By Manny Otiko
Much digital ink has been spilled over the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. There have been countless documentaries about it, and even a big-budget Hollywood movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” which was later criticized for taking liberties with the truth for the sake of better cinema. But one question that hasn’t been answered is why did the United States, the most technologically-advanced military power in human history, take so long finding him in the first place? President George W. Bush quickly went from bragging about finding him “dead or alive,” to declaring he didn’t care where he was.
It seems the Bush administration did indeed give up looking for bin Laden, at one point shuttering the CIA unit dedicated to tracking him down. But the question is why? Conspiracy theorists would point to the deep ties between the Bushes and the Saud family which rules Saudi Arabia. (This has been documented in Craig Unger’s book “House of Bush, House of Saud.”) They argue that the bin Laden family, who were favorites of the Saudi royal family, used their connections to the Bush family to “encourage” the U.S. government to not try too hard to find their wayward brother, Osama. According to an article by Denver Post columnist Cindy Rodriguez, several Bin Laden family members invested in The Carlisle Group, where former President George H.W. Bush sat on the board. After 9/11 he stepped down. A few days after the attack, the Bush White House allowed a plane to pick up several prominent Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, and leave the country without being interrogated by the FBI.
This might seem like something from Alex Jones, but noone has answered why U.S. forces didn’t get reinforcements when they had Bin Laden cornered at Tora Bora in 2001. Former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, who was one of the first on the ground in Afghanistan, describes this in detail in his book “Jawbreaker.” Berntsen says U.S. commanders asked for support, but were told to let Afghan forces, many who had fought alongside bin Laden against the Soviets, do the job. Bin Laden managed to slip across the border into Pakistan. However, if U.S. forces had killed or captured bin Laden in 2001, there would have been no excuse for an extended stay in Afghanistan or the eventual invasion of Iraq.
Col. (rtd.) Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Sec. of State Colin Powell, said the real reason for the failure to capture bin Laden is simple government incompetence.
“I think it was much more mundane,” Wilkerson said. “All agencies/departments—intel, military, law enforcement–were coming up empty, running into dead ends, and generally falling short. So, the political leaders decided to play down bin Laden, in speeches and in press conferences. In essence, they wanted to make their failure to find him look like it was not very important, simply by saying that they were not really focused on him and did not really care because he was no longer important.”
However, when Sen. Barack Obama was elected president he seemed to bring new focus to the hunt for bin Laden. According to Wilkerson, he also got lucky.
“First, on the luck side, he put some players in place who were serious players, and left one who was: Bob Gates at Defense,” Wilkerson said “I’m not a huge fan of Bob, but he does know how to take orders and then fulfill them. When the president told him to get bin Laden, he acted. We got lucky when a series of incidents gelled and demonstrated fairly successfully that bin Laden was alive and at least a 60 percent chance in Pakistan at a specific location. By the way, none of these incidents were accurately portrayed in ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ the movie. Hollywood sacrificed accuracy–if it indeed ever possessed it–for shoot-em-up, torture-filled, red-blooded American hype.”
Wilkerson also said Obama ordered the American military and intelligence agencies focus more on Afghanistan, instead of Iraq, a war he opposed.
“Early on in his first term, Obama prioritized Afghanistan over Iraq and escalated the U.S. presence in that country, by extension more focused attention fell on Pakistan, one of the real keys to the conflict in Afghanistan,” Wilkerson said. “Thus, that attention helped consolidate the intelligence, fix the location, and led to the ultimate decision by the president to act on that data.”
Albert Goldson, executive director of Indo-Brazilian Associates, LLC, a global advisory firm that provides cross-cultural training and security risk assessment for executives, said the decision to not quickly capture bin Laden and smash Al-Qaeda was a long-term strategic move.
“If the U.S. knew where bin Laden was and could either capture or kill him, it would have been a terrific public relations coup, yet it would not have served our long-term security interests,” said Goldson, who is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and a former Department of Homeland Security officer. “Whether or not the US knew the location of bin Laden, it was more important to construct, through painstaking intel gathering, how Al-Qaeda operates, its dynamics, its leaders, its henchmen, its players, their relationships with other militant organizations, funding and arms sources and with other governments even those of our allies. This is the same method used to understand, undermine and eventually eliminate criminal organizations through informational leveraging. Immediately removing bin Laden from Al-Qaeda would have forced them to reorganize thus changing the dynamics dramatically making future assessments more difficult.”
Goldson said by the time Obama entered the White House, surveillance technology had improved considerably, which also aided the hunt for bin Laden.
“One overwhelmingly important component was that surveillance technology had grown exponentially since 9/11, particularly with the advent of drones,” Goldson said. “With respect to the human factor, it took several years since 9/11 to develop deeper and better relations with those parties in that region who were willing to provide useful intel whether through monetary or political incentives.”
According to Goldson, the decision to let Afghan forces capture bin Laden at Tora Bora was made to not offend local sensibilities in a part of the world where Americans were not popular.
“From the political perspective, there’s animosity towards the West by every ethnic group in that region,” Goldson said. “If a regional militia were to go after bin Laden, it would be viewed as an internal squabble. Militarily, a U.S. operation would have been viewed as nothing more than a Western assassination squad with a blatant disregard of national sovereignty, particularly that of a Muslim nation, and exacerbated if a U.S. soldier was killed or captured.”
Michael Embrich, who served as an airman aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt in Iraq and Afghanistan, said bin Laden was able to elude capture for years because he had Pakistani help.
“Many Pakistani officers visited my ship,” Embrich said. “Those who did speak English informed us about his escape. Keep in mind, Afghanistan in 2001 was nothing like Afghanistan now, in many ways. But we didn’t have the infrastructure to track anything down then. Plus, we were relying heavily on Pakistani support, which changed after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and as Pakistan fell further in to instability. It came to a pinnacle after bin Laden was captured and it was clear to most that ISI, Pakistani intelligence, was protecting bin Laden.”
Embrich said bin Laden likely relied on Pakistani help to escape Tora Bora in 2001.
“Looking back at it, Pakistan probably just let bin Laden cross the border,” Embrich said. “According to a primary source document from January of 2012, Osama bin Laden’s youngest wife, Amal Ahmad Abdul Fatah, claims that except for the eight or nine months just after 9/11, bin Laden skipped from home to home in Peshawar, Swat, and Haripur, finally settling in Abbottabad for about the last six years of his life.”
Embrich said Obama’s team also figured out some of the things done by the George W. Bush administration weren’t working.
“I think the sins of the past administration more than anything led to Obama’s success. The Obama administration learned from Bush mistakes,” Embrich said. “Don’t trust the Pakistanis to do this with our military. By the time Obama took over, it was the worst-kept secret in Pakistan that bin Laden was living there. His staff even burned his garbage for a long time, with neighbors saying nothing to Pakistani authorities. Or Pakistani authorities ignoring them.”
However, Wilkerson says even if bin Laden had been captured or killed in 2001, the Iraq war would have still happened. Apparently, members of the George W. Bush administration were hellbent on returning to Iraq, which they saw as unfinished business.
“First, we were going to war with Iraq regardless, even without 9/11 (it would have been harder of course but Cheney would have tried just as hard),” Wilkerson said. “Second, immediately after 9/11, Rumsfeld wanted to do Afghanistan but because of DOD foot-dragging and CIA’s being prepositioned, CIA got there first and was the real agent in that war. So Rumsfeld had been tepid on Iraq until he failed to get his due in Afghanistan; then he became all for Iraq. As a consequence, he ordered Gen. Tommy Franks to start planning for Iraq in November 2001. But what really caused the screw up that let bin Laden escape was typical DOD and White House bureaucracy–both simply could not act swiftly enough to comply with battlefield requests. Rumsfeld in particular was lazy in his monitoring of the battlefield, because he wasn’t ‘in the lead,’ CIA was.”
Wilkerson also made a depressing point about the post-9/11 world.
“The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) would have gone on in any event because it is making tons of money for the Military-Industrial-Terrorist complex. In fact, the GWOT will probably never end,” Wilkerson said. “And the point is that the GWOT is interminable war, a boon for so many corporations, for the executive branch, and for wealthy people everywhere. As Madison wrote, the condition most conducive to tyranny is war and interminable war is, in fact, tyranny.”
