A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  According to President Bush, the history of Afghan invasions was riddled with cases of ‘initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure’. This White House was smarter than that. ‘We’re not going to repeat that mistake.’

  Not everyone was convinced. Those with first-hand experience of working in failed states recognized that even if the invasion went well – and there was no guarantee it would – the real problems were likely to emerge after Kabul had fallen. Breaking things in Afghanistan was all well and good; putting them back together might prove considerably harder. The country, which had been in a state of civil war for the best part of thirty years, was riddled with internal feuds. It had never been effectively ruled. The chances of this vast, under-resourced nation simply sitting up and sorting itself out were minimal.

  In the run-up to the invasion Richard Dearlove, the Head of MI6, visited CENTCOM in Tampa, and raised the issue with Tommy Franks.

  ‘He said to Franks, “What do you think is going to happen after we’ve pushed over the Afghan government?”’ recalls a senior British diplomat briefed on the meeting. ‘Franks said something like, “Oh, well, I expect that they’ll become a democracy, won’t they?”’

  US diplomats were also concerned about the lack of reconstruction plans for Afghanistan. James Dobbins, who had worked in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, and who became the United States’ Special Envoy to Afghanistan at the end of 2001, recalls a certain laissez-faire attitude towards the country.

  ‘It became clear not immediately but pretty quickly – almost immediately – that this simply didn’t have the same level of buy-in or interest at the higher levels of US government that I had been used to.’ To Dobbins it appeared that the White House thought the invasion would be hard, but the follow-up easy. He was strongly of the opinion that things might work the other way around. ‘The idea that Afghans could adequately secure their country after a twenty-three-year civil war,’ he later wrote, ‘struck me as naive and irresponsible.’

  Robert Finn, who became the US ambassador to Afghanistan in 2002, agreed, taking the White House’s ‘no nation-building’ line with a pinch of salt.

  ‘The rhetoric from Washington, which they said many times, was “We’re not doing nation-building. We’re not going to do this kind of thing.” And I said to myself, “Well, of course they’re going to do it, because that’s what you have to do to solve this problem.”’

  Military commanders had reservations, too. General Dan McNeill, who led US forces in Afghanistan in 2002, was summoned to CENTCOM prior to his deployment.

  ‘I was told to take half of my headquarters and leave half of it home in case it had to be replicated,’ he says. McNeill wasn’t convinced this was a smart idea. ‘My headquarters had just been though about a year’s worth of good training and we had a pretty good team, and yes, it did bother me that I was going to split it roughly in half and leave half of it at home.’

  His superiors, Generals Keane and Shinseki, refused to budge. The justification seemed to be that the deployment was a temporary one. McNeill was instructed to do nothing ‘that looked like permanence’.

  ‘No Bondsteel,’ Keane told McNeill, referring to the huge US military base in Bosnia.

  ‘So I concluded from that,’ says McNeil, ‘that we were not going to be there long.’

  The issue of how long the Americans would stay in Afghanistan did not occur to Abdul Malik. Like most inhabitants of Deh Rawood he assumed the Americans would sort things out. It was clear to the young man, however, that a great deal of work was necessary. The town had been wrecked by the Soviets during their occupation.

  As a result, neither Malik nor his bride-to-be Tela Gul had ever attended school. This was a source of disappointment to the young man: originally, he had wanted to be a schoolteacher. Instead, he had spent his childhood being shunted around the country as his parents tried to stop him becoming another casualty of the ongoing fighting. Whenever news of a Russian offensive arrived, the Malik family would load their possessions on to donkeys, then head for the mountains and valleys around town, where they would hide until the fighting was over.

  So itinerant was the young man’s life that, when World Health Organization representatives visited the town to check on health facilities and to vaccinate children against polio, he was always absent. Malik was never vaccinated. Neither were his friends. Deh Rawood was isolated from the wider community. News from inside the village seldom made it out; news from the outside seldom made it in.

  There were exceptions. Reports of the 9/11 attacks shocked the villagers. Malik heard about them on the family radio. He learned from snippets of conversation that Osama bin Laden was behind them, and that Bin Laden lived near Kandahar, protected by the Taliban. Malik’s brother Khaliq thought the whole story was implausible. It was a conspiracy, he told Malik: there had been no attacks. The US just wanted a reason to invade Afghanistan. Unsure what to believe, the brothers consulted their uncle Anwar, who pooh-poohed the conspiracy theory.

  ‘It can’t be a lie,’ he told his nephews. ‘Someone’s done this.’ One thing was clear. ‘If the Taliban don’t do what America tells them and surrender Osama,’ he told the boys, America will topple them.’

  The first Americans Malik saw were Special Forces troops accompanying the future president Hamid Karzai, then making his way north towards Kabul. The Green Berets of Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 574 travelled light and, initially, incognito.

  ‘We were told they were doctors,’ Malik says. ‘That they were here in case someone got hurt.’

  The behaviour of these six white men in Deh Rawood was a source of great amusement to the villagers.

  ‘They were filtering the water! They were eating packaged food dropped from aeroplanes. We laughed at them.’

  One of the villagers gave the Special Forces men local turbans, to help them blend in. Only later did news emerge that there might be more to these strange Americans than met the eye.

  ‘When more Americans arrived,’ recalls Malik, ‘people realized that they were not, in fact, doctors at all.’

  One individual better informed than most was Jan Mohammed, the governor of Oruzgan Province. It was a source of some pride to him that Hamid Karzai had made an appearance in Deh Rawood.

  ‘When President Karzai started the fight against the Taliban, he started it from here,’ Mohammed says. He and other leading figures were buttonholed by Karzai, who enlisted them in the struggle to overthrow the Taliban. A government will come to power,’ he told them, ‘that will meet people’s demands, provide education, give rights to men and women, build roads, schools and madrasas.’

  News of the impending overthrow of the Taliban caused great excitement in Deh Rawood.

  ‘People were very optimistic about the change,’ says Khaliq. ‘People thought foreigners would come and the situation would change a lot for the better. Everybody was happy. Everybody thought the foreigners would build schools, roads, clinics and hospitals.’

  Most important of all, however, was the idea that the Americans might actually be able to stabilize Afghanistan, to stop the fighting that had plagued the country for the last thirty years. If anyone could do it, the villagers said, the Americans could.

  ‘We were pretty sure that the Americans were very advanced and had the best technology’

  One area of technology of particular interest to the inhabitants of Deh Rawood was the ability of the US military to attack targets from a distance with great accuracy. When the Soviets had invaded, they had razed entire towns with poorly aimed artillery barrages. The mujahedin and Taliban were even less discriminating. But the Americans, it was rumoured, had equipment that enabled them to avoid this kind of damage. They could hit anything, accurately, from anywhere. ‘America is a very developed country’ says Jan Mohammed. ‘We heard that Americans can see even small things of four centimetres on the ground.’

  A month after the first SPECTRE gunships went into action from Masirah, th
e modus operandi changed. In early November 2001, 16 SOS deployed to an ‘undisclosed location’ near Afghanistan with three further aircraft, making a total of nine AC-130s available for Special Forces: almost half of all the gunships in the Pentagon’s arsenal.

  The crews lost no time in settling in, decorating their tents with US flags and AC-130 paraphernalia. SPECTRE declared one tent door sign. GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE. WE DO.

  GHOSTRIDERS read another: AC-130 GUNSHIPS: SO OTHERS MAY DIE. Operators photographed themselves autographing heavy-calibre munitions, then posted the pictures on the Internet: EAT THIS, BIN LADEN, COURTESY OF CARLY, BROOKE AND PAM, MISSOULA, MONTANA.

  For the AC-130 crews Operation Enduring Freedom offered a unique opportunity. During the early stages of the invasion, Afghanistan was target-rich, almost a shooting gallery. YOU CAN RUN 16 SOS posters warned but YOU’LL ONLY DIE TIRED.

  16 SOS immediately set about justifying its reputation for absolute, complete destruction. In November 2001, three aircraft and three crews from the ‘undisclosed location’ flew thirty-nine combat missions in just twelve days. During that period, the aircraft expended more than 1,300 40 mm rounds and 1,200 105 mm rounds. Between October and December 2001, nine AC-130 aircraft flew 225 missions over Afghanistan, making them the third most deployed weapon in the US Air Force. The secretive, elite 16 SOS was instrumental in every major Northern Alliance attack in the country.

  Troops on the ground adored the gunships.

  ‘Extremely competent, extremely talented,’ says a captain who led one of the first Operational Detachments Alpha (ODAs) into Afghanistan in the winter of 2001. ‘Just a critical part of what we do.’

  Special Forces appreciated not only the trail of destruction wreaked by the gunships, but also the near-hysterical fear they created among Taliban fighters. On one occasion in November 2001, during the battle for Kunduz, the captured Taliban Chief of Staff Mohammed Fazal was under interrogation by Northern Alliance warlord Rashid Dostum. Fazal heard the voice of a female AC-130 Fire Control Officer over his radio and asked why a woman was speaking to US troops.

  Dostum informed Fazal that it wasn’t a woman. It was the Angel of Death, waiting to deploy a killer ray on Taliban positions around the city. Within moments, Dostum explained, every one of his comrades would be vaporized.

  Fazal, who had witnessed an AC-130 attack the day before, seized Dostum’s radio, called his colleagues, and persuaded them to surrender immediately. The battle for Kunduz ended there.

  Although the AC-130 crews didn’t know it, the attribute that made them so effective in Afghanistan – their sheer firepower – had prevented them from operating there earlier. In December 1998, the US military had been considering how it might go about assassinating Osama bin Laden. Cruise-missile attacks had proved ineffective, causing significant collateral damage. Perhaps there was a more accurate, but equally lethal option? The Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested a clandestine AC-130 strike to eliminate Bin Laden, kill his followers and destroy their camps around Kandahar.

  Head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit Michael Scheuer was all for it: ‘The military as I understand it said, “OK, we’re sick of the President going after us on this. Let’s use the AC-130s, which can lay down so much ordnance on a particular target that nothing escapes.”’

  The plan was bumped up to the White House for approval, but, according to those involved at the time, President Clinton got cold feet when the notion of ‘target saturation’, as understood by an AC-130 crew, was actually explained to him.

  ‘It would kill everything from children and men to dogs, horses, cats and everything else,’ says Scheuer. ‘The President kind of blanched when the impact of an attack of that sort was described.’

  That, it seemed, was the problem with the AC-130s: there was no such thing as a nuanced attack. Either the crews stayed home, or they wrecked everything. spectre alpha, read another unit slogan. bloodbath IS OUR WAY OF GETTING CLEAN.

  For a brief period after Operation Enduring Freedom was launched, it seemed as if the military planners had miscalculated. With few overt targets worth bombing from the air and few troops on the ground, progress stalled. Journalists and military pundits glowed quietly: the invasion wasn’t working. The word ‘quagmire’ began to appear in newspapers.

  Then, suddenly, it all came good. The CIA-Special Forces-Northern Alliance triumvirate swept the country, and the Taliban simply fell apart. On 13 November 2001, Kabul was taken, leaving the city of Kunduz as the only Taliban stronghold. Two weeks later, Kunduz fell. One hundred CIA officers and 300 US Special Forces had successfully taken a country the size of Texas, with a population of 30 million people. And they had done it in seven weeks.

  The operation was a triumph, particularly for Donald Rumsfeld, whose notions of a faster, lighter form of manoeuvre warfare were completely vindicated. The Secretary of Defense, it seemed, had rewritten the rule book for war. Time for some reverse-gloating.

  ‘It looked like nothing was happening,’ Rumsfeld told the Press. ‘Indeed, it looked like we were in a – all together now – quagmire!’

  In the United Kingdom, Downing Street published a list of journalists whose predictions about Afghanistan had been wrong. In Parliament Foreign Secretary Jack Straw ridiculed suggestions that British troops would still be in the country in a year’s time.

  It was at exactly this moment, however, that things started to go wrong.

  A side effect of America’s decision not to deploy large numbers of troops to Afghanistan was a reduction in its ability to gather accurate intelligence. All too frequently tips handed to coalition troops were not the result of a genuine desire to assist the United States, but to settle old scores. For instance, on 22 December, the day Hamid Karzai was inaugurated as Afghanistan’s interim leader, US aircraft located and bombed a convoy of suspected Taliban leaders on a mountainous road outside Kabul. It soon transpired the casualties were not Taliban at all. They were political administrators from the city of Gardez on their way to attend the inauguration. A rival militia leader had blocked the Kabul road, forced the convoy on to an isolated track, then called the Americans and told them a Taliban convoy was coming. Twelve administrators were killed, along with fifteen locals who happened to live in the village next to the convoy when the bombs fell.

  The problem of bad intelligence was especially troubling when it came to the most important question of all: where was Bin Laden?

  In December 2001, he was apparently hiding at Tora Bora, but, by the time the mountain complexes were taken, he was gone. US military spokesmen downplayed the loss: perhaps he had never been there at all, they suggested. But he had.

  ‘Bin Laden was there. Zawahiri4 was there. They were all there,’ says a senior CIA officer engaged in the hunt at the time. They escaped. ‘We had the proof. We lost a golden opportunity’

  At the start of the War on Terror, George W. Bush had made a list of al-Qaeda suspects he wanted captured or killed. Now it appeared that many of them had slipped across the border into Pakistan, beyond America’s reach. In March 2002, Bush was asked about Bin Laden at a press conference.

  ‘Marginalized,’ the President told journalists. ‘I truly am not that concerned about him.’

  No one believed it. In fact, the President was desperate to capture the al-Qaeda leader. Apart from meting out justice for 9/11, the White House was keen for signs of progress that could be delivered to the Press. The United States had invaded Afghanistan to capture the guys responsible for 11 September. Where were they? How could the most sophisticated military force the world had ever known prove unable to locate a bunch of third-rate bandits on horses in a Third World country?

  With Bin Laden gone to ground, the focus in Afghanistan shifted to the Taliban. Here the problem was potentially more embarrassing: it was one thing not to be able to locate a handful of al-Qaeda terrorists. It was quite another, having driven the Taliban from power, to be unable to find any of its senior members. Rumours circulating at the time i
ndicated that the organization’s leader Mullah Omar had escaped from US forces on a Honda motorbike. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf joked to Japan’s Prime Minister that a photo of Mullah Omar speeding away on his bike, robes flowing in the wind, would make a great advertisement for Honda.

  After the debacle at Tora Bora, the Bush administration needed some good news. A few high-level Taliban officials might do it. US intelligence officers offered rewards for information leading to their capture, and were promptly swamped with tip-offs. Claims of Taliban hideouts poured in daily. Intelligence officials joked that finding Mullah Omar was like following up sightings of Elvis Presley. Every day there were new leads. He was here. He was there. He was gone. The hunt was made considerably harder by the fact that no one was quite sure what he actually looked like. Hamid Karzai later admitted he wouldn’t recognize Mullah Omar if he passed him in the street.

  There were some things the US intelligence community knew about Mullah Omar, however, that might shift the odds in its favour. A study of his childhood, for example, indicated that he had a strong affection for the province of Oruzgan – and one specific part of it: Deh Rawood.

  Mullah Omar’s father had died when he was young and his mother had married his uncle, Maulawi Muzafa. Immediately after his father’s death, Omar had moved to the village of Deh Wanawark, a few miles outside Deh Rawood, where Muzafa was the local mullah. There, the future Taliban leader had grown up, and it was from there that he had started the Taliban movement.

  This is why, when Hamid Karzai and the Green Berets of ODA-574 had begun the process of liberating the country in November 2001 they had focused on Oruzgan. The region, Karzai informed his Special Forces assistants, was ‘the heart of the Taliban movement’. Every major player had family and friends there.