The 9/11 Wars (102 page)

  
57
.
Author interview with a Special Branch officer, London, 2004.

  
58
.
Sums of between £25,000 and £100,000 were regularly seized, larger sums less frequently. One activist at the time told the author how he had given £50,000 to Lashkar-e-Toiba and £50,000 to Chechen groups, proceeds from a range of businesses that he and other activists ran, between 1999 and 2000. Indian intelligence services complained frequently to the British government – and the author – about these activities.

  
59
.
Author interview with an MI5 officer, London, 2005.

  
60
.
Author interview with an MI6 officer, London, 2009.

  
61
.
John Kampfner,
Blair’s Wars
, The Free Press, 2003, p. 113.

  
62
.
Condoleezza Rice, testimony before 9/11 Commission. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon,
Age of Sacred Terror
, Random House, 2002. Clinton officials later insisted they had in fact repeatedly emphasized the threat of terrorism to Bush, Rice and others, and though many of the threat reports which reached senior administration figures were indeed vague or historic and desperately short of actionable details they did collectively speak of an unprecedented level of evident danger.

  
63
.
Clarke,
Against All Enemies
, p. 234. Bush,
Decision Points
, pp. 134–5.

  
64
.
The 9/11 Commission
, p. 333. Rice, testimony before 9/11 Commission. The Principals Committee in Bush’s White House included Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and CIA Director George Tenet, among other senior administration officials.

  
65
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 135.

  
66
.
Ibid., p. 128.

  
67
.
CNN, Text of Bush’s address, September 11, 2001.

  
68
.
Abizaid was born in California to a Lebanese-American father and an American mother. Though Arab-speaking, he is not Lebanese-born, as sometimes reported. See Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, p. 243.

  
69
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 145.

  
70
.
Feith,
War and Decision
, pp. 3–11

  
71
.
David E. Sanger, ‘Ex-occupation aide sees no dent in “Saddamists” ’,
New York Times
, July 2, 2004. For Dick Cheney ‘the situation when President Bush and I came to office’ was that ‘where terrorists were emboldened by years of being able to strike us with impunity’.

  
72
.
Manuel Perez-Rivas, ‘Bush vows to rid the world of evil-doers’, CNN, September 16, 2001.

  
73
.
George W. Bush, ‘An Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’, September 20, 2001

  
74
.
The name was changed after Muslim scholars complained about the religiously charged initial name, ‘Infinite Justice’.

  
75
.
See Pervez Musharraf,
In the Line of Fire
, pp. 201–4, for a colourful if not entirely reliable account of this episode.

  
76
.
Operation Enduring Freedom: Foreign Pledges of Military and Intelligence Support
, CRS Report for Congress, October 17, 2001. Stephen Tanner,
Afghanistan: A Military History
, Da Capo, 2007, p. 292.

  
77
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 191.

  
78
.
President George W. Bush, Commencement Address at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, May 25, 2001
.
‘We must build forces that draw upon the revolutionary advances in the technology of war that will allow us to keep the peace by redefining war on our terms,’ Bush had also said.

  
79
.
Thomas Ricks,
Fiasco
, Penguin, 2007. Feith,
War and Decision
, p. 75.

  
80
.
Kampfner,
Blair’s Wars
, p. 117. One reason the Pentagon was reluctant to accept the myriad offers of aid flowing in was that, quite apart from few having the means to transport their troops to the theatre themselves or supply them once they were there, the forces offered were insufficiently equipped to fight effectively alongside a military as technologically sophisticated as the American army.

  
81
.
James F. Dobbins,
After the Taliban
, Potomac Books, 2008, p. 28. Feith,
War and Decision
, p. 51. Donald Rumsfeld, ‘A new kind of war’,
New York Times
, September 27, 2001.

  
82
.
Author telephone interview with Paul Pillar, former deputy director CIA Counter Terrorist Centre, national intelligence officer for the Near East and south Asia, November 2008.

  
83
.
Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Carl Ford to Secretary of State Colin Powell, ‘Pakistan – poll shows strong and growing public support for Taleban’, November 7, 2001, National Security Archive. The levels had gone from 38 per cent of people saying they favoured increasing their country’s support to the Taliban to 46 per cent and from a third to just over half seeing the Taliban more favourably as the coming war loomed.

  
84
.
‘Pakistan protests turn violent’, BBC News Online, September 21, 2001.

CHAPTER 3: WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

    
1
.
Claudio Franco, ‘The Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan’, in Antonio Giustozzi, ed.,
Decoding the New Taliban
, Hurst, 2009, p. 272.

    
2
.
An Afghan equivalent of General Cambronne’s useless but much admired ‘merde’ at Waterloo in 1815 or General McAuliffe’s ‘nuts’ at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, 1944, to name but a couple of examples.

    
3
.
Musharraf,
In the Line of Fire
, p. 216. See also Zahid Hussein,
General on a Mission
, Newsline, 2001, and
Frontline Pakistan
, Columbia University Press, pp. 41–3.

    
4
.
RAND Corproration, Benjamin S. Lambeth,
Air Power against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom
, 2005, p. xvi.

    
5
.
Author telephone interview with Bob Grenier, CIA station chief Islamabad 2001–2, January 2009. The Taliban commander concerned was Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani. See also George Tenet,
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
, HarperCollins, 2007, pp. 182–3.

    
6
.
These included Younis Khalis, the cleric and former
mujahideen
commander who was close to bin Laden and the Taliban but remained independent and a power in his own right. He was approached in early November. Author interview with Michael Scheuer, CIA head of Alec Station, 2002.

    
7
.
Schroen,
First In
, p. 300. Bob Woodward, ‘CIA led way with cash handouts’,
Washington Post
, November 18, 2002. Jason Burke, ‘Torture, treachery and spies – covert war in Afghanistan’,
Observer
, November 4, 2001. Multiple author interviews, Peshawar, autumn 2001, London, 2009.

    
8
.
‘President notifies Congress about troop deployment. U.S. claims air supremacy over Afghanistan’, CNN, October 9, 2001.

    
9
.
Author telephone interview with Paul Pillar, CIA national intelligence officer for the Middle East 2000–2005, with Bob Grenier, CIA station chief Islamabad 2001–2, January 2009. See also Schroen,
First In
.

  
10
.
At sixteen, after a row with his recently appointed Socialist schoolteacher, he had launched an attack on a police station. The capture and torture of one of his associates merely taught him, he later told interviewers, to plan operations properly.

  
11
.
See Robert D. Kaplan,
Soldiers of God
, Vintage, 2008, for an excellent account of Haq’s life, especially pp. 145–6. Also the useful documentary
Afghan Warrior: The Life and Death of Abdul Haq
, Touch productions for BBC2, 2003.

  
12
.
Much of the violence was directed at relatively Westernized schoolteachers sent to provinces from Kabul, such as the one who had been the immediate catalyst for Haq’s activism.

  
13
.
Kaplan,
Soldiers of God
. Author interviews with former
mujahideen
, BBC film; Afghan journalists who covered the war, Peshawar, 1998–9.

  
14
.
Author interview with a former MI6 senior official. Rashid,
Descent into Chaos
, p. 20.

  
15
.
‘We are firm on road of jihad’,
The Times
, September 25, 2001. Author interview with Haji Din Mohammed Arsala, Peshawar, November 2001. A letter addressed to the Pakistani people called on them to ‘rise in defence of Islam’ and welcomed the ‘martyrdom’ of those killed in the recent demonstrations.

  
16
.
Author interview with Abdul Haq Arsala, Peshawar, October 2001.

  
17
.
Instead Haq was bankrolled by two Afghan-American businessmen.

  
18
.
See Burke, ‘Torture, treachery and spies’.

  
19
.
Author interview with Haji Din Mohammed Arsala, Peshawar, November 2001.

  
20
.
R. W. Apple Jr, ‘A military quagmire remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam’,
New York Times
, October 31, 2001.

  
21
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, pp. 153, 154.

  
22
.
Seymour M. Hersh, ‘The getaway. Questions surround a secret Pakistani airlift’,
New Yorker
, January 28, 2002. Bob Woodward, ‘Doubts and debates before victory over the Taliban’,
Washington Post
, November 18, 2002. The letters turned out to have been sent by a disaffected American research scientist.