A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  One might suspect that the Labor leader, having been handed such a scandal – the Government apparently lying to the electorate just before a federal election – would be euphoric. The opposite was the case. To Beazley, the re-emergence of the story was a catastrophe: now the final two days of the campaign would be taken up debating John Howard’s immigration policies: the one thing Howard was keen to plug.

  ‘We had the most dramatic demonstration of the Dick Morris effect,’ Beazley later recalled. ‘Which is that, if people are talking about your issue, it doesn’t matter whether the story is favourable or unfavourable: you benefit.’

  The 2001 federal election was ‘one of the most remarkable of Australian elections’, according to a report from the Australian Parliamentary Library Law and Bills Digest Group. A government seemingly on the ropes just months before polling day is comfortably re-elected. Unusually, the major factors in its victory are immigration and international terrorism.’

  John Howard went on to serve another six years in office, becoming the second longest-serving Prime Minister in Australia’s history. A close friend of George W. Bush, he signed up to the Coalition of the Willing immediately, dispatching Australian troops to Iraq in 2003. Defence Minister Peter Reith – a man castigated by the ensuing Senate inquiry as having ‘engaged in the deliberate misleading of the Australian public’, and whose behaviour regarding the Children Overboard incident was described as ‘indefensible’ – left the Government to become a director of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, architect of the Pacific Solution – a man who had spent a large part of his time as a minister campaigning against the ‘corrosive’ nature of the judiciary – became Attorney-General.

  Kim Beazley announced his resignation.

  I met the Prime Minister Australia never had in the lobby of his hotel in Canberra in November 2008.

  ‘Yeah,’ Kim Beazley sighed. ‘We were going to win the election. No doubt about that. I think if the election campaign had proceeded without 9/11 we would have won it. We could have beaten asylum seekers. We probably could have beaten 9/11 without the asylum seekers. What we couldn’t beat was asylum seekers and 9/11.’

  If he had won that election and become Prime Minister, how would Beazley have responded to George W. Bush asking for support in Iraq in 2002?

  ‘From our point of view, it just stuck out that the initial victory would be quick, but the ultimate chaos would be uncontainable – and the distraction and the impact on the Islamic world horrific,’

  You wouldn’t have sent Australian troops to Iraq?

  ‘No.’

  Despite the Australian government’s repeated insinuations, the vast majority of the asylum seekers on the Olong proved to be genuine refugees. And despite the Prime Minister’s assurances that they would not be allowed into Australia, most of them were. It took time, but they got there in the end.

  The Kahtanys were accepted into Australia after six months on Manus, Island. They arrived in Sydney a few months later. The Alsaais were also granted asylum within a year – partly, they think, because their eldest daughter became ill on Manus. The Australian government didn’t want to be saddled with the death of a twelve-year-old Iraqi girl in an Australian detention facility in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  Halima and Karim al Saadi were not so lucky. After a year on Manus their claim for refugee status was denied. They were shipped to Nauru, where they languished for another three years. Then, in 2005, Australia suddenly changed its mind, declared that they were refugees and finally admitted them.

  The Saadis travelled to the West seeking asylum. Instead of giving it to them, the Australian government incarcerated them for four years. Why? No one seems to know.

  ‘Were they found to be refugees?’ mused Philip Ruddock in 2008. ‘Or were they people who were found not to be refugees and then just hung on and hung on?’

  Perhaps it depends on how you define ‘refugee’. Before fleeing Iraq in 1991, Karim al Saadi had spent time in prison, where his fingernails were extracted and he was tied to a rotating ceiling fan while soldiers beat his legs with wooden bats. Meanwhile, the secret police visited his home. Halima, heavily pregnant at the time, refused to let them in – whereupon they knocked her down and kicked her so violently that she miscarried. This is why the Saadis were travelling without children. It is why they remain childless to this day.

  Interviewed by immigration authorities on Manus Island, Karim did not reveal that he had been imprisoned. He didn’t tell them how he had escaped from an underground jail in northern Iraq the day before he was due to be shipped to Abu Ghraib. He didn’t draw attention to the fingernails missing from his right hand or the permanent damage to his legs. Nor did he mention Halima’s miscarriage.

  Why would anyone seeking asylum not tell the authorities such things?

  Seven years later, Saadi shakes his head. ‘I thought that if I told them I had been in prison in Iraq they would think I was a bad man.’

  3

  The Wedding Party

  We did not start this war. So understand: responsibility for every single innocent casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

  Donald Rumsfeld, December 2001

  PATIENCE MY ASS. I’M GONNA KILL SOMETHING

  AC-130 SPECTRE gunship motto

  Abdul Malik was returning home from work on the afternoon of 28 June 2002 when he heard the shots: staccato bursts of automatic gunfire coming from behind his house. Every now and then there was a pause, presumably while the marksman reloaded, followed by more shooting. Cautiously, Malik crept around the house into his father’s pomegranate orchard, where he found his older brother Khaliq reloading a Kalashnikov.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Malik asked.

  Khaliq looked up and grinned. ‘You’ll find out!’

  He cocked the AK-47, raised it to his shoulder and, laughing, fired another volley into the sky.

  Inside the house, something strange was going on, too. Malik found his mother in the kitchen as usual, but she appeared distant, distracted. Informed that her eldest son was firing an automatic weapon in the garden, she didn’t seem bothered.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Malik asked her. She didn’t answer. Instead, she pointed to a basket on the kitchen table. Peering inside, Malik saw a pile of small candy parcels, individually wrapped in exquisite cloth – and the penny dropped. The basket was a dastmal, a formal acceptance of a marriage proposal given by a bride’s family to the groom’s. The strange behaviour, the gunfire, the basket of wrapped candies, all now made sense: a member of the family had become engaged. For a town as small as Deh Rawood, Afghanistan, this was a major event. The Afghan wondered which of his three brothers it might be.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

  His mother raised an eyebrow indulgently and smiled. Abdul Malik,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’

  Clandestine negotiations regarding Malik’s future had commenced a week earlier, when his mother and aunt had visited the Akhond family in the neighbouring village of Chagasyan, half an hour’s walk away from Deh Rawood. The object was to vet the family’s second daughter, Tela Gul. On paper, a match appeared propitious: both families were members of the Popalzai tribe and were well respected in their villages. Malik’s father was a freeholder with a large house; Tela Gul’s had not only completed the Haj, he was also a mullah in the local mosque. One of the mosque’s attendees was Malik’s uncle. There was a connection.

  Abdul Malik wasn’t the only one kept in the dark about his mother’s secret assignation. Tela Gul also was not informed. Unaware the meeting was about her, she served tea to the two older ladies and made polite conversation. Only when they returned two days later did she realize something was happening. This could be serious, she thought. Throughout the second visit her mother could not find her anywhere. Tela Gul was hiding in an almond grove outside town.

  The M
alik family found initial reports of Tela Gul to be positive. She was polite, well brought up and attractive: an ideal partner for the family’s second son.

  ‘She’s good,’ Malik’s aunt told his father, ‘a perfect choice for Abdul Malik.’

  Tela’s family also appeared happy with the match: Malik had a good job, working for the local police force, supporting American operations in Oruzgan Province. In the last week of June 2002 Malik’s father visited the Akhond family to hammer out the financial details. Negotiations proved so easy they were completed in record time. Even the dowry was negotiated without difficulty. It was a sure sign the wedding was blessed.

  On the afternoon of 28 June, while Malik was still at work, his male relatives marched to Tela Gul’s house to demand her hand in marriage. A brief exchange took place, at the end of which her father handed over a symbol of his agreement: a basket full of candies wrapped in fine cloth. The dastmal. The men formally thanked Tela Gul’s father, grabbed the basket and ran into the street to celebrate. As they paraded home, Malik’s father, brothers and uncles raised their weapons to the sky and loosed a series of volleys of automatic gunfire.

  ‘It was a great moment, a happy moment,’ recalls Mohammed Anwar, Malik’s uncle. ‘Everybody was joining in. We were firing into the sky to let everyone know there was an engagement.’

  Malik was less enthusiastic. Why had he not been told about this sooner? He wasn’t ready for marriage. He was too young.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit late now,’ teased his mother. ‘You’re engaged!’

  Who was the girl?

  ‘She’s from a famous family. A good family. You’ll like her.’

  When she revealed the identity of his fiancée and described her to him, Malik began to warm to the idea.

  ‘I knew the family,’ he recalls. ‘I hadn’t been to their home, but I knew who they were. They were Popalzai, like us. I had never actually seen Tela Gul, but I’d heard about her . . . It was a very good match. I think we were both happy with it.’

  He told his mother he agreed.

  Outside, in the pomegranate orchard, gunshots rang out. Abdul Malik’s brother had found some more ammunition.

  Nine months earlier a conference took place that would have profound effects on the young Afghans’ wedding plans. In the week of 8 October 2001 General Tommy Franks, Commander-in-Chief of US Central Command (CENTCOM) met Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers. Ostensibly, the purpose of the meeting was to allow Franks to brief his commanders on progress in Operation Enduring Freedom, the US invasion of Afghanistan, after its first week. But Franks had a specific request for his Pentagon bosses. In his opinion, he told the pair, it was time to deploy SPECTRE to Afghanistan.

  Why was SPECTRE necessary? asked Myers and Rumsfeld. What did the CENTCOM commander hope to achieve? What were the risks? What exactly could SPECTRE offer in the Afghan theatre?

  Franks explained. The origins of the SPECTRE programme lay in Vietnam. In the mid-1960s – recognizing that Special Forces on the ground needed aerial support more accurate than jets dropping bombs from altitude – the Pentagon had commandeered a handful of AC-47 aircraft and modified them. Three heavy-calibre machine guns with rotating barrels were installed, each capable of firing 100 rounds per second. The resultant hybrids – squat, ugly planes, weighed down with ordnance – were designed to fly low over targets, delivering astonishing quantities of firepower, allowing troops on the ground to extricate themselves in emergencies. However, because the modified AC-47s were so heavy and slow they presented wonderful targets for the enemy. As a result they flew only at night. Special Forces, who seldom saw these mysterious aircraft watching their backs, nicknamed them ‘Spooky’.

  The North Vietnamese had another nickname. Night-time tracer fire from the AC-47, delivered at a rate of 18,000 rounds per minute, caused great plumes of smoke and the appearance of fire being spat from the sky. The Vietcong thought they were dragons. The roar of the guns alone was enough to precipitate a retreat.

  ‘Do not attack the Dragon!’ commanders instructed their troops. ‘It will only infuriate the monster.’

  Post-Vietnam, ‘Spooky’ had evolved. The AC-47s were swapped for C-130 Hercules transport aircraft – vast, four-propeller beasts capable of loitering over a target for hours on end, out of sight but within earshot. The new generation of gunships, AC-130s (known as SPECTREs), was fitted with an extraordinary range of artillery pieces including 25 mm, 40 mm and 105 mm canons. A single shot from the 105 mm gun could take the top off a tank.

  By 9/11, SPECTRE contained the most sophisticated airborne, computer-driven weapons system in the world, allowing its operators to engage targets at night or through cloud cover with pinpoint accuracy. When Special Forces were on the ground, SPECTRE would circle anticlockwise overhead, watching and waiting. At the right moment the AC-130 would launch a wall of fire, covering the target with ordnance – a technique military planners referred to euphemistically as ‘target saturation’.

  Subjected to an AC-130 attack, nothing survived. The aircraft carried a crew of thirteen, all part of a secretive unit under US Air Force Special Operations Command, known as the 16th Special Operations Squadron (16 SOS). Five of them were needed just to man the cannons.

  After Franks had briefed his Pentagon bosses on the capabilities of SPECTRE, he told them his plan. He wanted to escalate the fighting in Afghanistan. It was time, the General suggested, to insert small units of elite Special Forces and CIA officers into Taliban-controlled territory. These guys were highly vulnerable. They needed aerial protection. Something powerful. What better way of guaranteeing their safety than the AC-130s of 16 SOS?

  Details of SPECTRE’s subsequent deployment remain classified, but it’s no great secret that the first gunships flew out of Masirah Island, off the coast of Oman. Masirah had been the staging-point for the 1979 Iranian hostage rescue and had remained staffed, to some extent, by US personnel ever since. Although neither US nor Omani governments ever admitted to the base’s use in Operation Enduring Freedom, post-9/11 the Pentagon filled it with personnel and renamed it Camp Justice. From Masirah the initial six AC-130s had a clean 800-mile run into Afghanistan. First operations began on 15 October near Kandahar. ‘SPECTRE,’ recalls one Special Forces operative, ‘was in the house.’

  One of the reasons AC-130s were important in Afghanistan was that there were so few troops on the ground. This was the result of a series of policy decisions made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It was to have unforeseen consequences.

  Shortly after the first plane hit the World Trade Center in 2001, the White House became convinced that war in Afghanistan was inevitable. A number of problems immediately became apparent. A cursory study of history revealed numerous examples of military forays that had come unstuck there. Alexander the Great, the British and, most recently, the Soviets had all failed to hold the country. In military circles Afghanistan was renowned as possibly the most uninvadable nation on earth. Former Soviet commanders, consulted prior to the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom, warned the United States that taking – and holding – Afghanistan was a great deal harder than it appeared.

  ‘With regret,’ one Russian commander told a CIA officer in mid-September 2001, ‘I have to say you’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you.’

  The CIA officer disagreed. It wasn’t going to play that way.

  ‘We’re going to kill them,’ he told the Russian. ‘We’re going to rock their world.’

  One thing the Americans did conclude from these consultations was that deploying large numbers of troops to Afghanistan was not a good idea. The more troops they sent, the more the United States would look like a foreign occupier, and the more likely it was the Afghans would resist. That was the Russian mistake.

  ‘The Soviets introduced 650,000 troops,’ Tommy Franks told PBS in June 2002. ‘We took that as instructive, as not a way to do it.’

  There were
other lessons to be learned from the Soviets’ experience, too. Timing was critical.

  ‘If you do go in, don’t stay too long,’ Deputy-Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz advised in November 2001, ‘because they don’t tend to like any foreigners who stay too long.’

  As it happened, the notion of sending low troop numbers into Afghanistan, then leaving as soon as possible, gelled perfectly with the promises George W. Bush had made prior to his election. In the Bush White House it was generally accepted that President Clinton had wasted two terms in office meddling in Bosnia, Haiti and Kosovo. The result was a swathe of partially reconstructed failed states that were now apparently dependent on US largesse.

  ‘Nation-building’, the new president believed, was a failed notion. It cost a lot of money and ultimately it didn’t work. Besides, there were better things for the US military to do with its time than to escort children to school. Especially after 9/11.

  The White House’s plan called for a ‘light footprint’ in Afghanistan. Special Forces and the CIA would infiltrate the country, recruit allies among the Taliban’s enemies, then use them – together with the wholesale application of US air power – to take the country. Once the Taliban was gone, the Afghans would rebuild their nation themselves. The United States would assist, of course, but not with troops.

  This way the country would become self-sufficient faster and the United States would not end up stuck with a nation reliant on it for money and guidance. This way, in fact, the United States would not be seen as an invader at all: all it was doing was providing the firepower to remove a dictatorial regime and adding the democracy that would enable the country to right itself. If, after the invasion, peacekeeping operations became necessary, they could be left to other organizations – the United Nations, perhaps, or NATO – better suited to rebuilding sewage plants and monitoring the school-run. The US military, meanwhile, would fulfil its proper task: hunting al-Qaeda, knocking out the Taliban and killing terrorists.