The 9/11 Wars (104 page)

  
64
.
Audio tape, al-Jazeera, 2003, transcript at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2751019.stm:
‘Complete failure of the international alliance of evil, with all its forces, [to overcome] a small number of
mujahideen
– 300
mujahideen
hunkered down in trenches spread over an area of one square mile under a temperature of –10 degrees Celsius. The battle resulted in the injury of 6 per cent of personnel – we hope God will accept them as martyrs – and the damage of 2 per cent of the trenches, praise be to God.’

  
65
.
Author interview with Mohammed Umr al-Madani, Kabul, August 2008.

  
66
.
Smucker, ‘How bin Laden got away’.

  
67
.
United States Special Operations Command History
, p. 99.

  
68
.
Drew Brown, ‘How al Qaeda fighters escaped; Bin Laden told his men to disperse, witness says’,
Miami Herald
, October 17, 2002.

  
69
.
Author telephone interview with Bob Grenier, January 2009.

  
70
.
Author email exchange with Lodhi, February 2011. Author interview with General Orakzai, London, February 2009.

  
71
.
Seth Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, p. 101.

  
72
.
Newsweek
, author interviews.

  
73
.
Ghanim Abdul Rahman al Harbi, Combat Status Review Tribunal, Summary of Evidence, Guantanamo Bay, 16 August 16, 2004; Administrative Review Board Round 1 Summaries , June 23, 2006. Worthington,
The Guantanamo Files
, pp. 29–30. Interview with local residents, Hadda, Jalalabad, Milawa, November 2001, October 2002. Burns, ‘10-month Afghan mystery’. Glasser, ‘The battle of Tora Bora’.

  
74
.
Rory Carroll, ‘Biker Mullah’s great escape’,
Guardian
, January 6, 2002.

  
75
.
See ‘The Global War on Terrorism: The First 100 Days’, p. 11.

  
76
.
Bob Woodward, ‘The inside story of the CIA’s proxy war’,
Australian Age
, November 20, 2002.

  
77
.
Tenet,
At the Center of the Storm
, p. 255

  
78
.
Woodward, ‘CIA led way with cash handouts’.

  
79
.
The same was the case in the UK. Matthew Engel, ‘First British casualties as four SAS men shot’,
Guardian
, November 27, 2001. The first US casualty in Afghanistan was Evander E. Andrews, Master Sergeant US Air Force, age thirty-six, from Solon, Maine, on October 10, 2001, according to the
Washington Post
. He was killed in a forklift accident. ‘Faces of the Fallen’ project, Washington Post Online, accessed July 2010.

  
80
.
The airlift took place with the permission of senior Bush administration figures, who appear to have been largely unaware of exactly who was being lifted where. Hersh, ‘The getaway’. Douglas Frantz, ‘Pakistan ended aid to Taliban only hesitantly’,
New York Times
, December 8, 2001. Ahmed Rashid,
Descent into Chaos
, pp. 90–93.

  
81
.
Author interview with Haji Saifullah, Gardez, April 2002.

  
82
.
Bob Woodward,
Plan of Attack
, Simon and Schuster, 2008, p. 8. Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 234.

  
83
.
Judith Miller, ‘An Iraqi defector tells of work on at least 20 hidden weapons sites’,
New York Times
, December 20, 2001.

CHAPTER 4: THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

    
1
.
Author telephone interview with Robert Grenier, former CIA station chief Islamabad, January 2009.

    
2
.
Author telephone interview with Bruce Riedel, CIA senior analyst and senior director for Near East Affairs on the National Security Council 1997–2002, October 2008.

    
3
.
‘When we received intitial reports of al-Qaeda’s presence [in South Waziristan] we did not take them very seriously,’ said General Musharraf. See
In the Line of Fire
, p. 264.

    
4
.
Including one attack involving young Britons.

    
5
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 166.

    
6
.
Rama Lakshmi, ‘Gunmen with explosives attack Indian parliament’,
Washington Post
, December 14, 2001. Simon Jeffrey ‘The Moscow theatre siege’,
Guardian
, October 28, 2002.

    
7
.
Carol Eisenberg, ‘On religion, faith and rituals’,
Newsday
, December 22, 2001. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, December 2001. The post-9/11 figure was 59 per cent, up from 45 per cent six months previously.

    
8
.
Jason Katz, Victoria Cullen, Connor Buttner and John Pollock, ‘American Newspaper Coverage of Islam Post-September 11, 2001: A Community Structure Approach’,
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
, August 8, 2007. The study also discovered that communities with highest levels of education and revenues were not those whose newspapers reflected more positive views of Islam in the aftermath of 9/11. Depictions of Islam became more negative over the years up until 2005.

    
9
.
Emily Wax, ‘In times of terror, teens talk the talk’,
Washington Post
, March 20, 2002.

  
10
.
In March 2003 those figures were 64, 50 and 59 per cent respectively. The period saw a predictable crash in views of the US too. See
Pew Global Attitudes 2003: Views of a Changing World
, 2003, pp. 19, 46. The number of people giving the United States a positive rating has dropped by 22 points in Turkey and 13 points in Pakistan since 1999. See ibid., p. 4.

  
11
.
Ibid., p. 34.

  
12
.
‘The 2002 Gallup poll of the Islamic world’. Muslims overwhelmingly cited technology, computers and knowledge when asked what they liked most about the West. Scott Atran, ‘Trends in Suicide Terrorism: Sense and Nonsense’, paper presented to World Federation of Scientists Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism, Erice, Sicily, August 2004. Mark Tessler, ‘Do Islamic Orientations Influence Attitudes toward Democracy in the Arab World? Evidence from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Algeria’,
International Journal of Comparative Sociology
, vol. 2 (2002), pp. 229–49. Mark Tessler and Dan Corstange, ‘How Should Americans Understand Arab and Muslim Political Attitudes?’,
Journal of Social Affairs
, vol. 19 (2002).

  
13
.
Author interviews, Jalalabad, October 2002.

  
14
.
Author interviews Jalalabad, Gardez, Kabul, May and October 2002.

  
15
.
Michael O’Hanlon, ‘Staying Power: The U.S. Mission in Afghanistan Beyond 2011’,
Foreign Affairs
, September/October 2010.

  
16
.
Author interviews, Kabul, 2002–3. Interviews with Ashraf Ghani, former minister of finance, Kabul, January 2007 and August 2008. Author interview with Clare Lockhart, Ministry of Finance adviser, Kabul, January 2007. For the row over the road to Kandahar, see Dobbins,
After the Taliban
.

  
17
.
Clare Lockhart, ‘Learning from experience’,
Slate
, posted November 5, 2008.

  
18
.
Radio address by Mrs Bush, Office of the First Lady, November 17, 2001. Kampfner,
Blair’s Wars
, p. 123.

  
19
.
Images of the execution of a woman convicted of murder in Kabul in November 1999, which the author had witnessed, were repeatedly broadcast and became, despite the relative infrequency of such events, symbolic of the Taliban rule.

  
20
.
Afghan women and children relief act of 2001, US Congress, 107th Congress, December 12, 2001, US Government Printing Office, 2001. Public Law 107-81 states: ‘the President is authorized, on such terms and conditions as the President may determine, to provide educational and health care assistance for the women and children living in Afghanistan and as refugees in neighboring countries … In providing assistance under subsection (a), the President shall ensure that such assistance is provided in a manner that protects and promotes the human rights of all people in Afghanistan, utilizing indigenous institutions and nongovernmental organizations, especially women’s organizations, to the extent possible …’

  
21
.
But the experience of Afghan women was much more complicated than many in the West expected. When Florence Aubenas, correspondent for the left-wing French newspaper
Libération
, was asked by her editors to report on why such a large majority of Kabul’s women had kept their
burqas
she was first told they feared acid attacks. On discovering that there had been no such incidents reported, she asked again and was told that in fact the women did not want to leave home without the full covering because they had grown used to it. Florence Aubenas,
Grand Reporter: petite conférence sur le journalisme
, Bayard, 2009, p. 12.

  
22
.
‘Lauded at pageant, woman condemned by Afghan officials’, Associated Press, November 10, 2003. ‘Afghan Supreme Court bans beauty pageants’, Agence France-Presse, October 30, 2003.

  
23
.
The most extreme representatives of this new vision for Afghanistan were to be found among the eclectic collection of visitors who turned up in Kabul, few of whom had shown any previous interest in Afghanistan, through 2002. One was French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, dispatched by President Jacques Chirac to report on what France could provide to assist the reconstruction of Afghanistan. A senior French government bureaucrat told the author in 2009 that Lévy’s ten-day expedition and the subsequent publication of his 200-page report used up a significant proportion of the funds the French government had available for Afghanistan at the time. His suggestions included, among other things, ‘a year of French cinema’, ‘the creation of a French cultural centre, to be jointly developed with the intelligentsia of Kabul’ and for ‘the emergence of a democratic “Afghanitude” (identity)’ to combat the rule of the warlords, the creation of a corps ‘of black hussars for democracy, who would travel all over the country, in the name of President Karzai, preaching the message of citizenship and fundamental human rights’.

  
24
.
Marion and Peter Sluglett, ‘The Historiography of Modern Iraq’,
American Historical Review
, 1991, pp. 1,412–13. Barfield,
Afghanistan
, p. 339.