Peter Bergen wrote a cover story for the New Republic about the Bush administration’s missed opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden.
It has been six years since we were a few hundred maddening meters from killing Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora—and, perhaps, a few hundred soldiers from finishing off his top lieutenants as well. Tora Bora seems very far away from New York, and, in many ways, it is. But the disastrous chain of events that began there in December 2001—a bungled bid to snag bin Laden, followed by a war in Iraq that gave new life to Al Qaeda, accompanied by a virtual abandonment of Afghanistan, compounded by a naïve approach toward Pakistan, topped off by a set of legal policies that has made America the bane of world opinion–may yet end in the streets of Manhattan. Indeed, if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that the steps from Tora Bora to Waziristan to Anbar to London–to beyond?—are not so large at all.
