Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail [Paperback]

Philip G. Smucker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2005

Details how Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda fighters slipped out of Afghanistan during the battles of Tora Bora and Operation Anaconda. The author also charges that Western media outlets, eager to satisfy their audience’s thirst for revenge, lost their grasp on journalistic objectivity while covering bin Laden’s pursuit. Blinding patriotism and reliance on Pentagon press releases led them to portray events not reflecting reality on the ground. He contends that to satisfy the press and the public’s need for vengeance, the Bush administration pushed to achieve early, highly visible successes to the detriment of long-term strategy. Impatience at the top forced a rush into a war aimed primarily at “regime change,” which left the U.S. military largely empty-handed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Christian Science Monitor foreign correspondent Smucker offers an excellent, compact study of the campaign in Afghanistan and expounds a familiar thesis clearly and convincingly: the U.S. military, under not only executive but public pressure for a quick victory in revenge for September 11, adopted a strategy that achieved that victory, but only over the Taliban. Resources were not allocated to the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, many of whom either fled or went underground, to continue to cause trouble in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The bulk of the book details how that was allowed to happen. Smucker is much harsher on U.S. strategists and his fellow journalists than he is on the American fighting men and women in the field, who include not only the glamorous covert operations troops but the humble logisticians "in the air, on land, and sea." Stronger on the military than on the civilian side, Smucker does not adequately deal with the question of whether the pursuit of the Taliban received its priority because of the need for Northern Alliance support, and the Washington-based coverage could have been usefully expanded. Much more literate than most journalistic accounts, this book is not for ideologues at either end of the spectrum, as the struggle for balance and perspective is visible on every page. By the end, the wealth of operational detail will leave readers with a palpable sense of missed opportunity.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This account of the American campaign in Afghanistan, specifically the battles of Tora Bora and Operation Anaconda, is that of an experienced war correspondent. It covers what happened in the Afghan hills, the strategic policies in Washington, media coverage on the spot, and how bin Laden and scores of his followers were able to escape from Afghanistan, despite the U.S. Army. Besides providing an excellent picture--and pictures--of the war, Smucker explains how information was obtained, used, abused, and just plain ignored, which is important because, although the last thing the media should do during a campaign is provide the enemy with free intelligence, an informed citizenry needs to know this to consider what kind of job the commander in chief has done. War reporting has always been subject to propaganda biases, but Smucker's narrative style makes you feel as if you were there, especially when his "get the story at all costs" impulses take over. So in addition to everything else it is, this is quite a picture of contemporary combat reporting. Frieda Murray
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Potomac Books Inc. (May 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1574886290
• ISBN-13: 978-1574886290
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,560,582 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Smucker (Alexandria, VA) is the author of the highly acclaimed Al Qaeda's Great Escape, which broke the story of Osama's Bin Laden's escape. A seasoned journalist with over twenty-five years of experience abroad, he has worked and written for numerous publications including the Atlantic Monthly, McClatchy Newspapers, the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, Asia Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Daily Telegraph. His most recent reporting in the Muslim world has been for the McClatchy Newspaper chain, Atlantic Monthly, and USA Today, among others.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Someone slept through Vietnam, July 8, 2004

By 

Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (Hardcover)

"Al Qaeda's Great Escape" (AQGE) is a must-read for all who have forgotten the confusion of the war in Afghanistan. The first half of the book is a day-by-day account of journalist Philip Smucker's travels to and through the Afghani war zone, beginning just after the war began. The second half of the book is a third-person chronicle of the fight for Tora Bora and of Project Anaconda, taken mostly from interviews with the Special Forces commanders involved in the fighting. This change of mode results in a bit of disjointedness. Luckily, the subject is fascinating and vital, allowing that shortcoming to be overlooked.

AQGE chronicles how the war, fought with unreliable Pakistani and Afghan proxies, never had a chance of defeating Al Quaeda. That the US allowed bin Laden to escape is either a sign that we are not serious about fighting terrorism, or that our military and governmental leaders are too stupid to run a real war. We had thousands of al Qaeda fighters bottled up at Tora Bora. Yet we chose not to lay siege and flush them out. Also, we hugely underestimated the resolve, tenacity and ingenuity of the Al Quaeda fighters. Fighting on while vastly outgunned and outnumbered, they held off the larger and better-equipped US forces and inflicted serious casualties. Was this the "fog of war" or the fogginess of mind in the Pentagon and the White House?

AQGE also offers a comic look at the media buffoons who used the war to bolster their own egos and ratings. Geraldo Rivera comes in for a special raking. His moving, from-the-scene "report" on the aftermath of an attack on American troops was complicated by the fact that he was never there.

Media mockery aside, AQGE stays within journalistic bounds by refusing to indict the perpetrators of the mismanagement of the war. Yet the problem was not the lack of bravery on the part of American fighting men and women. Political timidity and naivete, even with the American public fully committed to war after 9/11, played a large part in failing to commit sufficient men and materiel to the battle.

Given bin Laden's mindset, he probably sees his escape as deliverance by God. Far from showing our strength and will, the inept prosecution of the Afghan War will only embolden bin Laden and his followers. AQGE is a valuable tool for bringing out the truth about the current adminstration's ability and willingness to wage war on terror.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I read the review in Wash Post, July 28, 2004

By 

Johnny Walker "Johnny Walker" (Detroit, Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (Hardcover)

This book is a gem. I picked it up in Detroit after I read the below review on the web in the Washington Post. I must agree that the author makes reading about the Bush Admin's massive strategic mistakes at Tora Bora both fascinating and, {Allah forbid,}FUN.

Wash Post Book World wrote:

The book is a devastating critique of Bush, Rumsfeld, other politically oriented strategists imposing their will on U.S. military forces and -- as the subtitle suggests -- quite a few of Smucker's fellow journalists. The critique is delivered with such humor and irony, however, that casual readers could easily underestimate its full impact. For all but the most avid Bush-Rumsfeld detractors, the humor and irony will be welcome. Smucker is a superb stylist; it is difficult to grasp how reading about something so depressing can be so much fun.

The book instructs pleasurably from the first page, as Smucker and his Afghan guide explore a remote tribal area of Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan. Smucker notices a sign reading "Winston Churchill's Picket." Winston Churchill, later to become the renowned British statesman? Yes, it turns out that just before 1900, Churchill spent time as a journalist in that very spot, writing about a frontier war dear to the empire. When Smucker learns that Churchill published a book about his experiences -- "The Story of the Malakand Field Force" (1898) -- he obtains and just about memorizes it. Then, in a brilliant touch, he opens his own chapters with apt quotations from Churchill's book. It is as if almost nothing has changed in that part of the world for more than a hundred years.

But the news reported by Churchill is not the same as the news Smucker reports. Churchill knew something about indigenous warriors from Pakistan, Afghanistan and other seemingly exotic territories whose thought patterns were so different from those found in the ruling U.S. and British citizens. He also knew quite a bit about government propaganda -- trying to make a losing cause seem not so bad. But Churchill knew nothing about airplanes flown into two New York skyscrapers and the Pentagon. Everything Smucker writes must be read in the shadow of Sept. 11, 2001.

When he wrote that al Qaeda terrorists had escaped their Tora Bora hideaway despite the vaunted U.S. military combining with native warriors to stop just that eventuality, Bush administration spokesmen all the way up to Rumsfeld said otherwise. As Smucker notes, "If it had not been for the Pentagon's diligent efforts to deny that bin Laden could have slipped out the back door, the story might well have been lost among all the other stories, rumors and propaganda. Instead, the Pentagon's denial mode boosted interest in our story of bin Laden's slippery moves."

Read it to believe it. Six Stars

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best so far, May 31, 2004

By 

Donald Negri (Sacramento, Ca United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (Hardcover)

When historians finally begin writing the comprehensive stories of the "War on Terror", something better willl probably come along than this book. But for the time being
this is a very enjoyable and enlightening read. Enjoyable because the author - a bit of an eccentric perhaps - takes us
along with him as he wanders througout eastern Afghanistan in the hope of interviewing or capturing Bin Laden. Along the way we are given snapshots of other
member of the foreign correspondant trade - with the
exception of Geraldo Rivera, who's arrival and subsequent
reporting fills five pages, with a mixture of respect, bemusement and envy at the whole coterie of assistants that accompany him. And then we have the two Afghan warlords hired by the Pentagon to conduct most of the ground operations. Smucker captures their ideosyncrasies perfectly, and the reader is not ultimately surprised to learn that they find no problem in being bribed by both sides.

The second half of the book is less folksy, as it concentrates
on the two major battles the US took part in: Tora Bora and
the Anaconda campaign. Here we learn how Rumsfeld's naivety perhaps didn't cost us Bin Laden per se, but allowed most of his high command to cross the border to Pakistan.
As for Anaconda, the only drawn out battle, Smucker reports it mainly from interviews and military records, describing it with a journalistic "you are there" eye. And it is an eye-opener to see that were it not for our air power our ground forces might have actually taken a beating.

Smucker wisely refrains from writing about what he doesn't either observe or learn first-hand. For that reason the reader doesn't get much insight into what the Pentagon was thinking when it did what it did. In any case, this book will help prepare for the fact that the "war" in Afghanistan is far
from finished, and may not yet turn out the way we want.