While America’s tribal mercenaries turned a blind eye, bin Laden and his followers fled over the mountains into the Tirah Valley in the Pakistani tribal agency of Kurram. They were said to have been guided by the torches of sympathetic pro-Taliban tribesmen.18 There they took advantage of their deep connections among the local FATA tribesmen, which went back to the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, and the Pashtun tradition of melmastiia (obligation to host and protect a guest) to request sanctuary. Bin Laden and hundreds of his followers had succeeded in escaping to one of the most inaccessible places in the world among the fierce Orakzai and Afridi Pashtun tribes of Kurram Agency. Bin Laden’s escape into the FATA was America’s greatest blunder in the war on terrorism for this was sovereign Pakistani territory. President Musharraf could never allow U.S. troops to directly invade his nation in pursuit of their Muslim enemies for fear of backlash among his own people, who distrusted the Americans.
But this was not U.S. Central Command’s only mistake. The hunt for the Taliban leader Mullah Omar was not going well either. An undisclosed host country (either Uzbekistan or Pakistan) had given the CIA permission to fly armed Predator drones from its territory on October 7, 2001, and they began flying on that very day.19 The drones were actively hunting Omar and on one occasion spotted a Taliban convoy fleeing Kabul. A drone’s high-resolution camera focused on the license plate of one car and found that it belonged to Mullah Omar. But instead of firing a missile at the car, the CIA controller asked for authority to fire on such a high-value target. The request eventually made its way from the duty officer at Central Command headquarters up to General Franks. Franks took the advice of his Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps lawyer and decided not to fire on Omar.20
Having survived a close brush with death without even knowing about it, Mullah Omar subsequently escaped across the border into the Pashtun tribal zones of Pakistan. There he continued to rule the exiled Taliban as the “Commander of the Faithful” from Quetta, the sprawling capital of Baluchistan Province. The Americans’ mistake proved to be catastrophic, for the messianic Omar was able to reunite and inspire his forces for years to come. Nearly ten years after his escape, one Taliban foot soldier explained his total awe of Mullah Omar, saying, “His words have a very powerful effect on us. We obey his orders, every Talib does, and we believe in him.”21
Omar was not the only one who escaped a Predator owing to a reluctance to give firing orders. On as many as ten other occasions, high-value targets (HVTs) escaped after being spotted by drones, whose pilots had to wait for permission and further verification before firing. One officer captured his frustration over this sort of reluctance to fire when he said, “It’s kind of ridiculous when you get a live feed from a Predator and the intel guys say, ‘We need independent verification.’” Another Air Force officer told the Washington Post, “We knew we had some of the big boys. The process is so slow that by the time we got the clearances, and everybody had put in their 2 cents, we called it off.”22
Clearly during the initial stages of the drones’ utilization, the CIA was reluctant to use this latest killing tool to assassinate targets on the ground, even during a war. This infuriated Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was said to have kicked in a door when he heard how Mullah Omar got away. The secretary quickly changed the rules of engagement, making it easier for drone operators to take out their targets without having to go through an extended chain of command.23 (The drones at this stage were being flown by the Air Force, which worked closely with the CIA to create targeting lists in a uniquely hybrid campaign.)
Rumsfeld may have done so just in time, for a drone subsequently spotted a large group of Arabs gathering at a three-story building south of Kabul known as the Yarmouk guest house. On this occasion not only did the drone operator receive instant permission from Langley and the Pentagon to fire on the target, but F-18 Hornets were called in to back up the Predator’s Hellfire ammunition with bombs. The building was subsequently bombed, and the Predator fired missiles on trucks filled with panicked survivors trying to escape the scene of the devastation.24
The American drone pilots then eagerly listened in on the Arabs’ radio chatter to see who had died in the attack. The CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) monitors were surprised to hear the Arabs bewailing the loss of someone described as “al Kumandan” (the Commander). There was only one al Qaeda leader who went by that name: the commander of al Qaeda’s military wing, Abu Hafs al Masri (aka Muhammad Atef), the third highest ranking member of al Qaeda. Masri was not only head of al Qaeda’s military operations, but he was also intimately involved in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa that had killed hundreds of people, predominantly Africans. His daughter had recently married bin Laden’s son to cement his relationship with his friend. The loss of the number three in al Qaeda was to be a tremendous blow to the organization and the first high-profile kill attributed to a Predator drone.
This victory appeared to give the CIA confidence, and as many as forty Hellfire missiles were fired by the agency’s drones by mid-November 2001. Although the CIA worked closely with the Pentagon during the campaign, on several occasions Air Force officials monitoring Afghanistan noticed explosions and belatedly came to realize that they were caused by CIA drones hitting various targets in the country without informing them.25 In this regard it should also be stated that the CIA was not the only organization deploying drones over Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. The U.S. Air Force had its own Predators, which were initially piloted remotely from Creech and Nellis Air Bases outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. (Air Force drones would later be flown out of Fargo, Holloman, March, Hector, Davis-Monthan, Beale, Ellington, Ellsworth, Fort Drum, Whiteman, Cannon, Eglin, Cannon and Hancock Airfields as well.) For their part, the CIA drones were controlled from Langley Air Base, 150 miles south of Washington, DC, and sent their remote images to the Global Response Center, on the sixth floor of CIA Headquarters in Langley.26 The CIA drone campaign was run by the CIA Counterterrorism Center’s Pakistan-Afghanistan Department.
Although the CIA and the Pentagon had clashed before 9/11 over who would pay for and utilize the drones, they appeared to have created synergy during Operation Enduring Freedom. Never was this better demonstrated than in March 2002’s Operation Anaconda. This operation followed the capture of the southern capital of the Taliban, Kandahar, in December 2001. With the capture of Kandahar by opposition Pashtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai, the Taliban regime collapsed. Unable to control even the Pashtun tribal lands, most “village Taliban” returned to their homes while the hardcore Taliban fled across the border into the Pashtun tribal lands in Pakistan’s FATA. There they received sanctuary in Bajaur Agency and North and South Waziristan in particular.
But a group of several hundred Arab al Qaeda fighters and Taliban members decided to resist the Americans from a remote Afghan mountain enclave near the Pakistani border at a place called Shah i Kot. In March 2002 the United States launched Operation Anaconda, an airborne assault to try flushing out the enemy in this area. The Americans who landed in Chinook helicopters were ambushed soon after arriving in the mountains and began to take casualties. One U.S. helicopter was downed, and its crew fought to survive the withering fire from the ambushers who were shooting at them from a nearby bunker. In desperation the U.S. troops called for air support to suppress enemy machine-gun fire coming from a ridge known as Takur Ghar. U.S. F-15s and F-16s were sent to save the team, and they attempted to take out the enemy bunker using cannon fire and bombs. But the supersonic jets that were screeching overhead at almost six hundred miles per hour could not be “walked to the target” via radio by the encircled team on the ground. The F-15s almost bombed the entrapped Americans by accident, and so their runs were called off for fear of killing their own men with clumsy five-hundred-pound bombs.
At this time a CIA Predator drone was hurriedly sent to the scene. The drone’s cameras captured the scene below and relayed it back to CIA Headquarters in Langley. Using rea
l-time high-resolution optics, the CIA operators were able to make out the Taliban bunker that had the American soldiers pinned down and to fire Hellfire missiles at it. When the bomb smoke cleared, a jubilant voice came from the trapped Americans on the ground: the enemy bunker had been destroyed.27
By now both the Pentagon and Langley had come to see the value of the Predator drone as both a battlefield weapon and a tool for targeted assassination. The combat career of the remote-controlled UAV had begun. But at roughly this time a CIA drone may have also made its first confirmed kill of an innocent victim, showing that the drones could be double-edged swords. Just prior to Operation Anaconda, a CIA drone had spotted three men walking in the hills of Zawhar Kili. Zawhar Kili, which is in the Afghan east, had been used in the 1980s as a base by the mujahideen, including bin Laden at one time. It had been heavily bombed by the United States during Operation Enduring Freedom.
In February the CIA drone operators noticed that the three men in the hills near Zawhar Kili appeared to be led by a tall man. The decision was made to fire a missile on the men gathered on the hill in the hopes that the tall man was bin Laden. The missiles were fired, and three men were killed instantaneously without ever knowing what happened to them. It was later announced that the CIA had fired on a figure suspected to be bin Laden himself. But when a Washington Post war correspondent rushed to the remote scene of the attack to investigate, he found that the man on the hill was not bin Laden at all. In fact he was a local villager named Mir Ahmad. He and his friends were scavenging for scrap metal from U.S. ordnance on the Afghan-Pakistani border when the drone found and killed them. The reporter described his findings as follows:
“I was going past there toward Khost, and I heard the sound of an explosion,” [a local villager] said. “The three were cut in half. They were just poor people trying to get money to feed their families.”
Khan said Ahmad had two wives and five children. The Pentagon has said that an unmanned Predator drone spotted a group of men at Zhawar, and that others seemed to be acting in a deferential manner toward one tall man. U.S. officials have said they received other, unspecified information that the men were al Qaeda leaders before giving approval to fire the missile.28
Another report from the area provides a heartbreaking account of how the local villagers dealt with the tragedy that had been inflicted on them by one CIA drone:
They were there making a living, Gir’s uncle said. His nephew “came down with a load of firewood from the mountains, and then said he was going out to collect some metal,” Janat Khan said. “He said he’d be back soon.”
Late that afternoon, they heard the news of the missile attack, Janat Khan said. The men of the village gathered coffins and went to retrieve the bodies.
“We were scared we would be bombed, but we had an obligation to bury them,” Qosmat Khan said. They had to collect the pieces of two of the men. Daraz’s body was intact, and he might have lived for a while, but he was dead when the village men arrived, said his brother.29
When subsequently asked about the unfortunate incident by a reporter who wondered if the errant strike presaged “some kind of public relations disaster,” a defensive Donald Rumsfeld said, “I’m always concerned when there is an allegation made that suggests that some innocent person was—that an attack was inappropriate or that some innocent person was killed or injured. Obviously, anyone would be concerned about that.”30 Clearly everyone involved, from the secretary of defense to the head of the CIA, understood from this incident that the drones, for all their advanced optics and loitering capacity, were only as good as their intelligence. In their eagerness to kill bin Laden, the CIA drone operators had just killed three civilians in precisely the sort of mistake CIA director George Tenet had fretted about.
Thus, at a relatively early stage of the game, the CIA came to see the drones as an advantage and a liability. They were an unprecedentedly accurate tool for killing the likes of al Qaeda number three Muhammad Atef “al Kumandan,” but they were still reliant on solid humint in order to be effective. The local Afghan governor at Zawhar Kili captured this dichotomy when he said, “We are happy that they [the Americans] came, and we are ready to help them. But the people are starting to get angry at them.”31
As the ongoing war against al Qaeda and its Taliban allies gradually shifted across the border from eastern Afghanistan to the Pashtun tribal zones in neighboring Pakistan, the Americans would continue to wrestle with a paradox. While the war against the Taliban was transformed into a hunt for HVTs, it became obvious that America’s most advanced weapon in the hunt for elusive terrorists might also be their worst enemy in the underlying battle to win the hearts and minds of the people of this volatile region.
5
Manhunt
It’s a new kind of war. We’re fighting on a lot of different fronts.
—U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice
We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without shutting down those safe havens.
—Adm. Mike Mullen, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff referring to the Taliban and al Qaeda’s sanctuary in the FATA
By the spring of 2002 the Pentagon believed that the majority of hardcore Taliban members had been driven from Afghanistan. Those few Taliban members who were still sniping at U.S. troops in Afghanistan were described by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as “dead enders.”1 Operation Enduring Freedom had been one of the most effective invasions in the history of the Afghan “Graveyard of Empires.” It was now time to fill the void left by the collapse of the highly unpopular Taliban regime and rebuild the war-torn country that the United States had previously abandoned after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. The vast majority of Afghans wanted a return to school for their sons and daughters, new roads, demined fields, democracy, jobs, security, and an end to the Taliban’s harsh misrule. To prevent the Taliban from coming back, the Americans and their NATO allies would have to rebuild the devastated nation from the ground up and offer this long-suffering people hope.
Unfortunately, the United States did not initially invest in Afghanistan’s security and future because the Bush White House was adamantly opposed on principle to the notion of nation building. Candidate George Bush famously summed up his views on this topic when he stated, “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.”2 For this reason the United States limited its military presence in the Texas-sized country of Afghanistan to less than ten thousand troops for the first few years of the conflict. The lack of a U.S. ground force allowed the down-but-not-out Taliban to begin to regroup in the Pashtun south as they awaited orders from their Pakistan-based leadership in the FATA and Baluchistan.
It also allowed the soon-to-be insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to return to the country. Hekmatyar, as mentioned previously, was the notorious fundamentalist mujahideen leader who had made a name for himself by throwing acid into the faces of unscarved women in Kabul, shelling the Afghan capital in the 1990s, and turning against his American sponsors during the 1991 Gulf War. In 1997 this Pashtun fundamentalist had been driven into exile in Iran by the Taliban, but in February 2002 he secretly returned to his old jihad stomping grounds in eastern Afghanistan. There he and his followers declared jihad on the American “infidels.”
In May 2002 the CIA tracked Hekmatyar to a base in the forested mountains of Kunar Province on Afghanistan’s northeastern border with Pakistan. There a CIA drone launched its Hellfire missiles at him and his followers. According to news reports, the missiles killed several of Hekmatyar’s followers but failed to take out the leader himself.3 From this point forward Hekmatyar is said to have changed “his location every five minutes” to avoid the drones.4 The United States suspected that one of the locations Hekmatyar hid in was the FATA, a region he had used as a rear-area staging ground during the 1980s jihad against the Soviets.
Hekmatyar was not, how
ever, the only ex-mujahideen warlord to ally himself with the Taliban as they licked their wounds in 2002 and prepared to launch an insurgency in the Pashtun belt of southeastern Afghanistan. The former CIA-backed mujahideen leader Jalaludin Haqqani had been courted by the CIA in 2001, but Haqqani saw the world in Manichean black and white jihad terms. To him the Americans were infidel invaders who needed to be expelled from Afghanistan just as the Soviets had been before them. As the American bombs fell in Operation Enduring Freedom, Haqqani and his followers fled from their base in the eastern Afghan province of Khost over the border into the neighboring Pashtun FATA tribal agency of North Waziristan. Haqqani had been based in this area during the 1980s, and he knew it well. There the so-called Haqqani Network regrouped in 2002 and awaited orders from its nominal leader, Mullah Omar. There were thus three Pashtun terrorist-insurgent networks, not including al Qaeda, based in the FATA and preparing to launch an insurgency against the Americans, who had too few troops to control this vast area of Afghanistan. Fortunately for the Taliban and al Qaeda, America’s attention was about to be directed elsewhere—and America was about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
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