As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on December 21, 2009:

By Peter Feaver

It is not every day that one gets a chance to rattle the cage of the boss, so when I read the contribution from ForeignPolicy.com czarina Susan Glasser to the Washington Post’s compilation of “worst ideas of the decade” I knew I had to respond — even if it means I can kiss my year-end bonus good-bye.

Glasser’s argument is the conventional wisdom, painstakingly assembled over years of partisan arm-chair generalship: if only the United States had deployed more ground troops into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, we may have killed or captured the al Qaeda leadership at Tora Bora. Grumbling about the Tora Bora mission could be heard within hours of the battle, but got much louder during the 2004 campaign when Senator Kerry made it a standard attack line. The failure to tamp down violence in Iraq after the fall of Saddam served to further fan the flames of this critique — too-light-a-footprint caused us troubles in Iraq and that “proves” we had too light a footprint in Afghanistan. This fall, the critique got revived when Senator Kerry’s committee published a report which purports to validate the argument.

My problem with the Tora Bora critique — both its generalized form and the particular form advanced by Glasser — is that it conveniently forgets that the reason bin Laden was “trapped” in Tora Bora in the first place is that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks and CIA Director George Tenet defied both the conventional war plans and the conventional wisdom to mount the very light-footprint campaign that Glasser et al. are complaining about. If Rumsfeld and Franks and Tenet had used the conventional warplan that involved a heavy U.S. ground presence  instead of the rapidly deployable light-footprint that Glasser denounces, the invasion of Afghanistan would have happened some time in 2002, if then.  If Rumsfeld and Franks and Tenet had listened to the conventional wisdom during the early weeks when the light-footprint approach appeared to be faltering, they would have abandoned the Afghan effort long before the battle in Tora Bora.

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