President Kennedy said of the Bay of Pigs “victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan”. That describes the recent failure of a rescue attempt in Afghanistan last month which we wrote about last week recounting the story from our buddy Susan Katz Keating in AMI Newswire. Today she writes that blame for the failure is lost in the finger pointing between the White House and the Pentagon.
The rescue at issue is the attempt to save two English language instructors from the American University of Kabul, American Kevin King and Australian Kevin Weeks, who were captured at gunpoint on August 7th outside of the Afghanistan capital.
A U.S. special operations team was flown into position to mount a rescue on Aug. 10, but President Barack Obama did not give his final approval. Twenty-four hours later, Obama reviewed the “decision documents” and authorized the raid.
Descending via high-altitude parachute drop, the American commandos landed on the night of Aug, 11 near their objective: a makeshift prison compound guarded by armed men. Under the cover of darkness, the commandos breached the outer walls.
“We raised hell in that compound,” one person with direct knowledge of the raid said. “We knocked down walls and killed bad guys.”
As they climbed through the openings in the walls, U.S. forces traded shots with hostile fighters, leaving seven defenders dead and one wounded, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed. Among its many duties, CENTCOM is the Pentagon’s Unified Combatant Command in charge of operations in Afghanistan.
“No civilians were killed or harmed,” said Col. John J. Thomas, the CENTCOM Director of Public Affairs. “No U.S. forces were killed or hurt.”
Nor were the teachers rescued – they were gone just four hours before the operators dropped on the target.
The disagreement comes in the events of August 10th leading up to the cancelled mission – when the teachers were at the target. The Pentagon claims that they gave all of the information that the president would need to approve the mission in a timely manner, but the National Security Council staff disagrees.
“On the first night in question, the decision never reached the President to make a decision,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an email. “The fact of the matter is the President was never presented with a decision document that day.”
However, U.S. sources with knowledge of the mission said they heard a radio message that contained words to this effect: “The President can’t make time on his schedule to give the go-ahead.”
So when the operators jumped off on the 11th, King and Weeks had been moved from the target compound just four hours earlier. According to Keating, the president’s schedule included a round of golf on the 10th, although it’s not clear what exactly he was doing when the mission briefing arrived at the Martha’s Vineyard compound.
I can’t help but think of Lyndon Johnson picking targets for B-52 strikes in North Vietnam from the basement of the White House. If the President wants to win this war, he’s going to have to get his hands out of the planning.
