The first circle
by Michael Griffin
[ politics - september 02 ]
In this excerpt from the revised and updated edition of Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban movement in Afghanistan, Michael Griffin traces the events leading to the US invasion of Afghanistan.
"America is full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that." Osama bin Ladin, 7 October 2001. [1]
Lt-General Mahmoud Ahmad, head of the ISI and architect of the 1999 coup that brought General Musharraf to power, was in Washington the day the World Trade Centre exploded and American Airlines flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon. He had arrived on 4 September for a series of meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council described as "routine" at the time, although visits to Washington by ISI chiefs had a tendency to presage major upheavals in policy and, after the collapse of US overtures to Kandahar a month earlier, this one was likely to be no exception. [2] His other task was to lay the groundwork for direct talks between Musharraf and India's Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, due to take place at the UN General Assembly before the end of September, and a crucial step towards normalising relations between the two trigger-happy nuclear powers.
Ahmad had paid a courtesy call on his CIA counterpart, director George Tenet, one of the only Clinton appointees to survive into the Bush era - and one of the few in the new administration to remember how Musharraf's coup had effectively scotched Washington's last determined effort to lay hands on bin Ladin by squeezing the prime minister he ousted, Nawaz Sharif. [3] By contrast, Ahmad was a loyal ally of the Taliban, for confessional as well as tactical reasons, and had met bin Ladin on numerous occasions. As he watched the awful calligraphy of hijacked planes on the morning of 11 September, the ISI chief was probably the only man in Washington who could instinctively decipher the flash of God's name as it ripped through the Manhattan skyline, and the signature of its author, a man who had never boasted of the power he disposed, but who could never again keep it secret.
Responsibility for the attacks on New York and the capital was initially claimed by a fringe Palestinian group, but the finger of suspicion halted more persuasively over the name of Iraq before turning, with a gasp of rage and disbelief, to Osama bin Ladin and his nexus of half-educated amateurs. On 13 September, Secretary of State Colin Powell confirmed that the administration viewed the exiled Saudi as the leading suspect. "We will go after that group, that network and those who have harboured, supported and aided that network, to rip that network up," he told a briefing, "and when we are through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general." [4] In the White House Situation Room the same day, George Tenet outlined a nimble plan for the launch of a secret offensive in Afghanistan that involved strengthening the Northern Alliance through an infusion of money, weapons and Special Forces liaison teams, who could then provide "eyes on the ground" when a more conventional military response - still a month away in view of the great distances involved - could be organised. He conceded that, without Massoud, the Northern Alliance was likely to be rudderless, demoralised and prone to fracture, but Bush liked the idea more than anything Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had to offer. [5]
Meanwhile, Powell realised Mahmoud Ahmad was still in town, barred from leaving by the three-day ban on civilian flights imposed after the hijackers hit their targets. "Do what you have to do," Bush told him. Powell and his deputy-secretary, Richard Armitage, a veteran of America's first Afghan war, drafted a list of demands for "assistance" from Islamabad that amounted to a terse ultimatum to suspend whatever support was given to the Taliban by the Pakistani government and its citizens or else face global censure - and possibly military attack - as a state that had systematically sponsored the terrorism that had gouged into the heart of America. On 13 September, Armitage as much as told General Musharraf through Ahmad to arrest all Al Qa'ida operatives; intercept all arms shipments; end logistical support to bin Ladin; give the US access to Pakistan's naval bases, air bases and borders; provide immediate intelligence and immigration information; "curb all domestic expressions of support for terrorism against the US, its friends or allies"; cut fuel shipments to the Taliban; and stop Pakistani volunteers from joining the Taliban. [6]
"Should the evidence strongly implicate Osama bin Ladin and the Al Qa'ida network in Afghanistan," ran Powell's final demand, "AND should Afghanistan and the Taliban continue to harbour him and this network, Pakistan will break diplomatic relations with the Taliban government, end support for the Taliban and assist [the US] in the aforementioned ways to destroy Osama bin Ladin and his Al Qa'ida network." [7] "The American people," he told Musharraf later that day, "would not understand if Pakistan was not in this fight with the United States." He listened as the general pledged "unstinted cooperation", offering to send Ahmad to Kandahar to negotiate bin Ladin's extradition with the Taliban, but Powell wanted more. Ahmad could go to Kandahar, but he would deliver only the bluntest of messages: surrender bin Ladin without conditions, or expect a declaration of war from the US. Ahmad was whisked out of Washington to Islamabad the next day. [8]
In private, Musharraf doubted he could honour the promise he had just given on the phone, in view of the pro-Taliban heirarchy running the ISI, the strength of Islamist feeling in the street and his flimsy control over the North West Frontier, where thousands of tribesmen owed their allegiance and livelihoods more to Kandahar than Islamabad. He had no evidence - even if he wished to reveal it - to convince Pakistanis of bin Ladin's involvement in the 11 September attacks, which had tended to elate Muslims around the world as the righteous chastisement of an arrogant power. "[The] training of pilots is the work of a running government," said Mullah Mohammed Omar in a message read out by the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. "Osama has no pilots, and where did he train them? In Afghanistan, there is no such possibility for training." [9] It was as difficult to argue with that logic as it was to counter the myth, widely circulating in Muslim countries, that 4,000 New York Jews had failed to appear for work at the World Trade Centre that fateful Tuesday after warnings from the attacks' "real" perpetrator, Mossad. Any attempt to counter such elemental beliefs among Pakistani militants entailed the leaking of secrets or documents that could only incriminate the ISI further as the guarantor of Al Qa'ida's safe haven in Afghanistan and, therefore, a sponsor of terrorism in the US and against Americans abroad. How much did the US know of Abu Zubaidah and the intimate links he enjoyed with the ISI, the Interior Ministry and its immigration authorities that had allowed a tide of Al Qa'ida recruits to surge into Afghanistan through Pakistan, and flow back out again, without hindrance, to carry terror to distant parts of the world? Indeed, how much did the general himself know?
As he considered the possible outcomes of confronting the generals who had brought him to power specifically to protect their investments in the Taliban and bin Ladin, Musharraf knew he faced his greatest test. As "Chief Executive" - his own chosen title - he had allowed the dogs of jihad to lie undisturbed, reassured they were vital to Pakistan's foreign policy priorities and under the ISI's tight command and control. His restraint had led to the most devastating terrorist attack in history, and a situation where Pakistan found itself trapped in the line of fire between a bleeding Washington and the unpredictable creatures in Kandahar, while India lurked on the sidelines ready to pounce at the first sign of his wavering. The options facing Musharraf were to embrace the Taliban's pariah status and share their transparent destiny, or reject them and withstand a howl of Islamist protest and potential mutiny that could shake the country to its foundations, toss him into history and pass Pakistan's nuclear trigger into the hands of fundamentalists.
Even as he calculated his choices, Musharraf was not without foresight or guile. He had to decide quickly, it was true, but President Bush was under fiercer pressure to deliver a statesmanlike response to a public travelling rapidly through the initial trauma of 11 September to a cold, hard fury that demanded action against its tormentors that was effective and measured, rather than symbolic like the Tomahawk attack on Khost in 1998. Nine months into his administration, a Bush who had yet to come into presidential focus was required both to comfort his people, and prove he could lead them; prepare them for a war with inevitable casualties, while reining in the hawks, who wanted to expand it to include the alleged sponsors of terror, Iraq and Iran; to build a catholic coalition of western and Muslim states committed to bringing bin Ladin to justice, whatever the political cost, while suppressing his own personal tendencies, as leader of the world's largest military power, to command the scores of bombers on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the Indian Ocean, to exact an immediate, unilateral and merciless reprisal.
Musharraf, the soldier, pondered the positive in his apparently hopeless situation. Whatever Bush decided to do, it could not be done quickly without Pakistan's air space, airports or the ISI, which possessed the most recent intelligence on bin Ladin's whereabouts, the members of his network and his bases, as well as copious files on Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leadership and its battle order and strategy. This gave him leverage and, with leverage, came maneuverability. The US public wanted bin Ladin "dead or alive", in Bush's tired, Texan phrase, but it appeared less concerned to discover what had made bin Ladin possible in the first place - or who - and Washington, eyes narrowing for a long military campaign, seemed happy for things to be left that way. The CIA and State Department had absorbed a torrent of criticism for failing to predict or prevent 11 September: neither wanted more light shed on their associations with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both clearly interwoven with the trajectories of the Taliban, bin Ladin and, by implication, Mohammed Atta himself.
The US needed these same Muslim states to underpin Powell's global coalition, facilitate the delivery of its aerial power and limit any further damage to the State Department and the US intelligence community. If speed and the efficiency of Washington's planned military action - not the thoroughness of enquiries into the background of 11 September - were the most important criteria of the US response, Musharraf reflected, then evidence of the ISI's past collusion with bin Ladin could be safely buried beneath the sound and fury of an approaching battle in which Pakistan appeared to stand shoulder to shoulder with the victim of its own misguided intrigues. Pakistan would become the toast of Washington and the World Bank again, the smoking gun snuffed out by a willed, collective amnesia that sought to slam the door on a shared bad memory. It might just work. On the evening of 14 September, Musharraf summoned his generals to discuss just how much assistance they could realistically offer Washington. They talked until the early hours. [10]
In a five-page memo, sent to Bush the same day, British Prime Minister Tony Blair argued that the swiftest route to persuading Arab opinion of the need for a multi-faith coalition against Al Qa'ida was by forcing Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to restart the peace process in the Middle East after a year of renewed intifada. He urged Bush to provide coalition partners who were vacillating with a detailed dossier of the government's evidence against bin Ladin, a synopsis easily culled from testimony in the trials of the embassy bombings and the Millennium plot and the USS Cole investigation. He advised the US to improve its relations with Iran and to provide the Northern Alliance with military assistance. Bush made two international calls that day. In the first, to Blair, he described his thinking on the coming war against terrorism. "We focus on the first circle," he said, "then expand to the next circle and the next circle." His second call was to ask Sharon to reduce the level of Israeli violence in Palestine. "It was not clear that Sharon understood Bush's message", observed reporter Bob Woodward. [11]
Three days after the suicide attacks, Congress gave its consent to military action against those found responsible, approving a $40 billion emergency package by 420 to 1, half for immediate disaster relief in New York and Washington, with around $12 billion for the armed forces and $8 billion for the newly emerging concept of "homeland defense". With the death toll from the Twin Towers collapse estimated at over 6,300, and body parts coming out of the wreckage, the US peace lobby had never been more marginalised. On 15 September, after the second evacuation of the Capitol in three days and more bomb threats in Manhattan, Bush authorised the call-up of 35,000 National Guard reservists to man roadblocks and guard government offices, airports, power stations and transport infrastructure against further attacks. "We're at war," he told the press at Camp David, where Vice-President Dick Cheney lived in seclusion as the guarantor of continuity in the event of Bush's assassination. "My message is for everybody who wears the uniform to get ready." [12]
The nation's airports re-opened for business the same day and, as a trickle of passengers trusted themselves to the skies, the shares of airline and insurance companies were poised to fall through the floor when Wall Street finally resumed trading after the longest closure in its history. Among the first to escape the lock-down were members of the bin Ladin family, fleeing US homes, businesses and colleges lest they be lynched for sharing the same name as the alleged mastermind of 11 September - or '911', as it was tagged after the US dial code that summons the police, fire and paramedical services. The Texas bin Ladins were escorted to a secret assembly point by FBI agents and flown to Washington, where they left for Saudi Arabia on a private plane. Privately owned jumbos, carrying the Saudi deputy defence minister, the governor of Mecca and their 140-strong entourages, also grounded after the attacks, were similarly cleared for take-off. [13] Al-Kalifa bin Ladin, Osama's mother, later told Saudi officials that she been called on 10 September by her refractory offspring to cancel a holiday they had planned together in Syria. "In two days," he told her, "you're going to hear big news and you're not going to hear from me for a while." [14]
Soon after the call, bin Ladin left Kandahar, sent his wives and children to the country and set off with his bodyguard for Kabul. From there, he ordered a statement to be faxed to Al Jazeera TV in the Gulf, which read out its contents on 17 September. "I would like to assure the world," bin Ladin announced grandly, "that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seem to have been planned by people for personal reasons." He added: "I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leader's rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations." [15] A day later, 500 of his Arab supporters in Kabul swore their personal allegiance to him, vowing to "fight to the last man", and he once more performed his vanishing act. "They left behind the vehicles and left on horses," said the source. "He must have gone to some place which is not motorable." [16] Anticipating US attacks, Omar also quit Kandahar for the countryside, but he had time to phone a statement through to Voice of Sharia radio in Kabul in which he asked Afghans to pray, read the Koran and prepare to meet "a test". [17] That same day - Monday 17 September - Islamabad announced that Lt-General Mahmoud Ahmad had flown to Kabul at the head of a delegation of military officers to demand the surrender of bin Ladin to the Americans within 72 hours. "Our dream, I cannot say our expectation, is that somehow or other there will be a miracle," said Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar. "Time is very short, patience has run out, there is no room for negotiation, it's time for action." [18]
After his marathon session with the generals on 14 September, Musharraf had told all ISI officers attached to the Taliban as advisors or trainers to return immediately to Pakistan, a decision that rankled with the ISI chief, whose designs appeared entirely at odds with the Pakistani leader's about-turn on Afghanistan. Ahmad had already approved a trip to Kandahar by retired, mid-level ISI officers in defiance of Musharraf's orders, allegedly to advise the Taliban on strategy in the event that the US launched air strikes. He had vetoed Musharraf's proposal for a face-to-face meeting with Mullah Mohammad Omar on "security grounds", but the parlay - the first in Musharraf's two-year rule - would have broken the ISI's long monopoly on the dialogue with Kandahar and exposed its leaders to a less edited account of the threat building against them across the world. [19] Mullah Mohammad Omar would have refused to see him anyway, having delegated the wrangle over bin Ladin to a "grand council" of 20 ulema, or scholars, in what was construed as a delaying tactic identical to the one employed in November 1998 when Karl Inderfurth sought to extradite the Saudi.
Even this early in, Washington had grave misgivings about the ISI's willingness to obey Musharraf's order or share its best intelligence about bin Ladin while Musharraf was having second thoughts about his own ability to help in other directions. He ruled out the presence of US troops on Pakistani soil or the use of Pakistani airbases to attack Afghanistan on 16 September out of a real fear of provoking his Islamist constituency, rapidly shaping up as Kandahar's 'Fifth Column' inside his borders. [20] From beyond the Khyber Pass came reports - no doubt exaggerated - of 20-25,000 Taliban warriors, massing to attack against any "neighbouring Islamic country" providing support to US military operations, and the grind of Soviet-built Scud missiles as they lumbered within firing range. [21] As Ahmad flew to Kabul with an ultimatum to surrender, in Powell's words, "this curse within their country" or face the "full wrath" of a US assault, his mission seemed doomed to fail. "On the issue of Osama bin Ladin," said Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil on the eve of the talks, "there has been no shift in our stand. We maintain our old position. We are responsible for the security of all those living in our country." The ISI chief may even have permitted himself a smile.
Bin Ladin and Mullah Omar were not the only ones on the move. Alerted by the ubiquitous BBC Pashtu and Dari services, hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of the World Trade Centre packed what they could and headed anxiously into the countryside, or for the checkpoints of Afghanistan's five neighbouring states, most of whose borders had been shut tight. "We heard rumours that fighting would start, that another country would attack," said a woman crossing into Pakistan at Chaman - still passable to traffic in spite of Musharraf's commitment to seal his frontiers. "I don't know which country it was, but I think the Taliban must have done something bad again." [22] Normally bustling Kandahar half-emptied as Arab fighters disappeared with their weapons into the mountains, Taliban escorted their families to Quetta and ordinary civilians trekked to the border, paying the required bribes as they went. Mullah Omar had closed Kandahar's madrassa the day after the attacks on America, distributed Kalashnikovs to their students and ordered them into immediate military training. [23] From cities across Afghanistan, refugees brought tales of men of fighting age being press-ganged by the Taliban from mosques, religious schools and homes, threatening to shoot anyone trying to escape. "Tell my house, tell my father and my mother that they have taken me," shouted one youth from a truck of unwilling recruits being driven to the front. [24] By the time Ahmad finished his first three-hour session with the ulema in Kabul, over 200,000 had escaped Kandahar as the threat of air strikes drew nearer. [25]
The last international aid workers - apart from the eight 'evangelists' still in custody - were evacuated the day after 11 September, leaving Afghan colleagues to administer the centrepiece of the UN programme, a vast and elaborate scheme of famine relief for over three million drought-affected people, mainly concentrated in a northern belt stretching from Herat to Balkh on the Uzbekistan border. A Taliban prohibition on satellite phones, lest they be used to disclose military secrets, cut all communications with the UN in Pakistan, while insecurity and the shortage of trucks made it impossible to maintain the 10,000 tonnes of grain needed each week to keep hunger at bay. With winter six weeks away and food sufficient for only 10-14 days, the UN predicted the number of Afghans at risk from starvation rising to between five and seven million, qualifying as the "world's worst humanitarian crisis", while a further 1.5 million people were expected to try to cross to Pakistan and Iran in a bid to escape bombardment. [26] "I think we have a responsibility to go back to the international anti-terrorism alliance," commented one aid official, "and say: 'Look, this is a risk. There is a climate which has been created by the threat of military action. Damage is not caused by missiles alone'." [27]
Ahmad's mission did not augur well. On 18 September, the ulema postponed giving any answer to the US ultimatum for 24 hours and, with a flourish of injured dignity, waved a list their own conditions that included diplomatic recognition, the lifting of sanctions and an end to all support for their opponents. The ISI chief flew immediately south to remonstrate with Mullah Omar, who denied any personal influence over the clerics' erratic timetable or their ultimate verdict. "You want to please America," he said, "and I want only to please God", [28] but as Ahmad boarded his plane to fly back to Islamabad, the one-eyed enigma hissed: "Osama will be the last person to leave Afghanistan." [29] The ulema did not assemble the following day because Mullah Omar had decided overnight to expand the grand council into a fully-blown shura by summoning more than 600 scholars by radio - 20 from each of the country's 32 provinces - to debate the US demands and issue a fatwa of jihad in the event America attacked. Afghanistan's ancients travelled through the night to reach Kabul before the deadline expired.
They convened on Wednesday morning in the the bombed-out Arg, the palace at the heart of so much Afghan killing, and listened as the education minister read out a message from Mullah Omar. "Our Islamic state is the true Islamic system in the world," he told them, "and for this reason the enemies of our country look at us as a thorn in their eye and seek different excuses to finish it off. Osama is one of these." [30] The speech didn't sound like a submission, and the chilling image at its centre more closely reflected the sensations of the average American after the obliteration of the World Trade Centre and its thousands of occupants, than any US treatment of the Taliban in the recent past. But Mullah Omar was famous neither for diplomacy nor his willingness to concede. "We appeal to the American government to exercise complete patience," he ended, "and we want America to gather complete evidence and find the real culprits." The travel-weary clerics chewed over the matters till lunch was announced and each was issued with a questionnaire in which to file their judgements on the weighty topics at hand. Their decision would be published on Thursday 20 September, 24 hours past deadline, but its gist was already too apparent in Islamabad.
General Parvez Musharraf stood before the cameras on the evening of 19 September visibly sweating as he struggled to explain to a volatile public his decision to meet US demands for Pakistan's complete and unreserved help in running bin Ladin to earth. The 20-minute speech was a carefully pitched appeal that stressed the survival of the nation over Islamic solidarity at a time when, he said, the country faced its gravest crisis since the disastrous war with India in 1971. If he did not help Washington now, Pakistan's very existence would be threatened because India wanted "to enter any alliance with the US and get Pakistan declared a terrorist state". "If we make any mistake, it could culminate in very bad ends," he said, "if we make the right decisions, it could be very fruitful for us." Musharraf told the "10-15 per cent" of Pakistanis who supported the Taliban not to let their emotions get out of hand: the US was not targeting the Taliban, Afghanistan or Islam, only bin Ladin. "Showing strength without wisdom," he counseled, "is a kind of foolishness". Pakistan's 36,000-strong army and airforce were on the highest alert - though whether to repel attacks by India, the 25,000 Taliban massing on its border or US ground troops testing the integrity of Musharraf's commitment was not altogether clear. "Trust me," he pleaded, "I have fought in two wars and, by the grace of God, I have never shown any timidity." He was sweating now, and about to begin his third. [31]
Two days earlier, on 17 September, Bush signed a Memorandum of Notification authorising the CIA to launch a worldwide covert war against terrorism and Tenet received the go-ahead to land agents inside Afghanistan but, even as the ulema mulled over their decision, the Taliban were still not squarely in the presidential sights. "Our goal is not to destroy the Taliban," Bush said in private, "but that may be the effect." [32] On 19 September, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered 100 planes, mainly F-15 and F-16 fighters and B-1 bombers, to fly to forward bases in the Persian Gulf in a deployment code-named "Operation Infinite Justice". The Pentagon refused to reveal their destinations for political as much as security reasons, but the US had access to facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all containing potential wells of sympathy for bin Ladin. B-52 Stratofortresses took off for the shared US-British base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, while a 14-ship armada, led by the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, steamed eastwards from Virginia to join the 22 warships in Carrier Groups Three and Five and the 150 strike aircraft on the flagship carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Enterprise. Aboard were 2,000 marines capable of mounting special operations: in Fort Bragg, the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 3rd Infantry and 10th Mountain Divisions were on war footing. [33] By an extraordinary coincidence - and at extortionate expense to taxpayers - nearly a quarter of the entire British military complement of 100,000 men were due to arrive in Oman to take part in Swift Sword 2 war games, beginning 15 September, supported by the 28 warships including the aircraft carrier Illustrious, the helicopter carrier Ocean and two nuclear submarines. [34] The deployment, the largest since the Falklands war 20 years earlier, confirmed Britain's deep anxieties about the region's stability long before 11 September. Within 10 days of the terrorist attacks, there was sufficient naval and air power in the Persian Gulf to launch a major war against any power in the region, without in any way undermining US command of the "no-fly" zones in Iraq imposed after the Gulf War 10 years before.
Meanwhile, in the Washington that instigated this frenzied movement of men and weapons, the ambassador for the UN-recognised government of former President Burhanuddin Rabbani was wondering why no one telephoned. "Everybody is talking about military action in Afghanistan," he said, "and the target is the Taliban and we're also against the Taliban, but they haven't been in contact. It's a real surprise" [35] But the target, in fact, was not yet the Taliban, for the ulema had not delivered their judgment and, while the men and machines arrayed against them were intimidating in the extreme, the military's objectives - and how to achieve them - were causing concern to both Bush and General Tommy Franks at US Central Command (CENTCOM), who would ultimately direct the campaign by video link from Florida, 10 hours behind and 8,000 kilometres away from real time in Afghanistan. Bin Ladin was no Saddam Hussein with thousands of men, tanks and military installations, ripe for demolition from the sky, a factor that rendered obsolete the institutionalised 'Powell doctrine' of using the US' overwhelming airpower to achieve defined goals that had largely shaped its strategy in the Gulf and the Balkans - as well as its criteria for weapons procurement. "One of our focuses is to get [bin Ladin's] people out of their caves," Bush had told reporters, "smoke them out and get them moving." But no amount of airborne technology could achieve that without having "boots on the ground" to make sure they were dead. [36]
Afghanistan's mountains ruled out using tanks across large swathes of the battlefield, while the value of helicopter gunships was sharply reduced without bases in surrounding countries. Musharraf had agreed to share ISI intelligence - the CIA had employed no agents on the ground in years - but he had balked at using his facilities to mount attacks on Afghanistan because of the challenge it presented to domestic stability. The sheer horror of 11 September had helped Bush to prepare the psychological ground for a return of US troops to the fray for the first time since the 1993 Mogadishu debacle, but they would be dangerously exposed if support choppers were based far out in the Arabian Sea on US carriers. While front pages pumped testosterone with specifications of the enhanced Daisycutter cluster bomb, or the unmanned Predator's remote-triggered Hellcat missiles, editorials fulminated about the impregnable terrain, the approaching winter and how every foreign army that had ever trod there washed up in bloody deserts of Afghan regret. "I pity their mothers and sisters and brothers," said former Soviet colonel Yuri Shamanov, "Vietnam will be a picnic by comparison. Here they will get it in the teeth. They will get it good." [37]
The support of Saudi Arabia, one of only three states to recognise the Taliban, was critical to Powell's ambition of forging an across-the-board coalition against Al Qa'ida similar to the one that enabled him defeat Iraq in 1991. If Riyadh signed up to the US agenda, the conservative Islamic world would follow, lending its diplomatic weight to a US-led punitive expedition, while offering whatever military assistance was required. The previous June had seen the opening of CENTCOM's futuristic command centre at Prince Sultan airbase, 70 miles south east of Riyadh, and the lynchpin of the hated US military presence that motivated so many Saudis to follow in bin Ladin's footsteps. The state-of-the art consoles of Combined Aerospace Operations at Al-Kharj had been designed to enforce the decade-long ban on Iraqi military flights, but they were capable of coordinating the movements of hundreds of planes across thousands of miles of airspace. General Franks was counting on Prince Sultan to facilitate the deployment of aircraft from bases in the US to carriers in the Gulf and from there into the skies above bin Ladin's camps, in spite of a long-standing agreement that restricted US aircraft on Saudi soil to defensive operations. [38]
A week after 11 September, the senile King Fahd offered "full cooperation" in Washington's fight against terror, but this commitment had quickly fractured on the diamond-hard dilemma in the Middle East where to side with the US against Al Qa'ida elided politically into extending moral support to Israeli attacks on Palestinian 'terrorists', whom the Islamic world naturally regarded as 'freedom fighters'. Saudi billionaire, Prince Al-Waleed bin-Talal, was among the first to discover the yawning double standard in Bush's rhetoric after 11 September when his $10 million contribution to victims of the World Trade Centre disaster was publicly rejected by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, after he openly suggested that a link might exists between the hijackers' suicidal impulses and US policy in the Middle East. [39]
Riyadh was in a much better position than Islamabad to stonewall Powell, in spite of its past support for bin Ladin, Al Qa'ida and the Taliban or the fact that 15 of the 19 suspected hijackers were Saudi nationals - and all 15 obtained US visas in the capital. If it chose not to endorse the coalition, the US would be driven into unilateral action, with only grudging support from the liberal west, playing into the hands of bin Ladin and radicals in the Middle East and Pakistan, eager to denounce any attack on Al Qa'ida as a war against Islam itself. As the US' largest energy supplier, there was little that Bush could do, however unique the circumstances or America's needs. The Saudis hedged their bets in customary fashion, offering passive support to the US coalition, while systematically thwarting FBI attempts to expose the Saudi roots of the conspiracy which engulfed the World Trade Centre. The authorities refused a request for conduct background checks on the Saudi-based hijackers, and frustrated all efforts to freeze bin Ladin's assets or audit contributions from charities and individuals that may have funded Al Qa'ida. [40] As for Prince Sultan airbase, western diplomats said Riyadh simply asked the Pentagon not to insist on a favour that, as a pillar of Islam, Saudi Arabia could not politically afford. "We do not accept the presence in our country of a single soldier at war with Muslims or Arabs," Defence Minister Prince Sultan told a local newspaper in mid-September, though the base named after him currently hosted 320 US F-15, F-16 and Stealth fighters and 4,000 military personnel, all poised for the coming fight in Afghanistan. [41]
Bush was preparing to address a joint session of Congress on 20 September when the ulema finally reported their findings. "To avoid the current tumult and similar suspicions in future," ran their decision, "the high council of the honourable ulema recommends to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to persuade bin Ladin to leave Afghanistan whenever possible ... and to choose another place for himself." [42] The clerics set no term to his departure, advising that bin Ladin should leave "of his own free will", but the decision was an advance on Omar's more intractable stance - though whether he conveyed it to his guest was up to the mullah's discretion. There was, moreover, nowhere for bin Ladin to go. "He has so many enemies," said Education Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, "it's not possible for him to go out on the road and stop a taxi." [43] White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was not impressed. "This is about much more than one man being allowed to leave voluntarily, presumably from one safe harbour to another safe harbour," he said. "It does not meet America's requirements."
Eighty million Americans tuned in that night to hear a speech carefully crafted to summarise the Bush administration's response to 11 September and all that had happened in the nine days since, and to witness his reply to the ulema, whose verdict was trailed as the decisive moment both in negotiations for bin Ladin, and whether the US went to war. It had been worked and re-worked to answer those questions, but also to outline a new and aggressive doctrine of global policing whose form had scarcely begun to emerge from the geopolitical architecture that predated the attacks on the US, but which cracked and groaned in the days that followed like iron breaking, or something giving birth. Bush used the staccato building blocks of rhetoric to fashion a primer of terrorism that was interrupted 29 times by applause from the floor. He mentioned bin Ladin once only, and then embarked on a list of demands from the Taliban that slid without logic or clearly defined goals into a description of unending struggle and sacrifice. "Our war on terror begins with Al Qa'ida, but it does not end there," he said. "It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." The US would direct every resource at its command - every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence and every necessary weapon of war - to the destruction and defeat of Al Qa'ida. "Americans should expect not one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any we have ever seen," he said. "It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations secret even in success." Bush's speechwriters and advisors had worried over the next phase of the speech, which dealt with states that sponsored organisations like Al Qa'ida. Powell felt there had to be a definite break with the past, or the US would end up declaring war on everybody, so the magic formula "continues to" was inserted in the text - allowing Pakistan to slink away unpunished: "From this day forward," Bush threatened, "any nation that continues to habour or support terrorism will be regarded by the US as a hostile regime." The applause was thunderous. [44]
In spite of the thunder, the overthrow of the Taliban was still not an explicit goal of US policy, chiefly because the ears of the soldier-turned-coalition-builder, Colin Powell, were so closely attuned to a man who strangely resembled him, Parvez Musharraf, a soldier in the process of morphing into a statesman, both now at bay amid the whirring of hawks' wings. Musharraf could conceivably shout down the Islamists in the army and ISI, but this was less likely if the US intended to use Pakistan's support to replace the Taliban in Kabul with a Northern Alliance regime sympathetic to Iran, Russia and, particularly, India. After a week of prevarication and intensive, inter-faction lobbying, the Alliance had finally confessed that its legendary commander, Maassoud, had truly perished within hours of the assassination bid on 9 September. His Panjshiri supporters attributed his killing to Al Qa'ida suicide bombers and their friends in the ISI, and its precise purpose, they conjectured, was to deny the US the option of an effective surrogate and ally in Afghanistan after Atta's planes collided with their destinations. It was a pragmatic reading of momentous events that was only discounted because of the Alliance's prejudices against Pakistan, Washington's new friend. On 17 September, amidst the throng of his campaign veterans, Massoud was laid in a grave on a barren, wind-swept hill overlooking the Panjshir valley that swiftly turned into a shrine for pilgrims seeking cures from illnesses ranging from epilepsy to madness. "Massoud has become far greater in death than he ever was in life," said one Kabul resident. "It's a cult, but not all of us subscribe to it." [45]
As the Lion of Panjshir mutated into an unwilling manifestation of traditional Afghan sainthood, leadership of the Northern Alliance had devolved onto his brother, Wali Shah Massoud, the Afghan ambassador in London, and General Mohammad Qasim Fahim, Massoud's deputy commander and former head of Najibullah's secret police network, Khad. In a bid to re-establish credibility after their commander's death, the Alliance launched offensives in Samangan and Takhar to attract Washington's attention, while Dostum advanced on Balkh from the south, capturing Zari district near Mazar-I-Sharif on 23 September. [46] In the meantime, Mullah Mohammad Omar had again decided to override the ulema's decision, telling Voice of America radio: "If we give Osama away today, Muslims who are now pleading to give him up would then revile us for giving him up." He outlined his choices in an interview censored by the State Department, but which saw the light in a Washington Post transcript. "I am considering two promises. One is the promise of God. The other is that of Bush. The promise of God is that my land is vast. If you start a journey on God's path, you can reside anywhere on this earth and will be protected. The promise of Bush is that there is no place on earth where you can hide that I cannot find you. We will see which one of these two promises is fulfilled." [47]
Bin Ladin's whereabouts, of course, were a mystery though Alliance commanders insisted their country was awash with shepherds, nomads and spies who could run him to ground, given a minor inducement. "If the Americans want to know where he is, they should come to us," said commander Momar Hasan at Dushti Qala, near the Tajikistan border. "It is really not so difficult." [48] Heavily influenced by Musharraf, Powell was suspicious of the Northern Alliance: he had learned to treat warlords with caution after Mogadishu. In spite of Bush's threats against harbouring terrorists, Powell feared that overthrowing the Taliban would suck the US into Afghanistan's whirlpool of strife, with no exit strategy in sight for the soldiers Bush told Congress he would have to commit. The US had still not contacted the Taliban opposition nearly two weeks after 11 September, according to official accounts, and when asked on 22 September whether removing the Taliban was now a US objective, Powell's answer was as ambiguous as it was contradictory. "That is not uppermost in our minds right now," he answered. "It wasn't 15 days ago, and it isn't right now, except to the extent that the Taliban regime continues to support Osama bin Ladin." [49]
But Powell's star was beginning to wane in Washington as the Pentagon geared up for war. On Tenet's orders, the CIA's first six-man team flew from Uzbekistan to the 'northwest corner' of Afghanistan four days on 26 September in a Russian-bought helicopter, stencilled with the number 91101. Composed of two Dari-speaking CIA officers, two former Special Forces commandos, a communications specialist and a paramedic, Northern Alliance Liaison Team Delta was warmly greeted by commanders loyal to Ismail Khan, head of regional resistance, who asked for beans, bullets, cold-weather boots and, of course, bucks. Million-dollar packages of $20 bills tumbled from the sky to secure the loyalty of the coalition's newest allies - as America's first casualty in the Afghan war, a $40 million Predator surveillance vehicle, was shot down by Taliban only too aware of the CIA presence. Five more liaison teams were subsequently flown out to make contact with anti-Taliban elements in the west, northwest, Mazar-I-Sharif and the south, where they also took delivery of laser target designators to guide US planes to their objectives. [50] The CIA had been quick off the mark, but its failure to insert agents into Al Qa'ida after the embassy bombings four years before, or to prevent 11 September were debts that entirely bankrupted its credibility as an efficient intelligence institution. Warnings of its 'risk-averse' and suburban mind-set had resounded from the pages of Atlantic Monthly only weeks prior to the attacks by a former agent who summed up the agency's problems thus: "Operations that include diarrhoea as a way of life don't happen." [51] Tenet needed a lot of shit and bravado if the CIA's prestige were to be restored before he retired.
As the military build-up continued, so did opposition to the impending US attack. Police used live ammunition to break up a pro-Taliban demonstration in Karachi, in which three people died and a number of cinemas and a UNICEF office were set on fire. "We hope that these brothers will be the first martyrs in the battle of Islam in this era against the new Jewish and Christian crusader campaign led by the Chief Crusader Bush under the banner of the Cross," wrote bin Ladin in the first of a series of messages and videos sent exclusively to Al Jazeera television, quickly emerging as his preferred mode of addressing the global audience that now hung on his every word. [52] Across the frontier, Mullah Omar claimed to have called up 300,000 additional fighters to reinforce the 10-15,000 hard-core troops in the Taliban army, though most were plucked unwillingly from village and street. Like bin Ladin, Omar strove to internationalise his quarrel with the US in a bid to rally Muslim opinion, though he had hitherto shown total indifference to the nuances of Middle East affairs. "If Americans want to eliminate terrorism," he said, "they should withdraw their forces from the Gulf and put an end of the biased attitude on the issue of Palestine." [53] On 23 September, President Bush announced the lifting of the sanctions imposed by Clinton on Pakistan, making it again elegible for military aid and a rescheduling of its back-breaking foreign debt of $38 billion. Islamabad withdrew its diplomats from Kabul the same weekend, citing security concerns though the Taliban were allowed to retain its representative in Islamabad, with Washington's approval, in order to preserve some line of contact. The UAE had broken off relations earlier and Saudi Arabia followed on 25 September, citing the Taliban's propensity to "defame Islam and defame Muslims' reputations in the world". [54] That day, the Pentagon bowed to moderate Muslim sentiment by changing the code name "Operation Infinite Justice" to "Operation Enduring Freedom" because 'infinity' was perceived as a property exclusive to God, not the US.
There would be one last attempt to reason with Mullah Omar - or so it was believed in Washington. On 27 September, Islamabad announced the dispatch of a second delegation to Kandahar, composed of 10 Pakistani ulema from the Deobandi school that had moulded and motivated the Taliban, led by Lt-General Mahmoud Ahmad. Their task was to "satisfy the conscience of the Pakistanis that they have done everything possible", explained an official. [55] As they took off, the Urdu-language newspaper, Ummat, published a second statement from bin Ladin. "As a Muslim, I will not lie," bin Ladin was quoted as saying. "I was neither aware of these attacks, nor would I support the killing of innocent men, women and children." [56] In Kabul, demonstrators ransacked the abandoned US embassy, tearing down the presidential seal, even as delegates from the Northern Alliance and Washington took turns to court former king Zahir Shah in his villa in Rome. Taliban troops were reported abandoning their positions across the country while Herat was on the brink of an uprising and, in Paktia and Paktika, tribal leaders expelled Taliban governors and demanded that Arab fighters be removed from their territory. Fear of US strikes and the Taliban's recruiting sergeants had driven over a million Afghans into headlong flight. In Kandahar, however, the one-eyed mullah was blithely serene, telling a journalist: "We do not expect [an attack], because they have no reason to attack us." [57] "America should give up its stubborness," he told the visiting Pakistani ulema, "and only then can Afghanistan negotiate." [58] Other members of the delegation, however, said that, during the flight to Kandahar, the ISI chief had brusquely impressed on them the need to support Mullah Omar. When they stepped back onto the tarmac in Islamabad, the ulema endorsed his decision not to give up bin Ladin. [59]
"The Americans are crazy," said one Taliban defector, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, Omar's former bodyguard and an accountant-turned-torturer. "It is Osama bin Ladin who can hand over Mullah Omar, not the other way round." Hassani boasted how he had been encouraged to devise punishments as gruesome as possible to deter offenders against Taliban edicts, sometimes crucifying violators or beating them till their spines snapped. "All the important places are now under Arab control," he said, "the airport, the military courts, the tank command." [60] Teams of US Green Berets, Navy SEALS and British SAS, supported by Blackhawk helicopters, were now reportedly searching for bin Ladin around Kandahar, though Pakistan had not yet officially sanctioned American use of its bases and the Pentagon badly needed to build up domestic morale by giving the impression that every avenue was being explored to bring the Saudi to justice - even if it wasn't. The habitual speculation over his destination, however, was this time nipped in the bud after the Taliban envoy, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, was ordered to put the press out of its misery. "Wherever he is, he's under the control of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," he said, circuitously, "and, because of his safety, you know it's only the security people who are responsible for his safety who know his whereabouts, and no one else." He said the Taliban wanted to see firm evidence of bin-Laden's guilt before even considering a handover. Zaeef added; "He's in a place that cannot be located by anyone." [61]
Powell had raised the issue of the evidence against bin Ladin on 24 September, not for the benefit of the Taliban, but to convince the restless populations of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan of the justice of US grievances against him. "I think in the near future we will be able to put out a paper," he said, "a document that will describe quite clearly the evidence we have linking him to this attack." [62] Two reports were forecast: a statement compiled by the State Department for public consumption; and a secret one, for local intelligence agencies, prepared by the CIA and FBI and including details from trusted sources. A day later, Bush froze the assets of 27 individuals and organisations associated with Al Qa'ida, including the business of Mohammed Atta's Hamburg friend, Mamoun Darkazanli, the Al Rashid Trust of Pakistan, publisher of the Taliban newspaper, and the Kandahar-based Wafa Humanitarian Organisation, financed by wealthy Gulf Arabs. But the president disagreed with Powell's argument for widening access to the evidence against bin Ladin. "It's important as this war progresses that the American people understand ... we will not make the war more difficult to win by publicly disclosing classified information," he said somewhat confusingly, while shelving Powell's report. [63] Tony Blair, however, agreed with Powell. On 4 October, he gave the House of Commons a 21-page dossier containing what he called "firm evidence" of bin Ladin's involvement in 11 September, while admitting that "evidence of a very specific nature" had been too sensitive to include. "A range of people were warned to return to Afghanistan because of action on or around 11 September," he told the Commons, "and, most importantly, one of bin Ladin's closest lieutenants has said clearly that he helped with the planning of the 11 September attacks and has admitted the involvement of A' Qa'ida." [64] Musharraf responded a day later, saying the evidence against bin Ladin was "enough for an indictment". [65]
At 8.30 on the evening of Sunday 7 October, the first of 50 cruise missiles was fired from British cruisers and submarines against Al Qai'da training camps and Taliban military installations, followed by a wave of 15 B-1, B-52 and B-2 Stealth bombers and 25 F-14 and F-18 strike jets in a night bombing campaign to knock out the Taliban's rudimentary air defences. Before the planes returned from their seven-hour, round-trip flights, Musharraf moved against the "Three Musketeers", the restive generals who had brought him to power precisely two years earlier. In what was later described as a "coup within a coup", Musharraf sent ISI chief Lt-General Mahmoud Ahmad into early retirement, dismissed the Vice-Chief of Army Staff, Lt- General Muzaffar Usmani and kicked the Chief of General Staff in Rawalpindi, Lt-General Muhammad Aziz Khan, into a largely ceremonial post. All three were pro-Taliban in orientation, and profoundly adverse to Musharraf's alliance with the US. Two days later, in what may have been a classic of Indian disinformation, the Times of India reported that the real reason for Ahmad's dismissal was that US intelligence had identified him as source for the $100,000 that was wired to Mohammad Atta in Florida between July and September 2000 and used to pay for flight classes. The go-between for the transfer, according to the anonymous article, was Ahmed Umar Saeed Sheikh, or "Sheikh Omar Sayeed", the Pakistani-born, British citizen imprisoned in India for kidnapping British tourists in 1995, who was freed after the hijacking of Air India flight 814 to Kandahar on Christmas Eve 1999. [66] The story was neither followed up, nor denied.
Even as the first bombers flew towards Afghanistan, bin Ladin popped up in the place that Americans least expected, on CNN, which transmitted a video of him with Ayman Al-Zawahiri immediately after Bush announced that airstrikes had been launched. Recorded before 7 October, the tape was delivered by courier to the Kabul office of Al Jazeera. Seated outside the mouth of a mountain cave, and dressed in camouflage with a Kalashnikov close to hand, bin Ladin talked to Al Jazeera's 35 million Arabic-speaking viewers of swords, horses and infidels in short, flowing phrases and with a quiet intensity that convinced many of his piety. He denounced Washington's support for Israel, the UN sanctions against Iraq and the America's "occupying" forces near the holy places of Saudi Arabia. "To America, I swear by God the great," he said, his finger pointing directly into the lens, "America will never dream of security or see it, before we live it and see it in Palestine, and not before the infidel's armies depart the land of Mohammed." [67]
Notes
1 BBC News, 6 October [Back]
2 The News, 10 September 2001; New York Times, 13 September 2001 [Back]
3 The News [Back]
4 Washington Post, 14 September 2001 [Back]
5 Washington Post, 29 January 2002 [Back]
6 Washington Post, 29 January 2002 [Back]
7 Washington Post, 29 January 2002 [Back]
8 Washington Post, 23 September 2001 [Back]
9 Guardian, 15 September 2001 [Back]
10 www.merip.org/pins/pin69.html [Back]
11 Washington Post, 30 January 2002 [Back]
12 New York Times, 16 September 2001 [Back]
13 Independent, 26 September 2001; New York Times, 30 September 2001 [Back]
14 New York Times, 2 October 2001 [Back]
15 CNN, 17 September 2001 [Back]
16 Dawn, 19 September 2001 [Back]
17 Washington Post, 17 September 2001 [Back]
18 New York Times, 18 September 2001 [Back]
19 Institute of War and Peace Reporting, 30 October 2001; Time, 29 April 2002 [Back]
20 Guardian, 17 September 2001 [Back]
21 Financial Times, 17 September 2001; Guardian, 18 September 2001 [Back]
22 Guardian, 21 September 2001 [Back]
23 Washington Post, 3 October 2001 [Back]
24 Guardian, 4 October 2001 [Back]
25 New York Times, 18 September 2001 [Back]
26 Guardian, 17 September 2001 [Back]
27 Guardian, 4 October 2001 [Back]
28 New York Times, 19 September 2001 [Back]
29 Washington Post, 19 September 2001 [Back]
30 New York Times, 20 September 2001; Guardian, 20 September 2001 [Back]
31 CNN, 19 September 2001; New York Times, 19 September 2001; Guardian 20, September 2001 [Back]
32 Washington Post, 1 February 2002 [Back]
33 Washington Post, 17 September 2001; New Zealand Herald, 18 September 2001; BBC News, 19 September 2001; Daily Telegraph, 20 September 2001 [Back]
34 Guardian, 22 September 2001; abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/oman_profile.htm [Back]
35 Washington Post, 20 September 2001 [Back]
36 Washington Post, 21 September 2001 [Back]
37 Guardian, 18 September 2001 [Back]
38 Guardian, 4 October 2001 [Back]
39 Reuters, 15 October 2001 [Back]
40 New York Times, 12 October 2001; New Yorker, 22 October 2001 [Back]
41 Guardian, 4 October 2001 [Back]
42 BBC New, 20 September 2001 [Back]
43 Daily Telegraph, 20 September 2001 [Back]
44 Washington Post, 20 September 2001; Washington Post, 2 February 2002 [Back]
45 Washington Times, 2 April 2002 [Back]
46 Guardian, 22 September 2001; BBC News, 23 September 2001 [Back]
47 Evening Standard, 26 September 2001 [Back]
48 Daily Telegraph, 3 October 2001 [Back]
49 Washington Post, 25 September 2001 [Back]
50 Washington Post, 2 February 2002; Time, 29 April 2002 [Back]
51 Atlantic Monthly, July-August 2001 [Back]
52 52 CNN, 25 September 2001 [Back]
53 53 CBC, 24 September 2001 [Back]
54 CNN, 25 September 2001 [Back]
55 CNN, 27 September 2001 [Back]
56 Guardian, 29 September 2001 [Back]
57 Daily Telegraph, 29 September 2001; Observer, 30 September 2001; CNN, 30 September 2001 [Back]
58 Daily Telegraph, 29 September 2001 [Back]
59 Institute of War and Peace Reporting, 30 October 2001; Time, 29 April 2002 [Back]
60 Sunday Telegraph, 30 Septemeber 2001 [Back]
61 New York Times, 1 October 2001 [Back]
62 New York Times, 24 September 2001 [Back]
63 USA Today, 25 September 2001 [Back]
64 Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2001; Guardian, 5 October 2001; www.number-10.gov.uk/default.asp?PageID=5322 [Back]
65 BBC News, 5 October 2001 [Back]
36 Times of India, 9 October 2001 [Back]
67 BBC News, 7 October 2001; Guardian, 8 October 2001 [Back]
