preferred choice would have been a small, agile force capable of deploying quickly and quietly and trained to operate in difficult terrain against unconventional enemies. The U.S. military has large numbers of soldiers and Marines who meet those criteria— Delta Force, Green Berets, Navy Seals, Marine special operations units and Army Rangers and paratroopers. The effectiveness of U.S. special operations commandos, even in small numbers, was demonstrated on December 10. Two U.S. soldiers were able to get close enough to the Al Qaeda positions to call in air strikes for 17 straight hours, forcing enemy fighters to retreat and enabling the Afghan militia to capture key terrain near bin Laden’s suspected location. It was an example of what a larger U.S. force could have accomplished, with support from available air power.

The CIA’s Berntsen had requested a battalion of Rangers, about 800 soldiers, and been turned down by CentCom. A battalion would have been a substantial increase in the U.S. presence, but it probably would not have been enough to both assault the stronghold from the north and block the exits on the south. Krause estimated that as few as 500 troops could have carried out the initial northern assault, with reinforcements arriving over the course of the battle. At least twice as many troops would have been required to execute the blocking mission on the southern, eastern and western reaches of Tora Bora. Krause proposed spreading about 1,500 troops to capture or kill anyone trying to flee. O’Hanlon estimated that closing off escape routes to Pakistan would have required 1,000 to 3,000 American troops. In all, an initial force of roughly 2,000 to 3,000 troops would have been sufficient to begin the block and sweep mission, with reinforcements following as time and circumstances allowed.

Troops Were Ready to Go

Assembling the troops to augment the handful of special ops commandos under Fury’s leadership at Tora Bora would have been a manageable task. Franks had set the ceiling of 10,000 U.S. troops to maintain a light footprint. Still, within that number there were enough ready and willing to go after bin Laden. In late November, about the time U.S. intelligence placed bin Laden squarely at Tora Bora, more than 1,000 members of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units, among the military’s most mobile arms, established a base southwest of Kandahar, only a few hours flight away. They were primarily interdicting traffic and supporting the special operations teams working with Afghan militias. Another 1,000 troops from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division were split between a base in southern Uzbekistan and Bagram Air Base, a short helicopter flight from Tora Bora. The Army troops were engaged mainly in military police functions, according to reports at the time. Both forces are trained in unconventional warfare and could have been redeployed rapidly for an assault. Lt. Col. Paul Lacamera, commander of a 10th Mountain battalion, later said that his men had been prepared to deploy anywhere in Afghanistan since mid- November. ‘‘We weren’t just sitting there digging holes and looking out,’’ said Lacamera, whose actions in a later assault on Al Qaeda forces won him a Silver Star. ‘‘We were training for potential fights because eventually it was going to come to that.’’

The commander of the Marines outside Kandahar, Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis, told a journalist that his troops could seal off Tora Bora, but his superiors rejected the plan. Everyone knew that such an operation would have conflicted with the Afghan model laid down by Franks and Rumsfeld. But there were other reasons to hesitate. One former officer told the committee staff that the inability to get sufficient medical-evacuation helicopters into the rough terrain was a major stumbling block for those who considered trying to push for the assault. He also said there were worries that bad weather would ground transport helicopters or, worse, knock them out of the sky.

In addition to the troops in country, a battalion of Army Rangers was stationed in the Persian Gulf country of Oman, and 200 of them had demonstrated their abilities by parachuting into an airfield near Kandahar at night in October. In Krause’s analysis, a battalion of about 800 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could have been deployed to Tora Bora in less than a week, covering the 7,000 miles in C-17 transport aircraft. No one should underestimate the logistical difficulty and danger of deploying even specially trained troops into hostile territory at altitudes of 7,000 to 10,000 feet. Landing zones for helicopters would likely have come under fire from Al Qaeda positions and drop zones for paratroopers were few and far between in the jagged terrain. But Chinook helicopters, the work horse for rapid deployments, proved capable of carrying combat troops above 11,000-foot mountain ranges as part of Operation Anaconda, a similar block and sweep mission carried out in February 2002 in eastern Afghanistan. Former U.S. military officers said that sending American troops into Tora Bora was discussed at various times in late November and early December of 2001. The CIA’s Afghan chief, Hank Crumpton, made specific requests to Franks for U.S. troops and urged President Bush not to rely on Afghan militias and Pakistani paramilitary troops to do the job. CentCom went so far as to develop a plan to put several thousand U.S. troops into Tora Bora.

Commanders estimated that deploying 1,000 to 3,000 American troops would have required several hundred airlift flights by helicopters over a week or more. DeLong defended the decision not to deploy large numbers of American troops. ‘‘We didn’t have the lift,’’ he told the committee staff. ‘‘We didn’t have the medical capabilities. The further we went down the road, the easier the decision got. We wanted Afghanistan to be peaceful for Karzai to take over. Right or not, that was the thinking behind what we did.’’

The Afghan model proved effective in some instances, particularly when Afghan opposition forces working with American advisers were arrayed against poorly trained Taliban foot soldiers. The precision bombs and overwhelming airpower also played a major role in dispersing the Taliban forces and opening the way for the rapid takeover of the country, though critics now say scattering the Taliban simply allowed them to regroup later. In the early days at Tora Bora, the light footprint allowed a handful of CIA and special operations operatives to guide bombs that killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Al Qaeda fighters. But the model was ineffective when it came to motivating opposition militiamen of questionable skills and doubtful resolve to carry the fight to the biggest concentration of Al Qaeda fighters of the war, particularly when the jihadis were battling to protect their leader. Fewer than 100 special operations force soldiers and CIA operatives were unable to turn the tide against those odds.

Some critics said bin Laden escaped because the United States relied too heavily on Afghan militias to carry the fight forward at Tora Bora and on Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps to block any escape. As Michael O’Hanlon pointed out, our allies did not have the same incentives to stop bin Laden and his associates as American troops. Nor did they have the technology and training to carry out such a difficult mission. The responsibility for allowing the most wanted man in the world to virtually disappear into thin air lies with the American commanders who refused to commit the necessary U.S. soldiers and Marines to finish the job.

The same shortage of U.S. troops allowed Mullah Mohammed Omar and other Taliban leaders to escape. A semi-literate leader who fled Kandahar on a motorbike, Mullah Omar has re-emerged at the helm of the Taliban-led insurgency, which has grown more sophisticated and lethal in recent years and now controls swaths of Afghanistan. The Taliban, which is aligned with a loose network of other militant groups and maintains ties to Al Qaeda, has estab- lished shadow governments in many of Afghanistan’s provinces and is capable of mounting increasingly complex attacks on American and NATO forces. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who helped develop the Obama administration’s Afghan policy, recently referred to the mullah’s return to power ‘‘one of the most remarkable military comebacks in modern history.’’

Ironically, one of the guiding principles of the Afghan model was to avoid immersing the United States in a protracted insurgency by sending in too many troops and stirring up anti-American sentiment. In the end, the unwillingness to bend the operational plan to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden paved the way for exactly what we had hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency that has cost more lives than anyone estimates would have been lost in a full-blown assault on Tora Bora. Further, the dangerous contagion of rising violence and instability in Afghanistan has spread to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed ally of the United States which is now wracked by deadly terrorist bombings as it conducts its own costly military campaign against a domestic, Taliban-related insurgency.

The Price of Failure

Osama bin Laden’s demise would not have erased the worldwide threat from extremists. But the failure to kill or capture him has allowed bin Laden to exert a malign influence over events in the region and nearly 60 countries where his followers have established extremist groups. History shows that terrorist groups are invariably much stronger with their charismatic leaders than without them, and the ability of bin Laden and his terrorist organization to recover from the loss of their Afghan sanctuary reinforces the lesson.

Eight years after its expulsion from Afghanistan, Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself and bin Laden has survived to inspire a new generation of extremists who have adopted and adapted the Al Qaeda doctrine and are now capable of attacking from any number of places. The impact of this threat is greatest in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda’s continued presence and resources have emboldened domestic extremists waging an increasingly bloody insurrection that threatens the stability of the government and the region. Its training camps also have spawned new attacks outside the region—militants trained in Pakistan were tied to the July 2005 transit system bombings in London and several aborted plots elsewhere in Europe. Closer to home, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says two recent suspected plots disrupted by U.S. authorities involved longtime residents of the United States who had traveled to Pakistan and trained at bases affiliated with Al Qaeda. One of the plots involved two Chicago men accused in late October of planning to attack the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. In the other, an Afghan-born man who drove a shuttle bus in Denver was arrested on suspicion of plans to detonate improvised explosives in the United States. Court papers said the man had been trained in weapons and explosives in Pakistan and had made nine pages of handwritten notes on how to make and handle bombs.

For American taxpayers, the financial costs of the conflict have been staggering. The first eight years cost an estimated $243 billion and about $70 billion has been appropriated for the current fiscal year—a figure that does not include any increase in troops. But the highest price is being paid on a daily basis in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where 68,000 American troops and hundreds of U.S. civilians are engaged in the ninth year of a protracted conflict and the Afghan people endure a third decade of violence. So far, about 950 U.S. troops and nearly 600 allied soldiers have lost their lives in Operation Enduring Freedom, a conflict in which the outcome remains in grave doubt in large part because the extremists behind the violence were not eliminated in 2001.

From:

A Report to Members

OF THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

UNITED STATES SENATE, ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION, NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Finding Osama bin Laden

An Application of Biogeographic Theories and Satellite Imagery

Thomas W. Gillespie and John A. Agnew are professors of geography at UCLA. They may be contacted respectively at tg@geog.ucla.edu and jagnew@geog.ucla.edu. Erika Mariano, Scott Mossler, Nolan Jones, Matt Braughton, and Jorge Gonzalez are undergraduates in UCLA’s geography department. They may be contacted respectively at erikmari@ucla.edu, smossler@ucla.edu, nolanjones@ucla.edu, mbraught@ucla.edu, and jorgon@ucla.edu.1

Abstract

1 The authors would like to thank Chase Langford for his assistance with graphics. The California Center for Population Research, UCLA provided funding through the Spatial Demography Program. We would also like to thank Bill Clark, Kathy Deuel, Rebecca Goodine, Patrick Healy, Stephanie Pincetl, and Duccio Rocchini, for reviewing this manuscript. We also thank the reviewers and editor for insightful comments and suggestions.

One of the most important political questions of our time is: Where is Osama bin Laden? We use biogeographic theories associated with the distribution of life and extinction (distance-decay theory, island biogeography theory, and life history characteristics) and remote sensing data (Landsat ETM+, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Defense Meteorological Satellite, QuickBird) over three spatial scales (global, regional, local) to identify where bin Laden is most probably currently located. We believe that our work involves the first scientific approach to establishing his current location. The methods are repeatable and can be updated with new information obtained from the US intelligence community.

Introduction

Osama bin Laden remains at large. Thought to be isolated from al-Qaeda's daily operations, bin Laden’s direction may no longer be a relevant factor in the group’s effectiveness. Yet the image of the bearded demagogue remains a source of inspiration to enemies of the West. Where is he?

In his confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee, then-CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta emphasized the hunt for Osama bin Laden as a top priority for the new administration (1). He remains the FBI's most wanted terrorist. A number of al Qaeda commanders have been captured or killed, including Mohammed Atef, Mohammad Saleh, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Abu Zubaydah. And yet despite seven years of espionage and a $25 million reward for his capture, the mystery of bin Laden’s whereabouts persists (2). Perhaps the CIA has availed itself of every gizmo, gadget, and theory the world has ever known to bring bin Laden to justice. The public, on the other hand, has never seemed to engage wholeheartedly in the debate over the manhunt; nor, to our knowledge, has the scientific community offered up any testable hypotheses on the subject.

In informal conversations in the Geography Department at UCLA, we began to ask ourselves if the biogeographic theories we use every day – theories that predict how plants and animals distribute themselves over space and over time – employed in conjunction with publicly available satellite imagery, could shed some light on this question. The outcomes of this musing, presented below, are our thoughts and experiment. By bringing these methodologies to bear, it is our hope that a long overdue debate might bring bin Laden back to the fore of the public consciousness – and possibly to justice.

True to the scientific method, a biogeographer starts with the best information available, makes a set of assumptions, and employs theories and technologies to home in on a progressively testable hypothesis. There have been significant advances recently in biogeographic theory and remote sensing imagery that can be applied to provide testable propositions about bin Laden’s current location (3-4). Distance-decay theory and island biogeography theory are two biogeographic theories associated with the distribution of life and extinction that can be used to identify the location of bin Laden at global and regional spatial scales. Distance-decay theory states that as one goes further away from a precise location, there is an exponential decline in the turnover of species and a lower probability of finding the same composition of species (5-7). The theory of island biogeography states that large and close islands will have higher immigration rates and support more species with lower extinction rates than small isolated islands (8-9).

These theories can be applied over varying spatial scales to posit bin Laden’s current location based on his last reputed geographic location. Distance-decay theory would predict that he is closest to the point where he was last reported and, by extension, within a region that has a similar physical environment and cultural composition (that is, similar religious and political beliefs). For instance, the further he moves from his last reported location into the more secular parts of Pakistan or into India, the greater the probability that he will find himself in different cultural surroundings, thereby increasing the probability of his being captured or eliminated. Island biogeographic theory predicts that bin Laden is in a larger town rather than a smaller and more isolated town where extinction rate would be higher. Finally, high-resolution analyses of a city can be undertaken to identify individual buildings that match bin Laden’s life history characteristics. For example, he reportedly has a small entourage of body guards, requiring a structure that contains at least three rooms. (See Table 1 for a complete list of life history characteristics used to derive structural building requirements.)

The public also now has at its disposal a number of new remote sensing tools to put these theories into action to create testable hypotheses. There have been over 73 successful launches of earth-observation satellites between 2000 and 2007. Most of these satellites can be utilized by scientists to examine natural and man-made features on the earth’s surface. Although these satellites and sensors are not as high resolution as US intelligence satellites, some may be accurate enough to create working hypotheses on bin Laden’s current whereabouts.

Methods

Three spatial scale analyses (global, regional, local) were examined to identify bin Laden’s likeliest current location (10). Osama bin Laden was last seen by non-local observers in Jalalabad, Afghanistan on November 13, 2001 and, according to radio traffic, he was last heard from in a transmission from Tora Bora on November 28, 2001 (Figure 1) (11). At a global scale, we used his last known location (Tora Bora) to create distance-decay probability maps over satellite imagery (Figure 2). At a regional scale, we overlaid the distance-decay map on the city islands to identify cities with the highest probability of bin Laden’s occurrence based on island biogeography theory. At a local spatial scale, we systematically searched the city with the highest probability of occurrence – that is, the highest probability of hosting bin Laden –to identify structures that match his six life history characteristics (see Table 1). Details on all satellite imagery and method used are in Appendix 1. 17 Feb 2009

When we applied a distance-decay model to his last known location from 2001, the FATA – or Federally Administered Tribal Area – of Kurram had the highest probability of hosting bin Laden (98%) (Figure 3). There were 26 city islands within a 20-km radius of his last known location in northwestern Kurram. Parachinar figured as the largest and the fourth-least isolated city (Figure 4). Nightlight imagery also shows that Parachinar is the closest city to his last known location and by far the brightest city by nightlight intensity in Kurram (Figure 5). When we undertook a systematic building search in the city of Parachinar, this approach resulted in three structures that meet all six of them (Figure 6) and 16 structures that meet five of them.

Figure 3

The Global Scale

There are few published reports concerning bin Laden’s current global or regional location. One comes from a letter from Atiyah Abd al-Rahman to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, bin Laden’s presumed second-in-command, dated December 11, 2005 (12). It suggests that he and the al-Qaeda leadership were based in the Waziristan region of Pakistan at the time. However, it is difficult to believe that a letter would be written by such a high-ranking official giving away bin Laden’s location. Another alternative hypothesis is that he resides in the southern or northern FATAs where there is significantly greater Taliban (Afghan and Pakistani) military activity.

At a global scale, distance-decay theory suggests that Osama bin Laden’s current location is not likely to be random, and his probability of occurrence exponentially decreases the further he moves from his last known location (5-7). Our results based on his last know location in 2001 indicate that there is a 98% probability that he is in Kurram, Pakistan, and an 86.6% probability that he is within one of the seven FATAs. The FATAs have long been outside of central government control and served as reservoirs of militant Islamists working to change the governments in both Kabul and Islamabad since the 1970s. Based on his last known location in Tora Bora, we estimate that he must have traveled 3.1 km over an approximately 4,000 meter pass in winter to enter Kurram, Pakistan. Doing so would have been extremely difficult for a 44-year old man with diabetes. Kurram is surrounded on three sides by the Afghan border (known as the Durand Line), which essentially cuts right though the ethnically Pushtun belt that straddles it. It is unlikely that he would have headed back into Afghanistan after leaving Tora Bora, if only because doing so would have required him to abandon the mountains for more open countryside.

The Regional Scale

Parachinar has a long history of housing mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, so it most likely contains a large number of Taliban soldiers who cross over from here into Afghanistan. Residing near or in a large city should reduce bin Laden’s chances of exposure and elimination due to a military raid on a small city or an isolated structure. Smaller cities would greatly reduce his security and privacy, and there are only a small number of structures that appear well-protected in smaller towns (Figure 7). Nightlight imagery also reveals that Parachinar is one of the brightest cities in the FATAs after the city of Miram Shah in North Waziristan, which is 102.3 km away. Most cities there have little or no nightlight signature. The city of Peshawar has the brightest nightlight signature in the region and may soon fall to the Taliban. If Peshawar falls under Taliban control, the search for bin Laden will become significantly more difficult due to the large number of structures in that city compared to the relatively small number of structures overall in the FATAs.

The Local Scale

Based on Osama bin Laden’s life history characteristics, three buildings should be closely monitored to test the hypothesis that he is located at one of them. Structures A, B, and C are the best fortified and some of the largest residential homes or structures in the city of Parachinar. Structures A and C are residential homes, while structure B appears to be a prison. However, if it is a prison, it has one of the best-maintained gardens in all of Parachinar. There are also 16 structures that match five of bin Laden’s life history characteristics (Figure 6 and Table 2-1). If one follows our approach, one would predict that he is located in one of these three buildings. Alternatively, there is a popular perception that bin Laden is currently residing in a cave. A cave would have to have a sealed entrance, be heated and ventilated, and have supplies transported to the cave monthly or annually. We feel that most of these requirements would have physical manifestation that might easily be seen from space, and that the cave hypothesis is unlikely but could be tested.

Conclusions and Implications

Our conclusion results from applying a model that, like all other models, makes critical assumptions. What we have attempted to demonstrate is that it is possible to narrow down where Osama bin Laden is by ruling out where he is unlikely to be and by providing a scalable hypothesis that can be tested, and accepted or rejected, like any other in science. High-resolution imagery of all structures in the FATAs is currently available from a number of international commercial satellites with a 0.4 meter pixel size; however, open-access satellite images can be high enough to be a national security risk in the region (13-14). For instance, in an attempt to aid disaster relief efforts after the October 8, 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, numerous international aid agencies posted high-resolution satellite images on the web. The Pakistani government forced these images to be removed because they feared that the security of the Kashmir region might be compromised. Perhaps it is past time to embrace this technology and create a public database concerning models or hypotheses about bin Laden’s current location. The US intelligence community has at least three agencies that have been involved in searching for bin Laden. The National Security Agency does code-breaking and communications monitoring, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency makes maps and analyzes surveillance photographs, and the National Reconnaissance Office provides satellite imagery. Altogether, the US intelligence community spent over $50 billion on intelligence activities last year alone. Ideally, some of this money should have been spent looking for bin Laden and the US intelligence community could make public a report based on all data collected from 2001 to 2006. The three agencies mentioned above should also disprove the hypotheses that Osama bin Laden is: (1) located in the Kurram region of Pakistan, (2) located in the city of Parachinar, and (3) at one of the three hypothesized buildings. These methods are repeatable and could easily be updated with new information obtained from the US intelligence community on his last known location.

from: MIT International Review, 17 Feb. 2009

$27,000,000.00 Reward

The Rewards For Justice Program (RFJ), United States Department of State, is offering a reward of up to $25 million for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of Usama Bin Laden. An additional $2 million is being offered through a program developed and funded by the Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association.

IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION CONCERNING THIS PERSON, PLEASE CONTACT THE NEAREST AMERICAN EMBASSY OR CONSULATE (OR THE FBI)

Islamabad, Pakistan

American Embassy: 011-92-51-208-0000

Kabul, Afghanistan

American Embassy: 301-490-1042

USA Toll-free number: 1-800-US-REWARDS

Email: RFJ@state.gov

What if a source risks his/her life to provide information on a terrorist and then he/she finds that his/her life is in danger? Can RFJ provide protection?

Confidentiality is a cornerstone of the RFJ program. RFJ keeps strictly confidential the identity of anyone who provides information in response to a reward offer and/or who receives a reward payment. In addition, relocation may be available for a source and his/her family, but these matters would have to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Anyone who provides actionable information that will either help us prevent or favorably resolve acts of international terrorism against the U.S. anywhere in the world may potentially be eligible for a reward.

Recent Bin Laden Sighting

A Taliban detainee claims to have information about Osama Bin Laden's location in January or February of 2009.

"In 2009, in January or February I met this friend of mine. He said he had come from meeting Sheikh Osama, and he could arrange for me to meet him," he said.

"He helps al-Qaeda people coming from other countries to get to the sheikh, so he can advise them on whatever they are planning for Europe or other places.

"The sheikh doesn't stay in any one place. That guy came from Ghazni, so I think that's where the sheikh was."

"What my associate told me was that he is fresh, and doing well," he said.

"The information I have is that he provides training to special people. There are training centres in homes, and all the teachers are first trained by the Sheikh. Then they go and teach the classes."

Ghazni (Pashto: غزني) (Persian: غزنی) is one of the thirty-four provinces of Afghanistan. It is in the east of the country. Its capital is Ghazni City. The province lies on the important Kabul to Kandahar road, and has historically functioned as an important trade center between those two major cities.

The major ethnic groups in the province are Pashtuns (51%), and Persian speaking Hazaras and Tajiks (47%).[8] There are also some Burki, and Uzbeks.

Events

Lee Vining Ice Climbing – February 6 – 7, 2010

The California Mountaineering Group is hosting an ice climbing trip to Lee Vining Canyon February 6^th and 7^th. The contact is: tombcronin@yahoo.com. Space may be available in room 50 at the Lake View Lodge, or make your own arrangements in Lee Vining. Full shank boots are recommended with twelve point crampons. Ice tools can be shared. Don’t miss the Mammoth Double Nut beer Saturday night at the Tiger Bar in June Lake.

Journal Information

Published by the “California Mountaineering Group”

Library of Congress: “Journal of Mountaineering”

ISSN: 1948-9110 (print), 1948-9129 (online)

Subscribe (join this group): http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JMTN/

Submissions: JMTN-owner@yahoogroups.com

Back Issues: www.journalofmountaineering.com

Disclaimer:

The Journal disclaims all responsibility or liability and does not guarantee, warrant, lend credibility, or endorse any product, service, or information mentioned; reader beware.