American Buddhist Net

The US military missed an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, when he was "within grasp" in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in December 2001, a US report has concluded.

The Senate foreign affairs committee report, released on Sunday, said that the failure to move in on Bin Laden when he was at his most vulnerable had "enormous consequences".

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Yes, they "missed," or avoided, an opportunity to get bin Laden. But also--bin Laden is almost certainly dead and the "enormous consequences" of his having been missed is the war grinds on to this day. My own opinion is that he was deliberately missed so that the war could grind on to this day. In Afghanistan, now Af-Pak - we see a reprise of a similar series of ever-changing excuses for the war. First it was bin Laden, then the Taliban, then democracy, then instability in the region or the danger of Pakistan's nukes, etc. Recently there have even been people saying we should remain in Afghanistan to further women's rights. Never mentioned in normal public discourse are the gas and oil reserves of Central Asia and the strategic value of the region. ABN