"At the end of November, Crumpton went to the White House to brief President Bush and Vice President [Dick] Cheney and repeated the message that he had delivered to Franks," the report said. "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 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."
But the Iraq-obsessed Bush still didn't act. Finally, in mid-December 2001, the small U.S. Special Forces team convinced the Afghan militia fighters to undertake a sweep of the mountainous terrain, but they found it largely deserted.
The Senate report said bin Laden and his bodyguards apparently departed Tora Bora on Dec. 16, 2001, adding: "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 (of the Afghan invasion) 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."
Bush, however, was following the advice of Washington's neocons who considered Afghanistan essentially a sideshow with the main event awaiting in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, in vanquishing Israel's enemies.
So, for the next seven years, U.S. forces in Afghanistan had to make do with the limited attention of Washington while the Bush administration obsessed over Iraq.
The narrative of that reversal of fortune in Afghanistan as the undermanned occupying troops saw their advantage lost to a resurgent resistance can be found in the 75,000 classified reports published by Wikileaks.
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