The 9/11 Wars (15 page)

The second worrying postscript involved reports of further air strikes that had caused significant civilian casualties. One incident saw a party of tribal elders on their way to Kabul for the inauguration of the new president methodically annihilated by US navy jets and gunships. Fifty were killed in their vehicles on the road, and more died as the survivors tried to find refuge in two nearby villages. American authorities first denied that the attack had taken place and then claimed the dead were Taliban. In fact the strike had been based on information that had come from Bacha Khan Zadran, a Pashtun anti-Taliban warlord who had exploited the anarchy following the fall of the Taliban regime to claim effective rule over a chunk of eastern Afghanistan after being recruited as part of the CIA’s ‘southern strategy’. Zadran, having learned that the elders travelling in the convoy opposed his claim to rule three provinces, had cynically exploited American ignorance of local conditions to eliminate his personal political opponents by telling the CIA that they were hostile to the coalition.
⁸¹
The final incident saw a village in Paktia province destroyed and ten men, seventeen women and twenty-seven children killed. The Americans claimed this time that the village was a weapons depot. Again, the information was out of date. The Taliban were long gone. These were the incidents that were sufficiently egregious to come to the notice of reporters or NGOs. There were many other deaths that went unreported. Near Gardez a father who had lost three daughters to an American bomb showed the author their shredded clothes, hung on a line to dry when the missiles had struck. ‘The Taliban were in the town but they left days ago,’ he told the author. ‘Why do they bomb us?’

In retrospect another worrying postscript could be added. Within twenty-four hours of the September 11 attacks, senior officials in Washington had suggested that Saddam Hussein was involved. On the orders of the president, Franks and his Centcom staff had begun planning for a potential invasion of Iraq shortly after the fall of Kabul in the fourth week of November.
⁸²
On December 20, little noticed among the chaos of Tora Bora’s aftermath and the inauguration of Karzai, the
New York Times
published an article by Judith Miller, a reporter at the paper. ‘An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons,’ it began.
⁸³
The broader aims of the Global War on Terror remained unchanged. Less than a month after Tora Bora, President Bush had used his State of the Union speech to further flesh out his doctrine of pre-emptive intervention against entities posing an actual or potential threat to the USA and had named three – Iran, Iraq and North Korea – as comprising an ‘Axis of Evil’. The next phase of the 9/11 Wars was already underway.

4
The Calm before the Storm

THE PHONEY WAR

Looking back, the fifteen months following Tora Bora, seem, given the sudden and extreme violence that preceded them and the escalation that followed them, like a moment of relative calm. This calm was tempered by profound anxiety but was coloured too by a suspicion that perhaps, despite the extraordinary events unfolding across the planet and the enduring trauma of 9/11, the world had not changed quite as much as many had thought on that day in early autumn 2001 when the planes had arrived from the clear blue sky in New York and Washington. As the first phase of the 9/11 Wars – the immediate aftermath of 9/11 – shaded into the second phase of the conflict, it appeared more and more likely that the apocalypse that many had thought imminent a few months previously had at the very least been postponed. The institutions of Western and Middle Eastern societies appeared stronger than many had thought. Those seeking to undermine them seemed weaker. And the critical middle ground – the hundreds of millions in the Islamic world whom bin Laden had hoped to radicalize and mobilize – remained at the very least uncommitted.

Certainly the war in Afghanistan had not provoked the violence across the Islamic world that some had predicted. Operations there appeared to be going relatively well, and Pakistan, where General Musharraf successfully managed elections to keep hold of power partly by co-opting local Islamist parties and partly by ensuring that the country’s most prominent democratic political leaders stayed in exile, remained more or less calm. Musharraf himself remained relatively popular domestically, and his speeches announcing a policy of ‘enlightened moderation’ in religion and neoliberal economic reforms reassured much of the international community. Tensions in Europe between Muslim communities and the broader population remained negligible. Counter-terrorist authorities in the UK and elsewhere were still directing the bulk of their efforts at rounding up foreigners rather than focusing on the far more worrying threat that their own citizens might pose. The attacks that did occur – though spectacular and bloody and though often targeting Westerners – were in places that appeared very distant from Europe or the USA.

Equally, the hunt for bin Laden, though there were no definitive leads on its principal target, appeared to be making progress. Many of those foreign volunteers and militants who had fled Afghanistan in November and December 2001 had first sought security in cities in Pakistan, exploiting the relationships with local groups they had made over previous years. But urban centres had proved far from safe, and with cooperation between American agencies and the Pakistani ISI better than it had ever been before – senior CIA officers in Islamabad met their ISI counterparts almost daily to exchange information and plan operations – a series of raids rounded up many of the most senior or at least most notorious al-Qaeda figures.
¹
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a young Yemeni who had been a key planner and aspirant hijacker in the 9/11 conspiracy, was detained in Karachi, and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the overall mastermind of the plot, was found in Rawalpindi. ‘There was a sense we were closing in,’ remembered Bruce Riedel, a senior CIA analyst at the time.
²

Though large numbers of fugitive militants were concentrating in and around towns like Shakai in the tribal agency of South Waziristan or further north in Miram Shah and Mir Ali in North Waziristan, their arrival had gone largely unnoticed and thus did little to mar the overall impression of progress.
³
Elsewhere, the seizure of a theatre in Moscow by Chechen groups was a spectacular and horrifying reminder of the variety and dynamism of terrorism but had little broader impact, and though the stand-off between a nuclear-armed India and Pakistan sparked by the Islamic militant attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 was worrying, the tension it provoked was hardly something new in the region. Violence in Gaza and the West Bank, especially an alleged massacre at Jenin during the summer, continued to rouse passions across the Islamic world, further sensitizing potential audiences to extremist messages, and a spate of suicide bombs hit Israel in an all too familiar way, but if or how such events played into the bigger picture of modern Islamic militancy in the post-9/11 era was unclear.
⁴

In the shadows, the CIA was already well engaged on an extensive programme of kidnapping suspects overseas, illegal detention, collusion and direct participation in torture, but little had yet become public, and little was yet known about abuse at bases in Afghanistan. The extension of electronic surveillance in America without warrants remained secret, and the passing of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, or USA PATRIOT Act, which, among other provisions, gave new powers of surveillance to investigators, was achieved with minimal opposition. A new ‘Department for Homeland Security’ was also created. Most of the public outrage was directed at the establishment of a detention centre for supposed high-level ‘enemy combatants’ on the 45 acre site of a former coaling station leased from Cuba under a treaty from 1903 and known as Guantanamo Bay. For some time in the autumn of 2001, detainees had been held on navy ships in the Arabian Sea, but transferring them to American territory could mean they would receive protection under the US constitution. The right to silence they would then be able to invoke particularly worried Bush administration officials. Guantanamo Bay – or ‘Gitmo’ as the centre became known – was the ‘least worst choice’ available for holding such men, they claimed.
⁵
That there was not a greater outcry was a mark of quite how exceptional the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was. As so often in the 9/11 Wars it was an image – of the first inmates wearing orange jump suits, ear defenders, blindfolds and wrist and ankle shackles kneeling in fenced-off pens shortly after arriving at the camp – which provoked the greatest reaction.

And at least through most of 2002, until the press campaigns to crank up support for the Iraq war started in earnest and the overall temperature began to rise, levels of enthusiasm for bin Laden in the Islamic world or negative Western feelings about Muslims barely changed.
⁶
Indeed polls in the months following the strikes and the Afghan campaign in fact showed remarkably positive views of Islam among many Americans and Europeans. One revealed that Americans saw Muslim neighbours more favourably than they did before the September 11 terrorist attacks, a trend analysts attributed to the average American’s increased familiarity with the religion over the previous three months.
⁷
A study of discussions of terrorism in US newspapers revealed that early coverage tended in general to be relatively generous towards ‘Islam’.
⁸
Teenagers in the US even felt confident enough to appropriate the vocabulary of the new conflict, describing a messy bedroom as ‘ground zero’, something out of date as ‘so September 10th’ and using ‘terrorist’, ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘Osama’ as terms of abuse.
⁹
In the Islamic world, though broad views of the USA had gone from bad to worse, a relatively low 28 per cent, 35 per cent and 33 per cent of respondents in Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia respectively told pollsters that the West posed a general threat to Islam.
¹⁰
Nearly 80 per cent of Pakistanis saw terrorism as a major problem.
¹¹
Surveys such as Zogby International’s ‘Arab nations’ impressions of America’ poll or the Pew Research Centre’s ‘How global publics view their lives, their country, the world’ showed that a profound belief in values seen as typically American (elected government, personal liberty, educational opportunity and economic choice) co-existed with visceral anti-Americanism. Work by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research found that the most positive attitudes to American culture in the Arab world were found among young adults, regardless of their religious feeling.
¹²
The sharpening in rhetoric and radicalism on both sides was to come later, particularly in the months before the war on Iraq and when that campaign began to go badly wrong.

Nonetheless, many elements that would come to define the 9/11 Wars had in fact begun to reveal themselves. It was just too early to know how characteristic of the conflict – and its many sub-conflicts – they were to be.

The polyvalence of the 9/11 Wars has already been mentioned. But that the conflict has many dimensions is self-evident. Already we have seen how for different people – Abdul Haq, Zaheer Arsala, Mohammed Umr, Dalton Fury – the war sparked by the 9/11 attacks meant different things. Most major conflicts are complex affairs, subsuming many sub-conflicts, and it would be surprising if, despite attempts by many to minimize this vast diversity, the 9/11 Wars somehow were an exception. Yet even the most multidimensional of conflicts have distinctive qualities which give them a particular character and significance that mean they are more than simply the sum of their various parts. As the Wars continued, the common elements naturally became more pronounced. Cross-fertilization of tactics among all the protagonists, the simple movement of individuals from one theatre to another, public discussion and communication all helped stitch together the mesh which made up the conflict. At Tora Bora something of its chaotic nature had become clear. Through 2002 and into the early months of 2003, a variety of other elements also emerged. All evolved over the years that followed and all were important in defining the nature of the 9/11 Wars. This chapter examines two of those characteristics, both in evidence during the campaign in Afghanistan in 2001. One was the odd mix of ideology, blithe optimism and lack of judgement which characterized the approach of Western governments to extremely difficult and delicate interventions in foreign lands, at least for the first five years of the conflict. The second is the difficulties Western militaries, and in particular the American army, had in understanding the challenges the fighting posed and in evolving effective responses to it.

IDEALISM, IDEOLOGY AND HARD CASH: HAPPY EARLY DAYS IN AFGHANISTAN

In Afghanistan, by the spring of 2002, the fighting of a few months previously and the ‘quiet of the grave’ under the Taliban was a distant memory. Under the trees in a dusty courtyard in the southern suburbs of Jalalabad, slates on their knees, books shared between three, latecomers searching for their friends among the rows of blue headscarves before the blackboards, the 800 girls of a newly reopened school were starting a new year. Pupils of all ages sat together in classes, the cheerful, flustered headmistress said, because many had missed several years of schooling under the Taliban. Now thousands sought to make up the time they had lost.