Mattis had a plan to capture bin Laden in Tora Bora and was not allowed to implement

Jamie McIntyre:

Legendary military commander retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis is on a whirlwind publicity tour promoting his book Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, which he co-authored with Bing West. Washington Examiner senior writer Jamie McIntyre covered Mattis both when he was in uniform and during his stint as President Trump’s first defense secretary. The two spoke by phone last week, after McIntyre promised in an email that he wouldn’t ask the same dumb questions as everyone else, but instead would ask entirely new dumb questions. That apparently appealed to Mattis, who immediately called. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and space.

Washington Examiner: I'm wondering about some of your judgments. You seem pretty confident after you've made a decision that you've made the right one. For instance, the account you give of how you were certain that you could've captured or killed Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora in 2001, even though your superiors never gave you the go-ahead.

Jim Mattis: You're never sure about anything in warfare. If I gave that impression, that was probably incorrect on my part. But I would tell you this, I'd studied the Geronimo campaign. We had intelligence that said Osama bin Laden was in probably one of two valleys in Tora Bora, and there was basically two ways out. We had done a computerized visibility diagram, so we knew which mountain tops we could be on that would basically allow us to cut off retreat. You didn't have to put a whole line of troops because it was a way to go from one— If you look at the old Crusader castles in Syrian desert, they could signal from one to another. They were all within sight of each other. There was a way to put these outposts in with snipers and mortars, machine gunners, and forward air controllers and artillery spotters, and then push up those two valleys with a couple of companies of troops, and I had plenty of troops. I could have inserted the outposts along the border by helicopter in the high country because we had helicopters that could go in at that altitude, the heavy CH-53 Echoes.

Washington Examiner: How sure are you that despite what other people thought, you'd have been able to capture bin Laden in those snowy mountains?

Jim Mattis: I had the historical example. We had the current intelligence, and I had the military capability to go in. It was not, I think, that others didn't think we could do it. They thought that the [local Afghan fighters allied with the United States] were capable and could do it. And I didn't think so because some of those elements were Tajik. This was a Pashtun area, and I just thought that considering the priority we had placed on getting Osama bin Laden, we should put everything into that fight up there. And I was not sufficiently persuasive.

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There is much more in this interview about Mattis's book.  I like the way Mattis thinks about his plan to capture bin Laden and believe he should have been given a chance.  He certainly would not have done worse than the plan that was executed.