The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  The official U.S. military history of the Afghan War later concluded that bin Laden was indeed at Tora Bora during the battle: “All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9–14 December.” And Lieutenant General Michael Delong, Franks’s deputy at CENTCOM, also wrote in his memoir that his superiors and he were well aware at the time that bin Laden was at Tora Bora: “We were hot on Osama bin Laden’s trail. He was definitely there when we hit [the Tora Bora] caves. Every day during the bombing, Rumsfeld asked me, ‘Did we get him? Did we get him?’”

  None of this was sufficient for anyone in the Bush administration or at the higher echelons of the Pentagon to order more U.S. soldiers into the battle zone. Later, top Bush administration officials and General Franks himself would simply deny that the al-Qaeda leader had ever been at Tora Bora.

  The question of whether the United States had missed an opportunity to kill bin Laden during the battle of Tora Bora became a particular issue during the razor-close 2004 U.S. presidential campaign. During the September 30 presidential debate, Democratic contender Senator John Kerry said, “When we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best-trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist.”

  This charge produced a furious response from the Bush campaign, since it went to the heart of the president’s claim that he was the “strong on terrorism” contender. Writing in the New York Times, General Franks, a Bush supporter and the overall commander of the Tora Bora operation, stated, “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora.” At a town hall meeting in Ohio, the same day that Franks’s piece appeared in the Times, Vice President Dick Cheney charged that Kerry’s critique of the Tora Bora campaign was “absolute garbage.”

  On October 27, President Bush himself weighed in at a campaign rally a week before voters went to the polls, accusing Kerry “of saying anything it takes to get elected. Like when he charged that our military failed to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, even though our top military commander, General Tommy Franks, said, ‘The senator’s understanding of events does not square with reality,’ and intelligence reports place bin Laden in any of several different countries at the time.”

  Two days later, bin Laden himself suddenly appeared on a videotape on Al Jazeera, his first appearance on video in more than a year. The tape was then replayed on TV stations across the United States. In the video, bin Laden spoke directly to the American people from behind a desk, dressed formally in gold robes and a white turban, his long beard streaked with gray. Bin Laden was well lit, suggesting a careful production, and he was without a gun at his side, a rare sight. That nonbelligerent visual message mirrored what bin Laden said: “Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, or Bush, or al-Qaeda. It is in your own hands and any state that does not violate our security has automatically guaranteed its own,” implying that al-Qaeda would suspend its attacks if there were a change in U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. On the videotape bin Laden for the first time made an unequivocal public admission of his own involvement in the 9/11 plot, saying that he had agreed with the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta, “that his mission be accomplished in twenty minutes before Bush and his administration had time to notice.”

  The most obvious message of the election-eve videotape was that bin Laden was not only alive but doing quite well, a potent reminder that the Bush administration had not brought the al-Qaeda leader to justice. By now Bush and Kerry were running neck and neck and Kerry was quick to point out that “when George Bush had the opportunity in Afghanistan and Tora Bora he didn’t choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.” President Bush immediately responded to Kerry’s charge, saying, “My opponent tonight continued to say things he knows are not true … it is especially shameful in the light of a new tape from America’s enemy.”

  Kerry was correct about what had taken place at Tora Bora, most importantly the fact that hundreds of al-Qaeda’s hard core, including bin Laden, escaped from the grasp of the United States to live to fight another day, while Bush, Cheney, and General Franks either misled the American public about what had happened at Tora Bora or were simply ignorant of what had really taken place during the most important battle of the “war on terror.”

  Just how close bin Laden came to death at Tora Bora was illustrated by a videotape that aired on December 27, 2001, a couple of weeks after the battle had ended. As we have seen, bin Laden said, “I am just a poor slave of God. If I live or die, the war will continue,” his choice of words seeming to confirm his recent brush with death at Tora Bora. A visibly aged bin Laden did not move his entire left side during the thirty-four-minute videotape, suggesting he had sustained a serious injury. Abdel Bari Atwan, who had spent two days interviewing bin Laden in Tora Bora in 1996, says that in late December 2001, “I was in the Gulf region and I met somebody from al-Qaeda and he told me that Osama bin Laden was injured during the Tora Bora bombing, and he was operated on his left shoulder.”

  On December 14, around the time bin Laden fled Tora Bora, he wrote a final testament that included a bleak message to his offspring: “As to my children, forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have chosen a road fraught with dangers and for this sake suffered from hardships, embitterment, betrayal, and treachery. I advise you not to work with al-Qaeda.”

  Bin Laden retreated from the Tora Bora battlefield demoralized, wounded, and contemplating his own death, while the organization he had so carefully nurtured for more than a decade was now on life support. He was forty-four.

  Chapter 6

  The Destruction of the Base

  The tactics took over the strategy.

  —Noman Benotman, one of bin Laden’s companions-in-arms

  during the jihad against the communists in Afghanistan,

  when asked to explain the 9/11 attacks

  Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

  —Sun Tzu

  Omar bin Laden, the fourth son of the al-Qaeda leader, cuts quite a figure. In one photo, he stares out from beneath an Adidas baseball cap, his beard closely trimmed—an entirely different look from his father’s seventh-century aesthetic. He wears jeans and sits next to his wife, a striking British woman more than two decades his senior and with five other marriages under her belt, who once was known as Jane Felix-Browne but preferred the name Zaina al-Sabah following her marriage into the bin Laden family. While his father would hardly approve of his lifestyle choices, few men know the terrorist mastermind so well. After the Sudanese government had exiled bin Laden in 1996, Omar spent four years living in and around the notorious training camps that his father had then assembled in Afghanistan.

  But between his departure from Sudan and his marriage, something happened to Omar: he turned against his father. During a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in 2003, where Omar spent four days performing religious observances and talking about life in Afghanistan, he heaped abuse on his father for attacking the United States. “Those guys are dummies,” he told Hutaifa Azzam, the son of the Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, who had been Osama bin Laden’s most important mentor. “They have destroyed everything, and for nothing. What did we get from September 11?” In fact, these attacks drove a permanent wedge between father and son. Omar left Afghanistan in disgust in 2000 as the 9/11 plans were advancing.

  After 9/11, Omar bin Laden was not the only al-Qaeda insider critical of his father. A letter written by an al-Qaeda member—and addressed to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of the September 11 attacks—gives a sense of just how demoralized the group was: “Consider all the fatal and successive disasters that have afflicted us during a period of no more than six months. … Today we are experiencing one setback after another and have gone from misfortune to disaster.”

  These
feelings of despair extended even to the al-Qaeda leader himself. In June 2002, bin Laden and one of his younger sons, Hamzah, posted comments to an al-Qaeda website that underlined how precarious life on the run had become. Hamzah wrote, “Oh father! Why have they showered us with bombs like rain, having no mercy for a child? Oh father! What has happened for us to be chased by danger?” The al-Qaeda leader replied, “Pardon me my son, but I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone by in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security has gone, but danger remains.”

  Al-Qaeda’s leaders and foot soldiers were right to be dispirited following 9/11. The United States appeared to have smashed the terrorist organization. But what exactly had been smashed? Successful militant organizations tend to be defined by two characteristics: inspirational leadership and effective management practices. Before 9/11, al-Qaeda had both. Not only did al-Qaeda have a charismatic leader who attracted recruits from around the Muslim world, but the organization also oversaw training camps in Afghanistan that had churned out an estimated ten thousand to twenty thousand recruits in the five years before 9/11. Some of those camps were operated by al-Qaeda itself and others by affiliated groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Pakistani Harakat-ul-Mujahideen. Most recruits learned just the basics of insurgent warfare. Others graduated to more specialized terrorist training, and an elite group of recruits were inducted into al-Qaeda itself by swearing a personal religious oath of allegiance known as bayat to bin Laden. Only around two hundred in number at the time of the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda inductees were required to sign an oath of allegiance that read, “I pledge by God’s creed to become a Muslim soldier to support God’s religion.”

  The training camps were tough. Omar Nasiri (a pseudonym) attended the Khaldan training facility in 1996. Despite the poor diet and harsh conditions, Nasiri loved his time in the camps and proved an adept student of insurgent and terrorist tactics. To his surprise, training patrols at night sometimes involved being shot at with live ammunition. He learned to fire every conceivable weapon, from German pistols to Russian artillery pieces, and he worked with explosives ranging from Semtex to blast mines. He also learned how to arrange kidnappings and assassinations. Nasiri went on to bomb school, where he was taught how to make high explosives from common household products. He even learned how to make a bomb from his own urine.

  Nasiri’s account tracks closely with what Moroccan L’Houssaine Kherchtou experienced when he attended al-Qaeda’s Farouq training camp near Kandahar in the early 1990s. Kherchtou trained on a variety of automatic rifles, including the AK-47, M-16, and Uzi. He also learned how to handle explosives such as C3, C4, and dynamite. Kherchtou, who had once attended a catering school in France, lost a lot of weight during the rigorous training, more than forty pounds.

  In addition to al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan, the Encyclopedia of Jihad was the organization’s most important contribution for instructing jihadists about guerrilla warfare and terrorist tactics. The Encyclopedia is a massive work of several thousand pages that was posted to the Internet in Arabic. It contains advice for every imaginable hostile situation, from how to booby-trap a napkin, to how to conduct a drive-by shooting, to how to recognize a rattlesnake or treat a scorpion sting.

  Internal memos from the time it was based in Afghanistan demonstrate that al-Qaeda, like many of the murderous organizations that had preceded it, was highly bureaucratic. Al-Qaeda’s bylaws covered annual budgets; who controlled which money accounts; salary levels (including a discussion of extra pay for those members with multiple wives); the frequency of airline tickets for members of the group to visit families back home; the proper distribution of medical benefits; the scale of furniture allowances; the special provisions that were made for those with disabilities; and the grounds for dismissal from the group. Al-Qaeda even had a generous vacation policy with a week off for its married recruits for every three weeks served. Requests for vacation had to be submitted two and a half months in advance.

  Abu Jandal, bin Laden’s chief bodyguard, told FBI interrogators that al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 management structure consisted of a military committee, public relations committee, finance committee, an administrative section for its training camps, and even a farming committee, which took care of the group’s agricultural pursuits. Abu Jandal explained that each section filed regular reports to the group’s leadership on a computer and that the al-Qaeda leader met regularly with the head of each committee “to discuss their issues.”

  Rather than an ad hoc collection of like-minded jihadists who had gathered in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, as some had portrayed it, al-Qaeda was, in fact, one of the most bureaucratic terrorist organizations in history. A detailed application form that potential recruits had to fill out before they were accepted at one of al-Qaeda’s training camps asked them about their education level, religious background, how they had arrived in Afghanistan, military skills, involvement in other jihads, marital status, language skills, and political affiliations. The application form also outlined al-Qaeda’s requirements for those entering its camps, including that they agree not to leave before their basic two-month training course was finished and that they not bring any “forbidden items” such as tape recorders, radios, and cameras. They were reminded to pack appropriate running shoes and clothes suitable for paramilitary training.

  The picture that emerges of the pre-9/11 al-Qaeda from the myriad accounts of trainees in bin Laden’s camps, from its own internal documents, and from accounts by its leaders to journalists and to Western interrogators, is of a paramilitary organization with a strict chain of command, at the top of which stood the absolute leader, bin Laden. It was bin Laden who set the group’s strategy, and key members of the group had sworn a binding religious oath of obedience to the man they referred to as their “emir,” or prince. Below bin Laden were his deputies, who enforced strict discipline and handled the operational details of terrorist plots and promotions within the hierarchy, all of which they managed with a heavy flow of paperwork more reminiscent of an insurance company than a group dedicated to revolutionary jihad.

  Instead of being a terrorist organization sponsored by a state, al-Qaeda was an organization that ran something of a parallel state alongside that of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. (This was the exact opposite of the state-sponsored terrorist groups that so many Bush administration officials believed to be the real threat posed by terrorism.) Al-Qaeda conducted its own foreign policy independent from the Taliban beginning in 1998 in the form of multiple strikes on American government, military, and civilian targets. And the 9/11 plot demonstrated that al-Qaeda was an organization of global reach. The plot played out across the globe with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, money transfers from Dubai, and the recruitment of suicide operatives from countries around the Middle East—all activities that were ultimately overseen by al-Qaeda’s leaders in Afghanistan.

  Despite the fact that following 9/11 al-Qaeda—whose name in Arabic means “the base”—lost the best base it ever had in Afghanistan, Saif al-Adel, one of the group’s military commanders, explained in an interview four years later that the strikes on New York and Washington had, in fact, been a brilliant success and were part of a far-reaching and visionary plan to provoke the United States into some ill-advised actions: “Such strikes will force the person to carry out random acts and provoke him to make serious and sometimes fatal mistakes. … The first reaction was the invasion of Afghanistan.”

  But there is not a shred of evidence that in the weeks before 9/11, al-Qaeda’s leaders made any plans for an American invasion of Afghanistan. They prepared instead only for possible U.S. cruise missile attacks or airstrikes by evacuating their training camps. Also, al-Qaeda insiders well understood that the overthrow of the Taliban hardly constituted an American “mistake,” as the loss of the first and only regime in the modern Muslim worl
d that ruled according to al-Qaeda’s rigid precepts was hardly a victory, nor was the loss of an entire country that they had once enjoyed as a safe haven. And in the wake of the fall of the Taliban, al-Qaeda would never again recover anything like the status it once had as a terrorist organization with considerable sway over Afghanistan.

  In 2004, Abu Musab al-Suri, a precise, intellectual Syrian jihadist who had known bin Laden since the late 1980s, released on the Internet a history of the jihadist movement titled “The Call for Global Islamic Resistance.” In his history Suri was at pains to praise bin Laden, but he also painted a grim picture of the scale of the strategic disaster that had engulfed the Taliban and al-Qaeda following bin Laden’s foolhardy decision to attack the United States: “America destroyed the Islamic Emirate [of the Taliban] in Afghanistan, which had become the refuge for the mujahideen. … The jihad movement rose to glory in the 1960’s, and continued through the 70’s and 80’s, and resulted in the rise of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan [the Taliban], but it was destroyed after 9/11.”