In the south our forces raided deep into Taliban-controlled territory. Near Kandahar, they launched an attack on one of the compounds of Taliban leader Mullah Omar. They began to call in supplies to be delivered by air—food, medical assistance, and ammunition—as well as the massive firepower of U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft. Members of the A-Teams served as forward air controllers, using laser range finders and GPS technology to pinpoint targets for devastatingly accurate air strikes. By the beginning of November the Taliban front lines in the north were being bombarded with two-thousand-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) and an occasional fifteen-thousand-pound BLU-82 Daisy Cutter, then the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in our arsenal. The Taliban lines were also attacked by U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunships, an aircraft with 105 millimeter howitzers, 40 millimeter cannons, and 25 millimeter Gatling guns able to fire an intimidating eighteen hundred rounds a minute. Intelligence sources reported that the gunships’ withering fire was particularly devastating to enemy morale. Our special operations forces were spotting Taliban fighters on ridgelines and calling in close air support to attack them.
On November 5, the forces under Northern Alliance commander General Dostum—outnumbered by the Taliban by eight to one—began their assault on Mazar-e-Sharif, the largest city in northern Afghanistan. Capturing Mazar was a crucial objective because it would open a land bridge from Uzbekistan, which was valuable for resupply efforts, particularly during the critical winter months.3 At first Mazar’s walls protected the Taliban’s artillery units and antiaircraft missiles. But from the surrounding hills, special operators spotted major Taliban units and targeted them with air strikes. Four days after the assault began Afghan and American forces, some on horseback, rode into the heart of the city, cutting off the Taliban, capturing Mazar, and sending the first major signal to the Afghan people and the world that the Taliban could be defeated.
Meanwhile, General Fahim Khan’s troops moved to seize the northern cities of Taloqan and Kunduz. General Ismail Khan captured Herat in the west. Pashtun forces were marching toward Kandahar. The ingenuity of American special operators and CIA teams, combined with precision U.S. airpower and the grit of Northern Alliance troops, forced Taliban fighters to retreat to the south. The quagmire talk began to die down, at least for the moment.
As the northern cities began to fall, I made another trip to meet with Afghanistan’s neighbors.4 My first stop in Russia attracted the most attention and had the potential to be the most uncomfortable. The country’s disastrous decade-long occupation of Afghanistan still rankled. A speedy military victory by American forces would be another embarrassment. Perhaps for this reason President Putin refused to allow the United States to move military equipment through Russian territory and sought to constrain our developing relationships with the neighboring former Soviet republics.
After meeting with Defense Minister Ivanov, reporters pressed him about whether Russians troops were going to join the coalition effort in Afghanistan. “I am asked this every day,” Ivanov replied, “and every day I say no.”5 I agreed privately, knowing that Russian troops reentering Afghanistan would not be greeted as liberators.
At the close of the Ivanov meeting, I was escorted to the gilded rooms of the Kremlin for a meeting with President Putin. He spoke without pause for close to ninety minutes. He was, as usual, somewhat of an enigma. Though he denied us tangible assistance for the Afghan effort, he was generous with his advice—which Afghans we could trust, the motives of regional players—right down to military tactics. He also pushed for the United States to buy Russian military equipment for Afghan Northern Alliance commanders. He declared without any sense of irony that the Afghans were very familiar with Russian equipment.
From Russia I traveled to Pakistan and then India. Both nations had had poor relations with the United States prior to the Bush administration. Our military had had next to no contact with Pakistani forces for a decade because of an American law that barred military support or training to Pakistan unless the U.S. government certified that Pakistan was not producing a nuclear weapon. Because of this congressional ban, a generation of Pakistani military officers had no ties to their American counterparts, which had spawned mistrust and bad feelings.
Yet in 9/11’s aftermath, the United States was able to develop an increasingly constructive partnership with Pakistan. Powell and his State Department colleagues had begun to persuade President Pervez Musharraf that he needed to cast his lot either with the United States or the Taliban and the Islamist extremists his country had backed for years. When he saw that America intended to act forcefully after 9/11, Musharraf chose the United States. Other Pakistani officials, however, hedged their bets by retaining ties with the Taliban and various terrorist groups that operated against India.
Musharraf was a gracious host. Though he was clearly in charge of his government, he had enough confidence to let his advisers speak freely in meetings—something that was unusual in that region. He was forthright about his domestic constraints, and he warned that the United States needed to do a better job combating enemy propaganda in the Muslim world—a crucial objective that should have been a top priority for the Bush administration over the years to come, but which to our lasting disadvantage was not.
Our country’s relations with India also improved dramatically under the Bush administration.6 The United States had all but shunned India after its 1998 nuclear weapon test.7 But from the earliest days of the administration, I believed India—the world’s most populous democracy—was going to be of strategic importance. I did not think it made any sense for us to be at odds with them. In February 2001, only fourteen days after I took office as secretary of defense, I sought out a bilateral meeting with the Indian national security adviser, Brajesh Mishra, at a security conference in Munich, to make this point. President Bush was ready to make ties with India a priority for his adminis tration.
Despite the cordial welcome, my meetings with Afghanistan’s various neighbors left me with misgivings. The region was a maelstrom of suspicion and intrigues. Pakistan distrusted the Northern Alliance. India distrusted Pakistan and vice versa. Russia distrusted our relations with its neighbors. And nearly everyone distrusted the Russians. Each of the countries surrounding Afghanistan—especially the one country I did not visit, Iran—seemed prepared to jockey for influence with whatever government arose and ready to use their longtime connections in that country as proxies. Stability—much less democracy—would be difficult to bring to an impoverished country that had for decades known little more than civil war, occupation, drought, drug trafficking, warlords, and religious extremism.
On the long flight back to the United States, I spoke to President Bush over a secure phone. “Afghanistan risks becoming a swamp for the United States,” I told Bush, using the word I once used when I was President Reagan’s envoy to the Middle East. “Everyone in Afghanistan has an agenda or two. We’re not going to find a lot of straight shooters.”
Bush expressed optimism about our efforts there. But I was not optimistic about the country’s ethnic groups coming together and sharing power. “It’s my view we need to limit our mission to getting the terrorists who find their way to Afghanistan,” I advised the President. “We ought not to make a career out of transforming Afghanistan.”8
Once American special operations forces were on the ground in Afghanistan, territory began to fall to our Afghan allies more quickly than we had imagined possible. By early November, Northern Alliance troops had advanced to the outskirts of Kabul, and were poised to take the capital city. At this point, the months-long discussions within the administration over what to do with the Taliban came to a head. State Department and CIA officials again expressed concern about the prospect of Northern Alliance troops seizing the capital city. Tenet reported that his intelligence experts were concerned that some Pashtun tribes in the south with historic ties to Pakistan and the CIA would be offended if the country’s capital was taken and occupied by Northern Allian
ce forces.
I supported the Northern Alliance’s advance into Kabul for a simple reason: It was the only realistic option. The Northern Alliance leaders had no intention of letting their enemies in the Taliban hold on to Kabul while they had the advantage.9 Furthermore, as a practical matter, the few dozen U.S. special operators embedded with the Northern Alliance probably would not have been able to stop their advance even if we wanted them to.
Even as the issue was still being discussed in the National Security Council, reports surfaced in the press that Powell and Rice were saying the United States was not going to advance on Kabul. Their comments concerned me, given the position I thought the President had set out clearly in speeches about removing the Taliban.* On November 13, I sent a memo to Bush, copying Powell, Rice, and Tenet. “Mr. President, I think it is a mistake for the United States to be saying we are not going to attack Kabul,” I wrote. “To do so, tells the Taliban and the Al Qaida that Kabul can be a safe haven for them. The goal in this conflict is to make life complicated for the Taliban and the Al Qaida, not to make it simple.” I also made the point that if we wanted to open the routes to the south, where al-Qaida and the Taliban still roamed with relative ease, we would need to control the capital city. “It is one thing to not take Kabul,” I added. “It is quite another to announce to the world that we are not going to take Kabul. I have read that Condi and Colin have both been saying this. I don’t believe anyone talked to me or Tommy Franks about the concept of doing that. I think it is a bad idea.”11
Not waiting for Washington to decide, the Northern Alliance forces marched on Kabul on their own initiative. In a desperate broadcast to his fleeing troops, Taliban leader Mullah Omar reportedly warned them to stop “behaving like chickens.” It was to no avail. When Northern Alliance forces first set foot in the city, on November 13, 2001, they met little resistance. All that remained of the Taliban’s defenders in their former seat of power was a group of a dozen or so fighters hiding out in a city park. Just five weeks after our air strikes had begun, Afghanistan’s capital city was under the control of Northern Alliance forces. I was relieved. When I conveyed the news to the President, he was eager to see the offensive continue.
Soon anti-Taliban forces gained control of many areas in eastern Afghanistan, including the city of Jalalabad that straddled the important route leading to the Khyber Pass and Pakistan. Al-Qaida leader Mohammad Atef, a deputy to bin Laden, was killed in an air strike. The remaining Taliban forces were being driven farther and farther south, toward Kandahar, a city of some three hundred thousand people that had become a way station for the most hard-core enemy fighters. There the Taliban would make its stand. A small contingent of U.S. Marines, under the command of a gruff and brilliant warrior, Brigadier General James Mattis, bolstered our presence in southern Afghanistan. The focus of the campaign now turned to an Afghan fighter who would be charged with taking Kandahar.
Though he had the demeanor of a polished, urbane, and scholarly gentleman, Hamid Karzai was tough and tenacious and seemed to command respect from diverse quarters of Afghan society. The day after the American bombing of the Taliban began, he crossed the border into Afghanistan from Pakistan on a motorcycle, where he helped organize anti-Taliban forces in the country’s south. A Pashtun tribal leader from a prestigious clan, he commanded a small cadre of Pashtun troops.* In an early skirmish, a bomb dropped from a B-52 had sent shrapnel and debris in his direction, slightly wounding him in the face.12 Karzai and his forces reached Kandahar on December 7. Contrary to expectations, the city fell quickly. The Taliban apparently knew that they could not win, so they had decided to regroup to fight another day.
By early December, two months to the day since the start of our combat operations, the Taliban had been pushed out of every major city in Afghanistan. By any measure, it was an impressive military success. Estimates varied, but likely some eight thousand to twelve thousand Taliban and al-Qaida fighters were killed—and hundreds more were captured. Eleven U.S. servicemen had given their lives, and another thirty-five had been wounded in this initial campaign against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Most Taliban and al-Qaida forces had been neutralized, at least for the moment, with one important exception: the holdouts in the mountainous area along the border with Pakistan known as Tora Bora, meaning “black dust.” The peaks of the White Mountains are among the highest in the world with altitudes of fifteen thousand feet. The eastern reaches of the mountain range include the legendary Khyber Pass, the notch through which armies had made their way onto the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years.
Tora Bora and its surrounding valleys were so treacherous to armies—any army—that much of the territory was out of the control of both the Afghan and the Pakistan governments. Local Pashtun tribal chiefs had been the only authorities there for centuries. They recognized no national boundaries and no earthly laws but their own. During their fight against the Soviet Union, many of the Afghan mujahideen found refuge in Tora Bora’s intricate labyrinth of caves. Now an unknown number of al-Qaida fighters sought shelter there. Among them, some speculated, was Osama bin Laden.
When Franks and CENTCOM were contemplating military options in the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the peaks were already covered in snow and ice. Freezing rain and bitter winds buffeted the lower elevations. CENTCOM had bombed Tora Bora since the start of the war, aware that bin Laden might flee there. “Tora Bora is a busy chunk of earth,” said a U.S. military pilot, referring to the bombing campaign. “The mountains are lit up like the Fourth of July.”13
I was prepared to authorize the deployment of more American troops into the region if the commanders requested them. Franks decided that mounting an offensive of conventional ground forces was not a good idea. The tribes along the border were hostile to outsiders, and they knew the territory. Others did not. Regular Pakistani military forces penetrated the territory only with difficulty, and generally suffered substantial losses. The insertion of large numbers of our conventional forces would have taken time, Franks reasoned, providing a window for terrorists to escape. The marshalling of American troops also could have led to fierce engagements against local Pashtuns, causing casualties on both sides. Further, an intrusion into the Pashtun heartland with thousands of American conventional ground forces, who were unfamiliar with the language, the cultures, and the territory, might have reversed the hard work that had convinced a large number of the Pashtuns to cooperate with us.
I believed a decision of this nature, which hinged on numerous operational details, was best made by the military commander in charge. Franks had to determine whether attempting to apprehend one man on the run, whose whereabouts were not known with certainty, was worth the risks inherent in such a venture. It was not an easy call. Though a number of people, including some at the CIA, suspected that bin Laden might have taken refuge in the Tora Bora area, no one knew that for certain. Earlier in the war we had received several reports of supposed sightings of both Mullah Omar and bin Laden, which all proved to be false.*
When the President said he was going to get bin Laden “dead or alive,” I noted that I had my preference.14 Still, the emphasis on bin Laden concerned me. To my mind, the justification for our military operations in Afghanistan was not the capture or killing of one person. Our country’s primary purpose was to try to prevent terrorists from attacking us again. There was far more to the threat posed by Islamist extremism than one man. I also suspect that if we had added a large conventional force and U.S. casualties rose in Tora Bora, the same people who faulted the decision to keep the troop presence small would have blamed us for causing needless American deaths.
Instead of a large American invasion of Tora Bora, the CIA and special forces recruited a Pashtun coalition, known as the Eastern Alliance and led by General Hazrat Ali, to provide the bulk of the manpower. Though not publicized, U.S. special operators joined the Eastern Alliance’s advance, traveling from ridgeline to ridgeline and taking fire from al-Qaida posi
tions. While Eastern Alliance forces were gaining control of more of the ridges around Tora Bora each day, each evening at sundown they would leave their positions and return to their villages in the valleys to break their fasts for Ramadan. Learning of this, I began to rethink the question of whether we needed to insert more U.S. forces.
On December 20, I sent a memo to CIA Director George Tenet saying that we might be missing an opportunity in Tora Bora, and perhaps we should reconsider the earlier decision against bringing in more U.S. forces. “How do we get Ali to get his forces to move?” I asked Tenet. “It seems to me we have to get a full court press on it, or else we are going to have to use some of our own.”15 I made it clear to Franks that if he believed he needed more troops, he would get them as quickly as possible. As I told him, I wanted to know “whether or not we should have had more people on the ground to avoid having so many people get away.”16
Much later, I learned that a CIA operative on the ground had requested some Rangers to help with Tora Bora.17 He even wrote a book on the subject.18 I never received such a request from either Franks or Tenet and cannot imagine denying it if I had. If someone thought bin Laden was cornered, as later claimed, I found it surprising that Tenet had never called me to urge Franks to support their operation. I can only presume that either their chain of command was not engaged or that they failed to convince Tenet of the quality of their information. Another explanation is that their recollections may be imperfect.
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