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Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail
Details how Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda fighters slipped out of Afghanistan during the battles of Tora Bora and Operation Anaconda. The author also charges that Western media outlets, eager to satisfy their audience’s thirst for revenge, lost their grasp on journalistic objectivity while covering bin Laden’s pursuit. Blinding patriotism and reliance on Pentagon press releases led them to portray events not reflecting reality on the ground. He contends that to satisfy the press and the public’s need for vengeance, the Bush administration pushed to achieve early, highly visible successes to the detriment of long-term strategy. Impatience at the top forced a rush into a war aimed primarily at “regime change,” which left the U.S. military largely empty-handed.
272 pages, Paperback
First published April 8, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 27, 2011
I was shocked to see no previous ratings or reviews at all of this book on Goodreads. At the same time (Nov 2011), there were three-quarter of million ratings for Twilight, and 65,000 reviews. Just sayin'.
Before I started this book, I remarked to my wife, “Now that Bin Laden's finally dead, I feel that I can read this book without getting a tremendous headache. But it seems like it is probably irrelevant.”
My wife said: “When everyone is ignoring a book, that's the time to read it.”
What a wise woman she is! Perhaps now it is finally possible to express skepticism of the effectiveness of the response of the George W. Bush administration to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. You can no longer be accused of endangering freedom fighters or undermining the morale of the U.S. and its allies, so the damage to your U.S. Transportation Safety Administration profile will probably be minimal.
Of course, it is still highly unfashionable to read messy primary source material on anything, what with the annoying ability of eyewitness testimony to be ambiguous, inconclusive, or (in the worst case) contradictory to preconceived notions. This part-memoir, part-journalism narrative, written by an American reporter for The Daily Telegraph of London and The Christian Science Monitor zigzagging around the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001, is no exception. The fog of war practically wafts out of the book as it sits on your table.
However, there are moments of clarity. Osama Bin Laden flees into the Afghanistan's mountainous Tora Bora border region after the autumn 2001 campaign by the American-supported Northern Alliance sweeps through the rest of the country. Since maintaining your high popularity-poll ratings by appearing clever on Sunday-morning political chat shows at home is clearly a higher priority than either the safety of U.S. soldiers and their allies or the successful capture/death of OBL himself, then-Vice President Dick Cheney (and others) must reveal US knowledge of Bin Laden's whereabouts to the media, allowing OBL ample time to flee with a large entourage of armed protectors.
Similar lunatic logic means that, immediately afterward, OBL's escape must then be denied by the same villains. Against both logic and circumstantial evidence, the thinnest reeds of hope are thrashed and snatched at (e.g., a tall man spotted walking the paths of Tora Bora must be OBL, a voice in radio chatted “sounds like” OBL) to justify continued futile operations, which inevitably result in American casualties.
Smucker reminds us that, to make a really impressive disaster, it helps to have journalists on the scene. Late-arriving Western news organization pay the equivalent of a year's average salary for the rental of hovels with no indoor plumbing. Meanwhile, Geraldo Rivera comes in for a good thrashing, although Smucker cannot deny his bravery. Smucker also envies female journalists who use their physical attractiveness to get their story, but he more or less admits that he'd do the same if he could.
However, it's not all after-the-fact I-told-you-so. After OBL's disappearance from Tora Bora was admitted by everyone but those whose paycheck derived from denying the obvious, there was a less famous but perhaps more significant military action in early 2002 known as Operation Anaconda, which merits its own long set-piece toward the end of this book. Like Tora Bora, this battle also features unnecessary suffering and death due to the unrealistic expectations of top military decision-makers, for example, grossly underestimating the number of opponent combatants on the field. But Smucker concludes that the persistence and bravery of the soldiers on the ground went a long way toward convincing Al Qaeda rank-and-file that the U.S. military, and by extension the U.S. itself, was not actually a hopeless decadent institution that would crumble when faced with genuine combat.
The Kindle edition of this book is lacking page numbers and riddled with typos/misspellings. Concerning the typos/misspellings (example: a chapter subhead Gloom and Doom at Ten Thousand Feeth), it is impossible for me to tell if they are present in the print edition or a result of unmindful conversion into electronic format.
At the time of its publication, this book got a positive review in the Washington Post.
It also got a tepid review in Armchair General magazine. I found that the criticisms leveled at Smucker in this review were pretty lame. For example, when Smucker is compelled to conduct interviews in person with the help of an interpreter (who later went on to become the personal interpreter of the U.S. Ambassador in Kabul), the reviewer accuses Smucker of relying on “second-hand knowledge”. The reviewer says the Smucker is “awkward with military equipment and technology”, but provides no example of mistakes or misleading information in the book. Finally, the reviewer says that the book “would have benefitted from more on-the-scene reporting”, which is simply a jaw-droppingly ridiculous accusation, considering the time and energy that Smucker spent putting himself in harm's way. But, after all, the name of the publication is Armchair General.
I assume that this is a case of both publications pandering to their respective readerships, meaning, Chardonnay-drinking, hate-America-first, liberal surrender monkeys and multiple-chinned, inadequately-socialized, Fox News-addled know-nothings, respectively.
Before I started this book, I remarked to my wife, “Now that Bin Laden's finally dead, I feel that I can read this book without getting a tremendous headache. But it seems like it is probably irrelevant.”
My wife said: “When everyone is ignoring a book, that's the time to read it.”
What a wise woman she is! Perhaps now it is finally possible to express skepticism of the effectiveness of the response of the George W. Bush administration to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. You can no longer be accused of endangering freedom fighters or undermining the morale of the U.S. and its allies, so the damage to your U.S. Transportation Safety Administration profile will probably be minimal.
Of course, it is still highly unfashionable to read messy primary source material on anything, what with the annoying ability of eyewitness testimony to be ambiguous, inconclusive, or (in the worst case) contradictory to preconceived notions. This part-memoir, part-journalism narrative, written by an American reporter for The Daily Telegraph of London and The Christian Science Monitor zigzagging around the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001, is no exception. The fog of war practically wafts out of the book as it sits on your table.
However, there are moments of clarity. Osama Bin Laden flees into the Afghanistan's mountainous Tora Bora border region after the autumn 2001 campaign by the American-supported Northern Alliance sweeps through the rest of the country. Since maintaining your high popularity-poll ratings by appearing clever on Sunday-morning political chat shows at home is clearly a higher priority than either the safety of U.S. soldiers and their allies or the successful capture/death of OBL himself, then-Vice President Dick Cheney (and others) must reveal US knowledge of Bin Laden's whereabouts to the media, allowing OBL ample time to flee with a large entourage of armed protectors.
Similar lunatic logic means that, immediately afterward, OBL's escape must then be denied by the same villains. Against both logic and circumstantial evidence, the thinnest reeds of hope are thrashed and snatched at (e.g., a tall man spotted walking the paths of Tora Bora must be OBL, a voice in radio chatted “sounds like” OBL) to justify continued futile operations, which inevitably result in American casualties.
Smucker reminds us that, to make a really impressive disaster, it helps to have journalists on the scene. Late-arriving Western news organization pay the equivalent of a year's average salary for the rental of hovels with no indoor plumbing. Meanwhile, Geraldo Rivera comes in for a good thrashing, although Smucker cannot deny his bravery. Smucker also envies female journalists who use their physical attractiveness to get their story, but he more or less admits that he'd do the same if he could.
However, it's not all after-the-fact I-told-you-so. After OBL's disappearance from Tora Bora was admitted by everyone but those whose paycheck derived from denying the obvious, there was a less famous but perhaps more significant military action in early 2002 known as Operation Anaconda, which merits its own long set-piece toward the end of this book. Like Tora Bora, this battle also features unnecessary suffering and death due to the unrealistic expectations of top military decision-makers, for example, grossly underestimating the number of opponent combatants on the field. But Smucker concludes that the persistence and bravery of the soldiers on the ground went a long way toward convincing Al Qaeda rank-and-file that the U.S. military, and by extension the U.S. itself, was not actually a hopeless decadent institution that would crumble when faced with genuine combat.
The Kindle edition of this book is lacking page numbers and riddled with typos/misspellings. Concerning the typos/misspellings (example: a chapter subhead Gloom and Doom at Ten Thousand Feeth), it is impossible for me to tell if they are present in the print edition or a result of unmindful conversion into electronic format.
At the time of its publication, this book got a positive review in the Washington Post.
It also got a tepid review in Armchair General magazine. I found that the criticisms leveled at Smucker in this review were pretty lame. For example, when Smucker is compelled to conduct interviews in person with the help of an interpreter (who later went on to become the personal interpreter of the U.S. Ambassador in Kabul), the reviewer accuses Smucker of relying on “second-hand knowledge”. The reviewer says the Smucker is “awkward with military equipment and technology”, but provides no example of mistakes or misleading information in the book. Finally, the reviewer says that the book “would have benefitted from more on-the-scene reporting”, which is simply a jaw-droppingly ridiculous accusation, considering the time and energy that Smucker spent putting himself in harm's way. But, after all, the name of the publication is Armchair General.
I assume that this is a case of both publications pandering to their respective readerships, meaning, Chardonnay-drinking, hate-America-first, liberal surrender monkeys and multiple-chinned, inadequately-socialized, Fox News-addled know-nothings, respectively.
December 6, 2009
Well-researched and written pretty well, this book does a lot better job than the mainstream media did in reporting the goings-on in Afghanistan (and the region) in the days, weeks and months after 9/11. Of course, Smucker had more time to tell the story and to tell it right. He seems to have acheived that. Another anger-inducing tale from the time period, well worth your time.
Want to Read
December 27, 2016I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14337693
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14337693
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews