BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - A problem with deep-sixing pirates....

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On Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:15:04 -0500, wrote:

On Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:15:58 -0800, wrote:

It was 31 miles from Pakistan and we are not sure Bin L:aden was
actually in Tora Bora. He may have already slipped away.

Actually, we are. He was sighted by one of the US troops on the
ground.. I believe I saw an interview with the guy on 60 minutes (or
similar).

They saw someone they identified as Bin Laden before the attack, but
we are not sure how fast he got out.

Fast enough I guess.

It certainly takes longer to fly from the US to Afghanistan than it
takes for a motivated squad to hump 31 miles, even those troops were
sitting on the tarmac with the engines warmed up.

Yet, if we had the troops there in the country, they wouldn't have had
to fly from the US.

I bet that sounded reasonable at the time.

The real problem was the original plan counted on help from the locals
and that worked fine until we got to a place where the locals liked
Bin Laden better than they liked us. 50,000 troops and 10 years has
not done much to control that area but you think Bush had a magic
bullet in his gun he could have deployed in a week or two.

If we had had the troops there, we wouldn't have needed the locals.

There was no way to get that many troops there in the time we had,
that was why we used locals.
It was working until we ran out of friendly locals.

Yes, there was. If we had started the deployment with more, we would
have had more. In time for what? There was a big delay anyway.

We were trying to do this without an invasion of Afghanistan. Time has
shown the original plan was the better option. There has been very
little to show for a 10 year war there.

?? WHAT? Rumsfeld was advised about how many it would take to do the
job. He IGNORED the advice. He decided that he wanted a small
military, and he got it.

Yes we should have "let him go" after Tora Bora. He would have popped
up somewhere and we could have had another shot at him.
We just drove him deeper under cover.

?? We DID let him go. Rumsfeld blew it.