Fight The Hypo

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get through some personal reading this Christmas break. I did finish the first book on my shelf, Jawbreaker by Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzulo. The subtitle is The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander. Reading it today, two years after publication and six years after Tora Bora, I’d title it “Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden: How Bureaucratic Nonsense Let Our Nation’s Number One Enemy Slip Away.”

Let me preface the rest of my post by saying that I never know what to make of these kinds of books. They are written by men far braver and far smarter than I. Though it seems that every quote fits perfectly with the story, makes the author look good, and mistakes are glossed over or they are the kinds of weaknesses one employs in a job interview (e.g. sometimes I push too hard when the people around me aren’t ready for the kind of change we need to get the job done). So, in a way the book seems to gloss over whatever weaknesses (if any) the author - a twenty year CIA veteran and national hero - might have.

That said, the book is awesome. And infuriating. And enlightening.

“Jawbreaker” is the team that was in Afghanistan coordinating much of the war on the ground there following 9/11. They interfaced with our Afghan allies, gathered and processed intelligence, called in air strikes. These guys are bad asses through and through. In that way, the book shows how an aggressive enterprising intelligence operative with resources and autonomy can really get the job done. At several points in the book, press reports are cited quoting President Bush and others as saying the war was a biggest bargain in history. I don’t doubt it.

What the book makes clear is that as the dust began to settle and it really came down to deciding where power would reside and, more importantly for the United States, how to get bin Laden, bureaucracy started to grind the hunt to a halt. So Jawbreaker had a several small teams in the mountains around the cave complex at Tora Bora. Working with local guides they evaded capture and guided bombing missions into the area where bin Laden had holed up with his army. At that point, the Army refused to drop personnel in on the opposite side of the mountains along the Pakistan border in order to cut off escape routes.

The Afghan forces (a collection of warlords and their men and dubbed the Eastern Alliance) were the primary ground force there. But the siege was occurring during Ramadan. So the men would leave the lines in the evening to go home to break the day-long fast, sleep at home, and return in the morning. They were not advancing. There was intelligence that some were taking money from al-Qaeda. They were even trying to negotiate with bin Laden. (Note: Berntsen’s response to the Afghan request to sit down with bin Lade was quite literally, “drop dead”).

Our reliance on the Afghan tribes and warlords is the primary criticism of the American siege on Tora Bora. By my untrained eye, the criticism is fair and unfair. They were invaluable allies for much of the war and I thought it wise at the time to consider the sensibilities of the people of the region to sizable foreign (”infidel”) force on their land, particularly in the Pushtun areas to which bin Laden and the Taliban fled. Berntsen suggests (and certainly felt this way himself) that we shouldn’t care about their opinion when we’re trying to win a war. I would go a step further and suggest that a moderately sized American force could have gotten us out of that area with bin Laden in two in far less time than we stuck around trying to bomb him out. Still, I can understand the rationale for not sending a battalion of Army Rangers to the base of Tora Bora.

What I can’t understand, is how the Army let bin Laden get away. The CIA was there listening to him on the radio talking to his army. He was there!! Yet, we were unwilling to put American boots on the ground to either (a) make sure he stayed there or (b) finished him off once and for all. We had the information, we didn’t act on it.By many accounts, Afghanistan is a success. There are many challenges today. But the war until Tora Bora was a huge success. Then, the bureaucracy started taking over. Chains of command, rules of engagement, personal agendas. All crap. This book makes me angry, but it’s one of the best accounts of the CIA’s role in a conflict that I’ve read.

I highly recommend it.