Franks Carpetbombs Kerry

As a student of military history, few things have irritated me as badly as John Kerry's consistent spinning of the campaign in Tora Bora as a mistake by the President.

I'll be charitable, and call it a "misstatement" on Kerry's part. But it's a misstatement on which he needs to be held accountable.

US, British, Australian, Danish, Norwegian and German special forces led an army of Afghans into the mountains of the Tora Bora to flush out the remnants of the Taliban and Al Quaeda that had fled the fall of the rest of the country. According to Kerry, we should have waited for the regular US military - the troops of the 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne, mainly - to arrive on the scene.

"The scene" being a place to which few people are acclimatized, the jagged peaks and arid plateux of the Hindu Kush, much of the area over 10,000 feet above sea level. It's a brutal place under any circumstances; nearly devoid of roads, it defies conventional military operations, as the Soviets found to their chagrin 20 years ago. Helicopters don't perform well; trucks and tanks flounder without roads; mens' physical performance is grossly impaired until they are acclimated to the area. Kerry's blandishments about "outsourcing" the operation and shunning the "best trained troops in the world" is pure illiteracy; well-trained as they are, the US regulars didn't know the area, they weren't acclimated to fighting in the environment yet, the area was not conducive to regular military operations, and the locals, led by the Special Forces, were the right troops at the right place at the right time.

Tommy Franks - who led the campaigns in both Afghanistan and Iraq as commander of Central Command - hammers Kerry's half-baked assertion in a NYTimes Op-Ed today. I've added emphasis in places:

First, take Mr. Kerry's contention that we "had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden" and that "we had him surrounded." We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. 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.

Second, we did not "outsource" military action. We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora, a mountainous, geographically difficult region on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is where Afghan mujahedeen holed up for years, keeping alive their resistance to the Soviet Union. Killing and capturing Taliban and Qaeda fighters was best done by the Afghan fighters who already knew the caves and tunnels.

Third, the Afghans weren't left to do the job alone. Special forces from the United States and several other countries were there, providing tactical leadership and calling in air strikes. Pakistani troops also provided significant help - as many as 100,000 sealed the border and rounded up hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Surely Kerry knows how he's mischaracterizing the operations in Tora Bora; certainly his entire campaign staff can't be illiterate about military history. Right?

But Democrats as a group tend to be profoundly illiterate on the topic. And it's them that Kerry is aiming at - the vast, teeming hordes of well-meaning Democrats who dont' know the difference between an F-16 and an M-16, the people who think Von Clausewitz is a brand of mineral water, people for whom "strategy" and "tactics" are interchangeable; the uninformed.

That's the depressing part - realizing how much, indeed, of Kerry's campaign is built on spreading disinformation to the uninformed. Disinformation about the draft, about social security, about the tax cuts and the economy, about Tora Bora...

...and, indeed, about the entire war on terror.

And they are the ones to whom Franks' last line is directed:

The war against terrorism is the right war at the right time for the right reasons. And Iraq is one of the places that war must be fought and won. George W. Bush has his eye on that ball and Senator John Kerry does not.

The truth is out there. Amazingly, it's in the Times this morning.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: I forgot - there were also Canadian special forces involved.

Posted by Mitch at October 19, 2004 07:51 AM | TrackBack