Afgan partners drew their weapons on Delta force.
“Officer: Best Plan To Kill Osama Was Nixed
Wants To Set The Record Straight On The 2001 Hunt For Bin Laden At Tora Bora
(CBS) The man who led the Pentagon’s mission to kill Osama bin Laden says the Afghan allies he was forced to use may have undermined his operation. He also tells correspondent Scott Pelley his superiors scuttled the most effective plan of attack against the al Qaeda leader.
The former Delta Force officer, who uses the pseudonym “Dalton Fury,” tells his story for the first time on 60 Minutes, this Sunday, Oct. 5, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Ten weeks after 9/11, Fury and a team of U.S. Army Delta Force soldiers joined CIA operatives and Afghan fighters known as mujahideen under the command of a warlord named General Hazrat Ali, to whom the CIA paid millions in cash. The Americans and Afghans pursued bin Laden and an estimated 1,000 al Qaeda fighters into the Tora Bora Mountains, near the border with Pakistan. The U.S. strategy, says Fury, was to let Afghan allies do most of the fighting, while U.S. Special Operations Forces directed air strikes and provided support.
The problem, according to Fury, was that Ali’s mujahideen would attack up the mountain by day and retreat at night, giving up territory they’d won. Today, Fury wonders whether some of the supposedly friendly Afghans were really conspiring with al Qaeda. “The mujahideen would go up and get into a skirmish…lose a guy or two, maybe kill an al-Qaeda guy or two and then they leave…almost like it was an agreement…Put on a good show and then leave,” recalls Fury, a retired Army major.”
Think of this when you hear the strategically idiotic utterances of Obama that in going into Iraq we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan. With an allied Iraq we can deal, if we also take away the oil weapon, with Bin Laden in Pakistan. It would be much harder without Iraq on our side. No one has ever tamed Afghanistan as an entity, for thousands of years. Without a center of gravity in Iraq, getting Afghanistan under control will be extremely difficult.