POTUS again repeated his claim that we should have gotten Bin Laden sooner, so here’s a brief thread on what actually went down and the effort spent going after UBL.
UBL officially appeared in (very few) JSOC targeting folders around the mid 90s. This is contextually important. After Mogadishu, DOD — and the American people — had no appetite for boots on the ground. Anywhere.
Nevertheless, JSOC began planning for an operation to kill or capture UBL. During these days, he periodically used a satellite phone, so we knew he traveled between one of his homes in Tarnak Farms (near Kandahar) and a training camp in Khost.
Even though we picked up occasional phone calls from UBL, he was notorious for operational security (OPSEC); he never said when he would be at a specific location, and was sometimes reported in multiple locations at once.
It’s also important to point out that, at this time, UBL was still a relatively low value target. JSOC wanted to go in with a small footprint and ambush him between Tarnak Farms and Khost. The risk-averse environment of the nation post-Mogadishu meant this never happened.
To be clear, this was not a “Clinton” problem. It was everywhere. “We can’t have another Somalia” was an attitude that permeated the military and government.
Then the Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania were bombed and UBL was found to be responsible.
Then the Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania were bombed and UBL was found to be responsible.
Americans have long suffered from the “over there” mentality, so while we were collectively outraged about the bombings, we still had no appetite for boots on the ground, and we sent cruise missiles to two targets.
Cruise missiles are great against buildings and other fixed targets. Things that move? Not so much. We missed UBL and tipped him off that he was a wanted man. He quit using his sat phone and became even more fanatical about OPSEC.
Around this point, UBL became a no-shit target and we spent a lot of time and resources looking for him between the cruise missile strikes in 98 and the USS Cole bombing in 2000. He would pop up, again, sometimes in multiple places, then disappear again.
The threat reporting went nuts with non-specific chatter during the period after the Cole bombing to around August of 2001. We knew something was coming, but not what. Then? Nothing. Radio silence. We found out why on 9/11 and the rest, as they say, is history.
This thread is already longer than I intended, so I won’t get into Tora Bora and the aftermath of 9/11, but suffice to say, between publicly reported operations and ops that are still classified, UBL was our most important target from 1998-2011.
Were mistakes made? Absolutely. We had far too few sources in Afghanistan pre-9/11 to develop any kind of situational awareness. We didn’t know how bad he would turn out to be, but to say “Clinton missed his shot” is a crock of shit.
