The 9/11 Wars (132 page)

  49
.
See Memorandum for Commander, US Southern Command, CSRT Input for Guantanamo Detainee, US9SA-000063DP, Muhammad Mani Ahmad Al Shalan Al Qahtani, October 30, 2008, secret, author collection. Michael Isikoff, ‘How profile of bin Laden courier led CIA to its target’, NBC News, May 5, 2011; Mark Mazzetti, Helene Cooper and Peter Baker, ‘Clues gradually led to the location of Qaeda chief’,
New York Times
, May 2, 2011.

  50
.
Remarks by the President on Osama bin Laden, May 2, 2011, Office of the Press Secretary, White House.

  51
.
Author telephone interview with senior ISI official, May 2011.

  52
.
Sebastian Rotella, ‘New details in the bin Laden documents: portrait of a fugitive micro-manager’,
Propublica
, May 12, 2011.

  53
.
Author telephone interview with officials in New York, Pakistan, May 2011. Author interviews, US and British officials, Kabul, May 2011.

  54
.
Mark Mazzetti, ‘Signs that bin Laden weighed seeking Pakistani protection’,
New York Times
, May 26, 2011.

  55
.
Author interviews with American and British intelligence officials, Kabul, June 2011.

  56
.
Ibid.

  57
.
Ibid.

  58
.
Quilliam Foundation,
The Coming Struggle within al-Qaeda
, London, 10 May 2011.

CONCLUSION: THE 9/11 WARS

    1
.
By 2010, support for suicide bombing in many countries of the Islamic world, after declining so dramatically in the middle years of the decade, began to edge up again. Often the change was slight. In Egypt it went from 13 per cent believing suicide bombing was sometimes or often justified in 2008 to 15 per cent in 2009 and then to 20 per cent in 2010. In Pakistan, the levels went from 5 to 8 per cent, still a fraction of the 33 per cent recorded in 2003. In Jordan it went from 12 to 20 per cent between 2009 and 2010. In 2005, it had been 57 per cent. Pew Global Attitudes Key Indicators Database, accessed January 2, 2011.

    2
.
Measured in the number of attacks, the volume of terrorism in the 1970s was far higher than between September 12, 2001 and the end of 2009, with between 60 and 70 strikes per year. Between 1970 and 1978, 72 people died in terrorist incidents in the US. Rand Corporation (Brian Michael Jenkins),
Would-be Warriors
, 2010, pp. 8–9.

    3
.
Steve Luxenberg, ‘Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war’,
Washington Post
, September 22, 2010.

    4
.
Elisabeth Bumiller, ‘The staggering cost of American conflicts’,
International Herald Tribune
, July 26, 2010. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Military Expenditure Database,
http://milexdata.sipri.org/result.php4
, accessed April 2011.

    5
.
In 2011, for the second consecutive year, President Obama made no reference to bin Laden in his State of the Union address.

    6
.
Walter Laqueur,
Terrorism
, Little, Brown, 1977.

    7
.
National Intelligence Council,
Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World
, November 2008.

    8
.
National Intelligence Council,
Mapping the Global Future, Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project
, December 2004.

    9
.
Such as the five American servicemen prosecuted late 2010 for premeditated murders of Afghan civilians.

  10
.
icasualties.org
, accessed October 9, 2010.

  11
.
‘Names of the dead’,
New York Times
, October 8, 2010. Congressional Research Service (Susan G. Cheeser)
, Afghanistan Casualties, Miltiary Forces and Civilians
, October 28, 2010, p. 2. Department of Defense statistics, accessed November 19, 2010.

  12
.
In Iraq at least 468 have been killed, according to
icasualties.org
, accessed December 2010. Some estimates are three or four times this total. See Steve Fainaru,
Big Boys’ Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq
, Da Capo Press, 2008.

  13
.
Congressional Research Service,
Iraqi Casualties: US Military Forces and Iraqi Civilians, Police and Security Forces
, October 7, 2010, p. 9. Report to Congress,
Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq
, June 2010, p. 29. This total includes 2,700 previously unreported deaths of Iraqi police and other Iraqi security forces killed after capture revealed by WikiLeaks and calculated by Iraq Body Count. More than 600 died in 2010, considerably more than in 2009, even if both totals paled into insignificance compared with the 2,065 who had died in 2007, the year of the Surge. ‘Death for Iraqis jumps’,
Beyond Babylon
,
Latimes.com
, July 2007.

  14
.
Brookings Institution,
Afghanistan Index: Tracing Variables of Reconstruction and Security in post 9/11 Afghanistan
, October 19, 2010, p. 14.

  15
.
Around 500 died in 2010. See the series of reports by the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies.

  16
.
Conetta, ‘The Wages of War’, p. 23.

  17
.
Press release, Inter Services Public Relations, ISPR, February 18, 2010. Author telephone interviews, ISPR, November 2010.

  18
.
David Leigh, ‘Iraq war logs reveal 15,000 previously unlisted civilian deaths’,
Guardian
, October 22, 2010. The logs put insurgent fatalities at 23,984. See PIPS Pakistan Security Report (October 2010), November 10, 2010, and others.

  19
.
Combating Terrorism Center,
Deadly Vanguards: A Study of al’Qa’ida’s Violence against Muslims
, December 2009, p. 7.

  20
.
‘Iraq war logs: What the numbers reveal’, October 23, 2010.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/warlogs/
.

  21
.
‘Iraq: Key figures since the war began’, Associated Press, January 2, 2009.

  22
.
Project on Defense Alternatives (Carl Conetta),
Operation Enduring Freedom: Why a Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties
, January 18, 2002. Project on Defense Alternatives (Carl Conetta),
Strange Victory: A Critical Appraisal of Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan War
, January 30, 2002. Afghan casualties database,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/aug/10/afghanistan-civilian-casualties-statistics#data
.

  23
.
‘Global war on terror claims 30,000 Pakistani casualties’, ISPR release, Islamabad,
The Economic Time
s, February 19, 2010. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, 9,230 civilians were killed as a result of the insurgency from 2003 to December 5, 2010.

  24
.
There are an estimated 2 million Iraqis who have left their homeland. Around 5 million refugees returned to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, but at least 2 million are now thought to have left, and the country now has an estimated 240,000 internally displaced. Figures from the International Displacement Monitoring Centre at
www.internal-displacement.org
based on data from the UNHCR, June 2010.

  25
.
Author interview, Dunkirk, December 2009.

Acknowledgements

A long book means a long list of people to thank. First of all, there are all my various editors who, over the last fifteen years of foreign reporting, have sent me around the world on assignments that have been sometimes testing, always fascinating and often hugely enjoyable. Roger Alton, Paul Webster and John Mulholland at the
Observer
and Harriet Sherwood at the
Guardian
all funded trips, found me space and, equally important, gave me time to travel, to talk, to listen and to write.

Years of reporting means years of accumulated favours owed. There are many hundreds of fellow journalists, translators, fixers, drivers, experts, soldiers, bureaucrats, diplomats and others, too many to mention individually, to whom I am genuinely indebted for their generosity, company, learning, advice and assistance.

As for the writing of
The 9/11 Wars
itself, I would like particularly to thank Paul Harris and Marc Thibodeau for their helpful criticism of early drafts. I am particularly grateful to Iain King for his careful reading and to Toby Dodge, Owen Bennett-Jones, John Boone and Alexander Evans for agreeing to look over drafts. Owen’s comments, astute and informed as ever, were of particular help.

Nadja Korinth, Aashish Jethra and Kailash Prasad all helped enthusiastically and competently with research and fact checking. A series of major events in 2011 meant scant time for final verifications. All errors are, of course, my own.

As ever, without the advice, inspiration, competence, drive and perspicacity of Toby Eady, my agent, and Simon Winder, my editor, this book would never have come to be. My thanks to them and all who work with them, especially David Watson for his fine work on the text.

My thanks too to my parents-in-law for their hospitality during long weeks at Lancieux and, of course, to my own parents, brothers and sisters for their forbearance and support for a stressed son or sibling.

But most of all my thanks to my wife, Anne-Sophie, for her love, understanding and encouragement and to Victor for his laugh.

ALLEN LANE

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ISBN: 978-1-84-614281-9