"From Lt. General Michael Delong former deputy commander of CentCom:

In recent days, John Kerry has repeatedly accused President Bush of having "outsourced the job" in Tora Bora to kill Osama bin Laden. Knight Ridder reporters concluded that in Tora Bora we "relied on three Afghan warlords" to catch bin Laden, "ignored" warnings from our own officers about incorrect methodology, and that we also relied on the Afghan warlords as our blocking forces, thus letting more than 1,000 al Qaeda fighters escape. As the No. 2 general at CentCom in charge of the Afghanistan War, I can say with certainty that all of these allegations are incorrect. And it is past time someone set the record straight on what really happened in Tora Bora.
We strategized Tora Bora in essentially the same way we strategized the rest of the Afghanistan war: by using a combination of our elite Special Forces and CIA Agents, embedded with native Afghan troops. We chose this approach in waging the Afghan war for many reasons: it minimized the number of U.S. troops put in harm's way; it drew on the strengths of the native Afghans who had been fighting in that terrain for years and who were adept at traversing the mountainous terrain on horseback; and it helped avoid the same mistake the Soviets made in Afghanistan. They had opted for a large troop presence and ended up with thousands of their troops killed.

The fact that we took Afghanistan in a matter of weeks -- a feat which tens of thousands of Soviet troops were unable to accomplish in a matter of years -- proves that our strategy was exactly the right approach for Afghanistan. This was essentially the same strategy we employed at Tora Bora. Thus, to say that we "outsourced" the job when we relied primarily on American Special Forces and American CIA agents is absurd.