Tommy Franks Fires Back

Several times, during the debates, John Kerry claimed that Bush had "outsourced" the capture of Osama Bin Laden to Afghan war lords and that Bush took his "eye off the ball" in Afghanistan in order to fight the war in Iraq. Bush was curiously quiet and let these charges go by unanswered. I'm not sure why that would be, but he obviously had his reasons.

Apparently, Tommy Franks couldn't let the charges go by unanswered. Tommy Franks ran both the fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq and he knows precisely the Whats and Whys. Tommy Franks wrote an op/ed in the New York Times in order to answer these charges.

His main points are:

We didn't know one way or another whether Bin Laden was in Tora Bora at the time.

We didn't outsource to the afghan war lords. We used them because of their knowledge of the area and we had special forces there assisting.

We didn't divert troops or equipment to Iraq. When there was the lead-up to the attack on Iraq, we had 9,500 troops in Afghanistan. When major hostilities ended in Iraq, we had over 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Once again Kerry seeks to mislead the voters and cast a pessimistic view on the events in Afghanistan and Bush's execution of the War on Terror.