The Longest War (12 page)

Then Bush turned to his analysis of why the United States was attacked on 9/11: “Why do they hate us? …
They hate our freedoms
—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another.” Yet in all the tens of thousands of words that bin Laden had uttered, he was
largely silent about American freedoms
and values. He just didn’t seem to care very much about the beliefs of the “Crusaders.” Instead his focus was invariably on American foreign policies in the Middle East. If the first rule of war is “know your enemy,” it would have been helpful if Bush had been more knowledgeable about the motives of al-Qaeda leaders, who cared far more about how U.S. foreign policy was conducted in the Middle East than about how Americans conducted themselves in their daily lives.

Bush then asserted that al-Qaeda followed in the footsteps “of the murderous ideologies of the 20th century … in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.” Certainly “bin Ladenism” seemed to share some commonalities with the Nazis and the Soviets: their anti-Semitism; their antiliberalism and general contempt for Enlightenment values; their cultlike embrace of charismatic leaders; their deft exploitation of modern propaganda methods;
and their bogus promises of utopia here on Earth if their programs were implemented. But the threat posed by al-Qaeda was orders of magnitude smaller than that posed by the Nazis, who instigated a global conflict that killed tens of millions and who perpetrated the Holocaust, and if the Cold War had ended with a bang instead of a whimper much of the human race would have vanished. Yet immediately after 9/11, President Bush raised al-Qaeda to the status of the strategic, existential threat that the group craved to be, rather than the serious-enough problem that it in fact presented.

Such a supposedly existential struggle merited that the coming war would have to be fought in black and white: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” said Bush. An alternative formulation could have been “If you are against the terrorists, then you are with us,” and that formulation would have vastly increased the number of potential allies of the United States. Instead, much of the foreign policy of the first Bush term would be conducted in a high-handed and unilateral manner.

What went unsaid
in Bush’s speech was the idea that the United States, the consumer of a quarter of the world’s energy, should launch a Manhattan Project–style energy policy to make Americans less dependent on the Middle Eastern countries that had helped to incubate al-Qaeda. This was a squandered opportunity, since at no other point in history would the American public have been more receptive to such a call. Bush would style himself as a “wartime president,” but by way of sacrifice he stopped playing golf, cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, and did not institute a draft. At the height of the Battle of Britain in 1940, Churchill could say with some truth, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” After 9/11, never was so little asked from so many.

On 9/11 there was little question that al-Qaeda was at war with the United States; the critical question in the months that followed was, What kind of war was the United States going to fight against it? The dean of military strategists, Carl von Clausewitz, explained the importance of this decision making in his 1832 treatise
On War:
“
The first, the supreme
, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature.”

Clausewitz’s excellent advice about the absolute necessity of properly defining the war upon which one is about to embark was ignored by Bush administration officials, who instead declared an open-ended and ambiguous
“war on terror.” Sometimes known as the Global War on Terror, or by the clunky acronym “GWOT,” it became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. The GWOT framework propelled the Bush administration into its disastrous entanglement in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 but was launched under the rubric of the “war on terror” and the erroneous claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he might give to terrorists, including al-Qaeda, to whom he was supposedly allied, and that he therefore threatened American interests. None of this, of course, was true.

On September 14, 2001, Congress passed an “
Authorization for Use of Military Force
” against “those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks.” The coming American war against the Taliban was backed by the world; two days earlier the UN Security Council had passed an unusually forceful and unambiguous resolution “to
combat by all means
… terrorist acts.” On the same day NATO
invoked Article 5
for the first time in its history, which meant that the nineteen member states of the alliance considered the 9/11 attacks as an attack against all of them, to be responded to with force. (Interestingly, major Muslim clerics did not declare that the subsequent American war in Afghanistan necessitated a “defensive jihad,” as had happened after the Soviets invaded the country in 1979.)

Bin Laden disastrously misjudged the possible American responses to the 9/11 attacks, which he believed would take one of two forms: an eventual retreat from the Middle East along the lines of the U.S. pullout from Somalia in 1993, or another ineffectual round of cruise missile attacks similar to those that followed al-Qaeda’s bombings of the two American embassies in Africa in 1998. Of course, neither of these two scenarios happened. The U.S. campaign against the Taliban was conducted with
massive American airpower
, tens of thousands of Northern Alliance forces, allied with some three hundred U.S. Special Forces soldiers working with 110 CIA officers.

The first Americans into Afghanistan, Gary Schroen’s seven-man CIA team, code-named JAWBREAKER, touched down
on the afternoon of September 26
. Two weeks later, on October 7, the American bombing campaign against the Taliban began. As it did, bin Laden made a
surprise appearance
in a videotape shown around the world. It was the first time he had been seen publicly since the 9/11 attacks. In an uncharacteristically brief statement, the al-Qaeda leader,
dressed in a camouflage jacket with a submachine gun propped at his side, said that the attacks were revenge for the long-standing Western humiliation of the Muslim world, consistently his most important theme.

Nine days after bin Laden’s videotaped appearance, the first U.S. Special Forces team arrived near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif and
linked up with
one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, the Uzbek general Abdul Rashid Dostum. After spending their first night in a cattle stable, the Special Forces group teamed up with Dostum’s heavily bearded, RPG-wielding Uzbek horsemen. Within twenty-four hours of their arrival the Americans started calling in airstrikes on the Taliban front lines, using their laser designators. Those strikes were so precise that Northern Alliance commanders came to believe that the U.S. forces possessed some kind of “
death ray
.” The Americans did not disabuse them of this notion; once the Taliban got wind of the U.S. death ray, units would often surrender.

But the American press
was already growing restive about the seeming lack of progress against the Taliban. On October 31, R.W. “Johnny” Apple wrote an indicative front-page story in the
New York Times
headlined “A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam.” The fall of Kabul was less than two weeks away.

The CIA’s top official on the ground in Afghanistan was Gary Berntsen. If some men can be described as laid-back, Berntsen is laid-forward, a bear-sized, gung-ho CIA officer with a pronounced Long Island accent who speaks Dari, one of the local Afghan languages. In early November Berntsen was liasing with the leaders of the Northern Alliance and helping to call in the airstrikes on the Taliban front lines on the Shomali Plains, north of Kabul. He remembers that at first the Taliban morale was very high: “They’d beaten the Soviets and
figured they were going to beat us
.”

Berntsen recalls that there were several thousand Taliban soldiers on the front lines near Kabul who were being joined by many more Pakistani recruits. “The roads from Pakistan into Afghanistan were clogged with people all trying to get
in
.” Berntsen’s boss at the CIA, Hank Crumpton, said, “We’re gonna let ’em all in so we kill ’em on the front lines.
The more the merrier
.” AC-130 gunships and B-52 bombers made short work of the Taliban foot soldiers on the Kabul front lines.

In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden avoided all but his closest supporters. Only a handful of people outside al-Qaeda or the Taliban are known
to have spent any time with him.
A couple of weeks
after the first American bombing raids had begun, the al-Qaeda leader met with Taysir Allouni of Al Jazeera, who interviewed the Saudi exile at length on October 21. During that interview bin Laden appeared relaxed and poised, explicitly linking himself to the 9/11 attacks for the first time publicly. The Al Jazeera correspondent asked him, “
America claims
that it has proof that you are behind what happened in New York and Washington. What’s your answer?” Bin Laden came close to admitting his role, answering: “If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who are killing our sons is terrorism, then let history be our judge that we are terrorists.” At one point bin Laden made the interesting observation, “
We practice the good terrorism
.”

Allouni followed up with the most important question that can be posed to al-Qaeda’s leader: “How about the killing of innocent civilians?” Bin Laden replied, “The men that God helped [on September 11]
did not intend to kill
babies; they intended to destroy the strongest military power in the world, to attack the Pentagon,” adding that “the [World Trade Center] Towers are an economic power and not a children’s school.”

Dr. Amer Aziz, a prominent Pakistani surgeon and Taliban sympathizer who had treated bin Laden two years earlier for a back injury, also met with him a few weeks after 9/11. Aziz was
summoned to Kabul in the first week of November 2001 to treat Mohammed Atef
, the military commander of al-Qaeda. While examining Atef, Aziz again encountered bin Laden. This meeting was significant because there had been widespread reports that the al-Qaeda leader suffered from potentially deadly kidney disease. Aziz said those reports were false: “When I saw him last he was in excellent health. He was walking. He was healthy.
I didn
’t see any evidence of kidney disease. I didn’t see any evidence of dialysis.” (Similarly, Ahmed Zaidan of Al Jazeera television, who had interviewed bin Laden for two or three hours eight months before 9/11, says, “I didn’t see anything abnormal.” That was also the take of Bakr Atyani of the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation, who met him five months later. Atyani thought that bin Laden had put on weight and was in “
good health
.”)

On November 9, Mazar-e-Sharif, the largely Uzbek city in the north of Afghanistan that had been the scene of some of the Taliban’s nastiest massacres, fell to the Northern Alliance and the small team of U.S. Special Forces supporting the local warlord General Dostum. One of the American soldiers remembered the roads “
were just lined
with people cheering and clapping
their hands and just celebrations everywhere. It was just unlike anything we’d ever seen, other than maybe on a movie screen.” Three days later, Kabul also fell to the Northern Alliance. Peter Jouvenal, a British cameraman who had covered Afghanistan extensively since 1980, was the first Westerner to set foot in Kabul as it fell. He recalled, “
The people were overjoyed
to be relieved of such a suppressive regime.”

The Taliban and members of al-Qaeda made a hasty retreat from Kabul following its liberation by the Northern Alliance.
A few days later
, Atef was killed in a U.S. Predator drone air strike. Atef, a former Egyptian policeman, was one of the most hard-line members of al-Qaeda. To cement their relationship in January 2001, bin Laden had
married his son Muhammad to Atef’s daughter
. The loss of al-Qaeda’s military commander was
a blow to the organization
, since it was Atef who had performed as bin Laden’s chief executive officer, and had worked around the clock to manage al-Qaeda’s personnel, operations, and cash flow.

Hundreds of miles to the south of Kabul, the CIA was working to try to open up a rift between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In late September, Robert Grenier, the dapper, smooth-talking CIA station chief in Islamabad, traveled to Baluchistan, a Pakistani province of vast, broiling deserts less than a hundred miles from the Taliban headquarters of Kandahar, for a clandestine meeting with Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, the number-two official in the Taliban. Meeting in the five-star Serena hotel in the Baluch capital of Quetta, Grenier offered Mullah Osmani a deal whereby the Taliban would let American forces covertly snatch bin Laden while they could plausibly maintain that they had no idea of the plan. Mullah Osmani took careful notes and said he would discuss the idea with Mullah Omar. Grenier figured that even if Mullah Omar rejected this plan other Taliban leaders might embrace it, and so “we could at least
sow some dissension
within the ranks.”

The proposal to snatch bin Laden came to nothing, but in their next meeting, on
October 2
, Grenier offered Mullah Osmani another deal: overthrow Mullah Omar, seize power, and then turn over al-Qaeda’s leader. Grenier recalls telling Osmani, “You need to save your movement. So he said, ‘How do I do that?’ So I gave him a sort of textbook plan as to how you launch a coup d’état: Put Mullah Omar under house arrest. Don’t let him communicate with anybody.” Nothing came of this plan either.