by Steve Coll
The C.I.A.’s days-old Kabul Station attempted to track Al Qaeda as its units fled the capital, but the atmosphere was highly improvised and the station had new leadership. Schroen had pulled out after about six weeks in the field, replaced by Gary Berntsen. The new chief had grown up on Long Island, where he “drank, got into fights, and caused all sorts of trouble, graduating next to last in a high school class of about 300, a functional illiterate.” He did not know Afghanistan, but he spoke Farsi and had worked on terrorism operations, where he “took a grab-them-by-the-neck approach.” Sending him to run C.I.A. operations at the end of October was Hank Crumpton’s call. Crumpton wanted aggression on the front line, and he got that. During his short tour in Kabul, Berntsen may have advocated more forcefully than anyone in the U.S. government to put American boots on the ground at Tora Bora to try to prevent Bin Laden’s escape. Yet he also fought so bitterly with colleagues and U.S. military commanders that he undermined his own message.
On November 26 or 27, a C.I.A. officer who was a former Delta operator told Berntsen that the small American presence coordinating with Afghan militias was not working. Berntsen sent in a “careful” cable asking for U.S. Rangers. “Let’s kill this baby in the crib,” he concluded.30
On November 29, Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC News that Bin Laden “was equipped to go to ground” at Tora Bora. “He’s got what he believes to be secure facilities, caves underground. It’s an area he’s familiar with.” Around December 1, Crumpton took maps of Tora Bora to the Oval Office and squatted on the floor before President Bush and Cheney to review the terrain.
“Is there any way we can seal this border?” Bush asked.
“No army on Earth can seal this,” Crumpton answered.
Delta Force, C.I.A., and other paramilitary and Special Forces units were following the method that had already conquered Afghanistan’s northern cities: They embedded with Afghan militias. Hazarat Ali, a commander in Jalalabad allied with the Northern Alliance, oversaw one force; Haji Zahir, the son of a prominent commander who had initially welcomed Bin Laden to Afghanistan, oversaw a smaller one. Neither of them had the motivation or history of collaboration with the C.I.A. that the Panjshiris or Gul Agha Sherzai had.
The United States could deploy small reconnaissance units behind the caves and watch for Bin Laden and his followers with satellites and the C.I.A.’s two Predators, Crumpton told Bush, “but with such a vast territory and uncertain weather, we could miss their escape.” Crumpton felt that he had made an intelligence case emphasizing the Pakistani border was porous and that he had doubts that Pakistani forces could seal it. He did not think it was his position to recommend directly that Bush deploy hundreds of U.S. troops in a blocking position; as an intelligence officer, he had laid out his analysis, but the decision about how to fight the war was up to the president and Franks. The alternative to an American ground assault force was airpower. But Tora Bora had been constructed fifteen years before to withstand heavy Soviet aerial bombardment.31
Franks ordered heavy bombers into action on December 3. Over the next four days B-52s and other high-altitude aircraft dropped about seven hundred thousand pounds of explosives on Al Qaeda’s suspected positions. Small teams of Delta Force and C.I.A. officers working with reluctant Afghan militias pushed up the mountainside to observe what they could. The teams intercepted radio transmissions that included Bin Laden speaking to his followers, in the judgment of C.I.A. analysts. But Al Qaeda vastly outnumbered the small American spotting force on the mountain. So did the legions of foreign journalists covering the fight from around Jalalabad.
Several days after Crumpton’s Oval Office meeting, around December 4, Berntsen demanded that the United States put more of its own soldiers on the ground. He “almost screamed” over the phone to Crumpton that U.S. Army Rangers or Marines were needed in the mountains. Crumpton briefed Cofer Black and then called Tommy Franks the next morning in Tampa. They had a long conversation; Crumpton urged the general to deploy American troops onto the mountainsides. Franks “expressed concern about the lack of planning and the time required to deploy substantial reinforcements,” as Crumpton put it later.
When Crumpton described Central Command’s reluctance to Berntsen, the Kabul station chief only cursed. Crumpton answered that Berntsen had to accept Franks’s decision and “go with what we have.”32
Bush later defended his own decision making on the grounds that he “asked our commanders and C.I.A. officials about bin Laden frequently” and “they assured me they had the troop levels and resources they needed.” But Crumpton’s view was that Central Command had to provide the critical blocking forces on the ground; that was well beyond the C.I.A.’s capacity.33
In Kabul, Berntsen met Major General Dell Dailey, who commanded Joint Special Operations Command, the subunit of Special Forces housing elite counterterrorism units such as Delta Force and the Navy SEALs. Dailey told Berntsen that he would not deploy more American troops to Tora Bora because it might arouse resentment from Afghan allies. “I don’t give a damn about offending our allies!” Berntsen shouted. Dailey refused to change his mind; in fact, the decisions were being made at higher levels. “Screw that!” Berntsen answered.34
United States Senate investigators later concluded that about two thousand to three thousand American troops would have been required to make an effective attempt to block Al Qaeda’s escape from Tora Bora. About a thousand soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division had deployed nearby to Uzbekistan, where they had no significant mission. A thousand Marines sat at Camp Rhino, southeast of Kandahar, with no significant mission. With reinforcements from the U.S. Army Rangers and the 82nd Airborne flying out of the United States, a substantial blocking force was available. Organizing enough high-altitude helicopter lift, supplies, and medical support would have been challenging and risky under such time pressure. The peaks at Tora Bora rose as high as fourteen thousand feet, meaning that American soldiers training at lower altitude and dropped there suddenly might suffer from altitude sickness. Because of the harsh weather and rough terrain, close air support would have been difficult to deliver, leaving ground troops vulnerable to ambush or capture.35
Yet various accounts given by Franks and his lieutenants indicate that Central Command’s reluctance to bear risk was as much the product of a political judgment as it was about logistics. The generals feared the deployment behind Tora Bora might provoke a tribal revolt in the mountains or otherwise destabilize Afghan politics. History misguided them: The cataclysms and mass slaughters suffered by Soviet and British invaders of Afghanistan led Franks and Lieutenant General Michael DeLong, his deputy, to believe that the sudden arrival of hundreds of American soldiers among armed Pashtun tribesmen might stir a spontaneous uprising, they said later. As DeLong put it: “We wanted to create a stable country and that was more important than going after Bin Laden at the time.” He feared that “this tribal area was sympathetic to Bin Laden.”
The reluctance to go in heavy with American forces began at the top, with Rumsfeld and Franks. According to Major General Warren Edwards, who was involved in the operation, “The message was strong from the national level down: ‘We are not going to repeat the mistakes of the Soviets. We are not going to go in with large conventional forces.’” This precept was “embedded in our decision-making process, in our psyche.” In fact, the pattern of local responses to heavily armed N.A.T.O. troops deploying for short periods in Pashtun regions would later make clear that even where locals were sullen or hostile, they did not typically have the means or will to mount a spontaneous armed uprising. That would only invite bombing and other deadly retaliation from a vastly superior American force. In the longer run, alienated Pashtuns across the south and east would join or aid the Taliban against the United States, but those populations almost certainly did not pose the threat to a short-term deployment at Tora Bora in December that DeLong and others feared.36
On December 9, C
rumpton informed Berntsen that he was being replaced after only a few weeks in country. Berntsen had alienated analysts and operators at the Counterterrorist Center and ALEC Station. When he learned of his removal, he felt “as though someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water in my face.” He could not understand the decision. “Why was headquarters pulling us out? And why was Washington hesitant about committing troops to get Bin Laden?”
Crumpton felt Berntsen had “done a magnificent, heroic job,” but Afghanistan was about to form a post-Taliban government, and there would be a “new mission” for the C.I.A. in Kabul that required “a strong station chief.” Crumpton believed he had to manage “sudden success” and the “impending political transformation from a Taliban-occupied country to a liberated proto-state in need of a central authority.” This required a chief of station who “could engage across the entire U.S. national security spectrum and forge a close working relationship with the emerging Afghan national government.” That might be so, but it did not explain why it was necessary to deliver this news to Berntsen and his frontline team before the Tora Bora battle was resolved. Berntsen was furious, and punched a hole in a door at the Ariana Hotel. He had to sheepishly watch Afghan workmen repair it the next day while he ran a meeting. But he turned back to the fight. He was “pretty angry” about being ordered back, but “3,000 people had been killed” on September 11, so the decision “had no negative effect on my performance.” He had a sore fist, however.37
Tommy Franks said later that, in addition to heavy bombing, his plan was to help Pakistan’s army block Al Qaeda’s exit. He thought it was “a pretty good determination” to work with the Pakistanis. But the C.I.A. reported immediately that the plan would fail, according to Charles Allen, who was in charge of agency intelligence collection at the time. On December 11, at C.I.A. headquarters, Allen’s directorate composed the first edition of what would become a daily “Hunt for Bin Laden” classified memo, intended for Tenet, Bush, and key members of the national security cabinet. The early editions concentrated on Tora Bora and emphasized that “the back door was open,” by Allen’s account.
The Pakistani generals in charge of closing the back door had no means to airlift troops high into the Hindu Kush Mountains in the time available. When they asked the United States for help, they were turned down. Pakistan’s then director-general of military operations, in charge of all day-to-day military movements, later said that he “first learnt about Tora Bora from the television,” and that the Pakistan Army command’s reaction to the battle was one of alarm. This account is supported by other Pakistani generals then stationed along the border. Only by December 8 or 9, after days of heavy bombing had taken place, did Franks ask the Pakistan Army’s XI Corps to seal the border. Pakistan had few troop-carrying helicopters. The army did move ground forces into the region by truck, but this only blocked a few routes of escape from Afghanistan.38
Was Bin Laden really there? Charles Allen and a Delta Force major who at the time scrutinized intercepts of a radio speech Bin Laden apparently delivered on December 10 concluded that he was, as did the operations officers and analysts back at ALEC Station. It later materialized that Bin Laden wrote his last will and testament on December 14. The document’s tone and content suggest he thought he would die soon. “Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,’” he wrote. He apologized to his children for the hardship he had created in their lives and asked his wives never to remarry. It was probably the next day that he left for Pakistan. The C.I.A.’s Allen hypothesized that Bin Laden moved north, inside Afghanistan, into Kunar and Nuristan provinces before crossing over to Pakistan. Scores of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda followers who survived the bombing walked or rode into Pakistan—Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks, some wounded and ill, all seeking shelter.39
Tommy Franks flew into Islamabad to meet Musharraf over lunch in the midst of this migration. Chamberlin attended. Musharraf asked, “General Franks, what are you doing? You are flushing these guys out and there are one hundred and fifty valleys for them to move through. They are pouring in to my country.” Franks did not have an answer. Musharraf asked Franks if Central Command could hurriedly provide helicopters to lift sixty thousand Pakistani troops to the Afghan border. Trapping Al Qaeda’s thousand-odd hard-core survivors inside Afghanistan was as much in Pakistan’s interest as it was in America’s, since Al Qaeda’s migration into Pakistan could wreak havoc. Franks did not answer at the time but later communicated to Musharraf that it could not be done. Helicopters were in short supply.40
President Bush heard conflicting advice throughout the fall of 2001 about how much Osama Bin Laden mattered as an individual target. Some of his advisers argued that Bush should avoid equating Al Qaeda with the United States by singling Bin Laden out. It is true that Bin Laden’s position was not that of a commanding general or even a guerrilla leader comparable to Mao Zedong or Fidel Castro. He was the chairman of a force of multinational volunteers who sometimes worked autonomously and had no political territory of their own. After Bin Laden disappeared, it was tempting for Bush and his advisers to believe that his survival didn’t matter much, apart from the need to deliver justice on behalf of Al Qaeda’s victims in New York, Washington, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and elsewhere. But the failure at Tora Bora ran deeper than justice delayed. As Senate investigators later concluded, the events at Tora Bora “forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism.”41
It also altered the future of Pakistan. On the eve of the American attack on Afghanistan, Dick Cheney had warned Bush’s war cabinet that the war could spill over into Pakistan, “causing the government to lose control of the country and potentially its nuclear arsenal.” Stephen Hadley, Bush’s then–deputy national security adviser, called this “the nightmare scenario.” Pentagon planners had listed “the collapse of the Pakistani government” as one of the risks of the campaign. Now the migration of hundreds of Uzbeks, Chechens, Arabs, and other foreign fighters from the eastern mountains of Afghanistan into Pakistan’s tribal areas and cities brought that “nightmare scenario” into being. Al Qaeda’s arrival created conditions that would further destabilize Pakistan. It connected the country’s indigenous radical networks with Al Qaeda’s international ideologists. It deepened resentment among Pakistan’s generals, who would come to see their country’s rising violence as a price of American folly in the fall of 2001. The potency of Al Qaeda’s ideas and tactics further challenged a Pakistani state that was weak, divided, complacent, and complicit about Islamist ideology and violence. These consequences were not fully apparent that December, but they would rapidly metastasize.42
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American politicians and media celebrated Operation Enduring Freedom as a great and stunning campaign, a harbinger of a new kind of war. The operation did succeed faster and at a lower cost in American lives than any comparable war in the country’s history. The C.I.A., Navy, and Air Force planners and Special Operations Command developed and executed in less than four weeks an improvised, successful attack in a large, distant, landlocked country. Special Forces teams fought remarkably alongside Afghan forces that were themselves courageous and daring. Of course, the Taliban had no modern air defenses, no significant air force, no economy, and no powerful allies. Even so, few would have ventured to predict on the night of October 7 that by mid-December the Taliban would be out of power entirely, or that an opposition government led by Hamid Karzai and recognized by the United Nations would be installed, or that the U.S.-led coalition would have suffered only twelve military deaths, as well as the death of one C.I.A. officer, Johnny Micheal Spann. Operation Enduring Freedom was a military-political-intelligence endeavor of great ingenuity, luck, and tactical skill.
Its success blinded many American politicians, commanders, a
nd C.I.A. leaders to the losses inflicted on Afghans and the political risks of their strategy. The U.S.-led coalition dropped about twelve thousand bombs on Afghanistan that autumn, about 40 percent of them “dumb,” or unguided, according to an analysis by Carl Conetta of the Center for International Policy. Hank Crumpton at the Counterterrorist Center estimated that the campaign killed “at least ten thousand” foreign and Taliban fighters, “perhaps double or triple that number.” By the conservative estimate of Boston University political scientist Neta Crawford, between 1,500 and 2,375 Afghan civilians also died. Some perished in plainly avoidable mistakes when American bombers destroyed civilian villages and extended families. The arbitrariness of these civilian deaths planted seeds of bitterness. So did the C.I.A.’s revived client Abdul Rashid Dostum, who accepted the surrender of several thousand Taliban and allied prisoners in November. Hundreds of those prisoners soon died from suffocation after being stuffed into shipping containers or shot by guards. Dostum said he was in Kunduz, did not order the actions that led to the deaths, and did not learn about them until a year later. In any event, the Bush administration did nothing to hold anyone accountable for the massacres; Dostum entered politics and soon held high office.43
The United States had no serious plan for Afghanistan after the war. The nearly uniform worldwide support for Hamid Karzai’s interim government created a framework for massive reconstruction and for new politics. Yet the Bush administration had little appetite for nation building or peacekeeping. Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar had escaped. Afghanistan’s cities lay in the hands of strongmen, many of them C.I.A. clients, whose previous turns in office had been marked by abuse, internecine fighting, and incompetence. Thirty years of war—and now, after Operation Enduring Freedom, thousands of additional bombs dropped on the country—had left Afghanistan prostrate. Life expectancy and child mortality rates—to the extent they could be measured at all—stood at the very bottom of the U.N.’s worldwide human development tables. The country’s only real equities were international goodwill and some collective memory of a multiethnic country that had once been peaceful.