60 Minutes Still Relevant

I owe most of my political awareness to my father, a high school history teacher. Every evening we would have one of the major news programs on, and his narration would provide context and commentary to topics that I hadn't yet the intelligence or experience to grasp. Without fail, each Sunday, we would watch 60 Minutes. Their anchors always had the gravitas to enrapture even a young mind, and Andy Rooney was more than fun to disagree with (my furor at his post-Cobain suicide rant prompted the only letter I've ever written to him). As I grew up, and my boyish love of American Football took up more of my Sunday's, I often found myself missing the show. However this Sunday I made sure to watch, and was rewarded with a fantastic story.

The True Story of Tora Bora was an extended interview and demonstration with "Dalton Fury", an Army Major who was the commanding officer of the Delta Force team in the Afghan mountains during the infamous Tora Bora hunt of Bin Laden. His brave admission of what he saw as his own failure to capture or kill UBL when he was but 2000 meters away was striking in this era of 0-accountability. What was far more interesting, though, was his explanation of the lack of will on the part of our Afghan allies, and how Delta Force's plans to hit Bin Laden from the rear door of the mountains were continuously rejected from higher up the food chain.

I won't rewrite the entire piece here, as it is worth watching. However, two points stuck out to me:

1. The small size of the Delta Force was referenced repeatedly. It's not a stretch to make the connection between those references and the overall lack of military support during the Tora Bora operations.

2. The insinuation that the denial of workable assault plans with good ground intelligence came from higher up the command chain, including into the civil administration. Wasn't one of the lessons of Vietnam the fallacy of micro-managing ground commanders?

"Dalton" also has a book out, Kill Bin Laden, which I will certainly be picking up.