Continuing with the New Yorker quoting Barry Posen on the Battle of Tora Bora:
["]Or it was pure incompetence—using drones and a bunch of mercenaries and bombs in a cordon operation. We couldn't have done a worse job. We should have put in every Ranger in range. There's no excuse. This is very weird. Then they have this second chance, Operation Anaconda"—the American effort to encircle Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the Shah-i-Kot valley, in eastern Afghanistan, last March. "My sense is, it was the toughest of the Al Qaeda hard cases, very good and gutsy. The commander"—Major General Franklin Hagenbeck—"didn't know what he was doing. He didn't send enough forces. He didn't take enough artillery. And there was too much reliance on the Afghans. And, it's clear, they were kerfuffled afterward. They went to the Brits for more troops"—England flew in seventeen hundred marines as reinforcements—"and the commander was relieved," by Lieutenant General Dan McNeill. "They knew something was wrong. Opportunity No. 2 was missed. My guess is, most of them got away. So this is disturbing—a war on terror that doesn't focus on the terrorists."
Weird indeed. And what happened in the following months in Afghanistan? Wesley Clark in Winning Modern Wars (2003) (my emphasis):
[B]y the summer of 2003 the situation in Afghanistan had deteriorated: There were persistent rumors about a resurgence of Taliban strength, and the evidence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was too great to deny. The U.S. forces there remained at about 10,000 troops, built around a corps-level forward command post. The International Security and Assistance Force had seen its leadership go from the British to Turkish, then to German-Dutch command, and finally to NATO. But the 5,000-strong force remained locked in Kabul, providing security for President Karzai and his government. By the standards of the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia and Kosovo, these U.S. and international forces were less than one-tenth the size required.
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