On December 10, 2001, in the battle of Tora Bora, in Afghanistan, signals intelligence had pinpointed bin Laden’s location. “As dusk fell, [Delta Force leader (pseudonym) Dalton Fury’s key Afghan ally, Hazarat Ali, had retreated from the battlefield back to Jalalabad for some dinner to break his Ramadan fast, as is the Afghan way. Fury was under explicit orders not to take the lead in the battle and only to act in a supporting role for the hundreds of Afghans in Hazarat Ali’s ragtag army. Now he had no Afghan allies to guide him at night into the craggy moonscape of upper Tora Bora. Fury reluctantly made the decision to bail on that night’s mission. ‘My decision to abort that effort to kill or capture bin Laden when we might have been within 2,000 yards, still bothers me. It leaves me with a feeling of somehow letting down our nation at a critical time,’ Fury says.”
– Peter Bergen, The Longest War, Page 76