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How Osama bin Laden Escaped
How Osama bin Laden Escaped
In December, 2001, a small group of U.S. special operations forces had al Qaeda's main man cornered in Tora Bora. Days later, he crossed the border into Pakistan unnoticed. Here is the story of the White House policy that let him get away.
DECEMBER 11, 2009
On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. aircraft began bombing the training bases and strongholds of al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban across Afghanistan. The leaders who sent murderers to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon less than a month earlier and the rogue government that provided them sanctuary were running for their lives. President George W. Bush's expression of America's desire to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" seemed about to come true.
Three months later, American civilian and military leaders celebrated what they viewed as a lasting victory with the selection of Hamid Karzai as the country's new leader. The war had been conceived as a swift campaign with a single objective: defeat the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda by capturing or killing bin Laden and other key leaders. A unique combination of airpower, Central Intelligence Agency and special operations forces teams, and indigenous allies had swept the Taliban from power and ousted al Qaeda from its safe haven, keeping American deaths to a minimum. But even in the initial glow, there were concerns: The mission had failed to capture or kill bin Laden.
Removing the al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency, and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.
This failure and its enormous consequences were not inevitable. By early December, bin Laden's world had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora. Cornered in some of the most forbidding terrain on Earth, he and several hundred of his men, the largest concentration of al Qaeda fighters, endured as many as 100 airstrikes a day. One 15,000-pound bomb, so huge it had to be rolled out the back of a C-130 cargo plane, shook the mountains for miles. Even bin Laden himself expected to die. He wrote his last will and testament on Dec. 14, instructing his wives not to remarry and apologizing to his children for devoting himself to jihad. But the al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. On or around Dec. 16, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.
What happened in Tora Bora? A major with the Army's Delta Force, now retired and writing under the pen name Dalton Fury, was the senior U.S. military officer there, commanding about 90 special operations troops and support personnel charged with hunting down and capturing or killing bin Laden.
In interviews with committee staff, Fury explained that al Qaeda fighters arrayed in the mountains used unsecure radios, allowing U.S. forces to eavesdrop on al Qaeda, tracking their movements and gauging the effectiveness of the bombing. Even more valuable, a few days after arriving, one of the CIA operatives picked up a radio from a dead al Qaeda fighter. It gave the Americans a clear channel into the group's communications on the mountain. Bin Laden's voice was often picked up, along with frequent comments about the presence of the man referred to by his followers as "the sheikh."
For several days in early December, Fury's special ops troops moved up the mountains in pairs with fighters from the Afghan militias. The Americans used GPS devices and laser range finders to pinpoint caves and pockets of enemy fighters for the bombers. It was clear from what they could see and what they were hearing in the intercepted conversations that relentless bombing was taking its toll.
On December 9, a C-130 cargo plane dropped the 15,000-pound bomb, known as a Daisy Cutter, on the Tora Bora complex. The weapon had not been used since Vietnam and there were early fears that its impact had not been as great as expected. But later reports confirmed that the bomb struck with massive force. A captured al Qaeda fighter who was there later told American interrogators that men deep in caves had been vaporized in what he called "a hideous explosion." That day and others, Fury described intercepting radio communications in which al Qaeda fighters called for the "red truck to move wounded" and frantic pleas from a fighter to his commander.
Given the radio signals, Fury hoped his special operations forces were getting close to capture. They were not. The United States was relying on two relatively minor warlords from the Jalalabad area for Afghan support. Haji Hazarat Ali had a fourth-grade education and a reputation as a bully. He had fought the Soviets as a teenager in the 1980s and later joined the Taliban for a time. The other, Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, was a wealthy drug smuggler who had been persuaded by the United States to return from France. Together, they fielded a force of about 2,000 men, and there were questions from the outset about the competence and loyalties of the fighters. The two warlords and their men distrusted each other and both groups appeared to distrust their American allies.
Those concerns were underscored each time the Afghans insisted on retreating from the mountains as darkness fell. But the suspicions were confirmed by events that started on the afternoon of Dec. 11, a day U.S. forces heard bin Laden tell his men it was OK to surrender. Ghamsharik approached Fury and told him that al Qaeda fighters wanted to give up. He said all they needed to end the siege was a 12-hour ceasefire to allow the fighters to climb down the mountains and turn in their weapons. Intercepted radio chatter seemed to confirm that the fighters had lost their resolve under the relentless bombing, but Fury remained suspicious.
The U.S. Special Operations Command official history records that Centcom refused to back the ceasefire, suspecting a ruse, but it said the special ops forces agreed reluctantly to an overnight pause in the bombing to avoid killing any surrendering fighters. Ghamsharik negotiated by radio with representatives of al Qaeda. He initially told Fury that a large number of Algerians wanted to surrender. Then he said that he could turn over the entire al Qaeda leadership. Fury's suspicions increased with each bold promise. By the morning of Dec. 12, no al Qaeda fighters had appeared and the Delta Force commander concluded that the whole episode was a hoax. Intelligence estimates are that as many as 800 al Qaeda fighters escaped that night -- but not bin Laden.
Despite the unreliability of his Afghan allies, Fury refused to give up and started plotting ways his forces could go at bin Laden on their own. One plan was to corner bin Laden from a direction he wouldn't anticipate -- through the back door. The peaks to the south rose to 14,000 feet and the valleys and precipitous mountain passes were already deep in snow. "The original plan that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the Pakistan side," he explained. "Over the mountains and come in and get a drop on bin Laden from behind."
The audacious assault was nixed somewhere up the chain of command. Undeterred, Fury suggested dropping hundreds of landmines along the passes leading to Pakistan to block bin Laden's escape. "First guy blows his leg off, everybody else stops," he said. "That allows aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. OK, there is a big large group of al Qaeda moving south. They can engage that." That proposal was rejected, too.
From the outset of the invasion and bin Laden operation, according to former CIA Director George Tenet, it was evident that aerial bombing would not be enough to get bin Laden at Tora Bora. Henry Crumpton, the head of special operations for the CIA's counterterrorism operation, for instance, had made entreaties for more troops to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks long before December. Crumpton even urged Franks to move 1,000 Marines from Kandahar to the "back door" into Tora Bora and briefed Bush and Vice President **** Cheney on the need for a greater presence on the ground. But Centcom rejected these ideas, saying it would take too long to get a large enough U.S. contingent on the scene.
On Dec. 14, the day bin Laden finished his will, Dalton Fury finally convinced Ali and his men to stay overnight in one of the canyons that they had captured during daylight. Over the next three days, the Afghan militia and their American advisers moved steadily through the canyons, calling in airstrikes and taking out lingering pockets of fighters. The resistance seemed to have vanished, prompting Ali to declare victory on Dec. 17. Most of the Tora Bora complex was abandoned and many of the caves and tunnels were buried in debris. Only about 20 stragglers were taken prisoner. The consensus was that al Qaeda fighters who had survived the fierce bombing had escaped into Pakistan or melted into the local population. Bin Laden was nowhere to be found. Two days later, Fury and his Delta Force colleagues left Tora Bora, hoping that someone would eventually find bin Laden buried in one of the caves.
There was no body because bin Laden did not die at Tora Bora. Later U.S. intelligence reports and accounts by journalists and others said that he and a contingent of bodyguards departed Tora Bora on Dec. 16. With help from Afghans and Pakistanis who had been paid in advance, the group made its way on foot and horseback across the mountain passes and into Pakistan without encountering any resistance.
The ultimate fault for the failure to capture bin Laden lies not in the U.S. effort, but in the U.S. strategy. Franks and Rumsfeld decided to attempt to deliver a swift and economical knockout blow to the Taliban through airpower and the limited application of troops on the ground. Instead of employing the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, the Afghan model for Operation Enduring Freedom depended on airpower and on highly mobile paramilitary teams, working in concert with opposition warlords and tribal leaders. Franks capped the number of boots on the ground at 10,000.
For this reason -- the relative scarcity of U.S. soldiers -- Franks and Rumsfeld refused to send more troops to Tora Bora to block, capture, or kill bin Laden. But soldiers and scholars alike have since argued that there were sufficient troops available in Afghanistan and nearby Uzbekistan to mount a genuine assault on bin Laden's position at Tora Bora. And they could have been augmented within about a week by reinforcements from the Persian Gulf and the United States.
Peter Krause provides the most detailed description of this untaken option -- a "block and sweep" -- in an article in Security Studies, "The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora." The plan is simple enough: One group of American forces would have blocked the likely exit avenues to Pakistan on the south side of Tora Bora. A second contingent would have moved against al Qaeda's positions from the north. The assault would not have required thousands of conventional forces; in fact, a large number of troops would have taken too long to deploy and alerted al Qaeda to the approaching attack. The preferred choice would have been a small, agile force capable of deploying quickly and quietly and trained to operate in difficult terrain against unconventional enemies. The U.S. military has large numbers of soldiers and Marines who meet those criteria: Delta Forces, Green Berets, Navy Seals, Marine special operations units, Army Rangers, and paratroopers.
In all, an initial force of roughly 2,000 to 3,000 troops would have been sufficient to begin the block-and-sweep mission, with reinforcements following as time and circumstances allowed. Franks had set the ceiling of 10,000 U.S. troops to maintain a light footprint. Still, within that number there were enough ready and willing to go after bin Laden. In late November, about the time U.S. intelligence placed bin Laden squarely at Tora Bora, more than 1,000 members of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units, among the military's most mobile arms, established a base southwest of Kandahar, only a few hours flight away. They were primarily interdicting traffic and supporting the special operations teams working with Afghan militias. Another 1,000 troops from the Army's 10th Mountain Division were split between a base in southern Uzbekistan and Bagram Air Base, a short helicopter flight from Tora Bora. The Army troops were engaged mainly in military police functions, according to reports at the time.
Ironically, one of the guiding principles of the Afghan model was to avoid immersing the United States in a protracted insurgency by sending in too many troops and stirring up anti-American sentiment. In the end, the unwillingness to bend the operational plan to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden paved the way for exactly what we had hoped to avoid: a protracted insurgency that has cost more lives than anyone estimates would have been lost in a full-blown assault on Tora Bora.
Bin Laden's demise would not have erased the worldwide threat from extremists. But the failure to kill or capture him has allowed bin Laden to exert a malign influence over events in the region and nearly 60 countries where his followers have established extremist groups. History shows that terrorist groups are invariably much stronger with their charismatic leaders than without them, and the ability of bin Laden and his terrorist organization to recover from the loss of their Afghan sanctuary reinforces the lesson.
Eight years after its expulsion from Afghanistan, al Qaeda has reconstituted itself and bin Laden has survived to inspire a new generation of extremists who have adopted and adapted the al Qaeda doctrine and are now capable of attacking from any number of places. The impact of this threat is greatest in Pakistan, the United States' nuclear-armed ally, where al Qaeda's continued presence and resources have emboldened domestic extremists waging an increasingly bloody insurrection. Closer to home, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says two recent suspected plots disrupted by U.S. authorities involved long-time residents of the United States who had traveled to Pakistan and trained at bases affiliated with Al Qaeda.
Plus, the costs to the United States -- human and financial -- have been staggering. The first eight years cost an estimated $243 billion and about $70 billion has been appropriated for the current fiscal year, not including President Barack Obama's 30,000 troop increase. But the highest price is being paid on a daily basis in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where 68,000 American troops and hundreds of U.S. civilians are engaged in the ninth year of a protracted conflict and the Afghan people endure a third decade of violence. So far, about 950 U.S. troops and nearly 600 allied soldiers have lost their lives in Operation Enduring Freedom, a conflict in which the outcome remains in grave doubt in large part because the extremists behind the violence were not eliminated in 2001.
ROMEO GACAD/AFP/Getty Images
How Osama bin Laden Escaped | Foreign Policy
How Osama bin Laden Escaped
In December, 2001, a small group of U.S. special operations forces had al Qaeda's main man cornered in Tora Bora. Days later, he crossed the border into Pakistan unnoticed. Here is the story of the White House policy that let him get away.
DECEMBER 11, 2009
On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. aircraft began bombing the training bases and strongholds of al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban across Afghanistan. The leaders who sent murderers to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon less than a month earlier and the rogue government that provided them sanctuary were running for their lives. President George W. Bush's expression of America's desire to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" seemed about to come true.
Three months later, American civilian and military leaders celebrated what they viewed as a lasting victory with the selection of Hamid Karzai as the country's new leader. The war had been conceived as a swift campaign with a single objective: defeat the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda by capturing or killing bin Laden and other key leaders. A unique combination of airpower, Central Intelligence Agency and special operations forces teams, and indigenous allies had swept the Taliban from power and ousted al Qaeda from its safe haven, keeping American deaths to a minimum. But even in the initial glow, there were concerns: The mission had failed to capture or kill bin Laden.
Removing the al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency, and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.
This failure and its enormous consequences were not inevitable. By early December, bin Laden's world had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora. Cornered in some of the most forbidding terrain on Earth, he and several hundred of his men, the largest concentration of al Qaeda fighters, endured as many as 100 airstrikes a day. One 15,000-pound bomb, so huge it had to be rolled out the back of a C-130 cargo plane, shook the mountains for miles. Even bin Laden himself expected to die. He wrote his last will and testament on Dec. 14, instructing his wives not to remarry and apologizing to his children for devoting himself to jihad. But the al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. On or around Dec. 16, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.
What happened in Tora Bora? A major with the Army's Delta Force, now retired and writing under the pen name Dalton Fury, was the senior U.S. military officer there, commanding about 90 special operations troops and support personnel charged with hunting down and capturing or killing bin Laden.
In interviews with committee staff, Fury explained that al Qaeda fighters arrayed in the mountains used unsecure radios, allowing U.S. forces to eavesdrop on al Qaeda, tracking their movements and gauging the effectiveness of the bombing. Even more valuable, a few days after arriving, one of the CIA operatives picked up a radio from a dead al Qaeda fighter. It gave the Americans a clear channel into the group's communications on the mountain. Bin Laden's voice was often picked up, along with frequent comments about the presence of the man referred to by his followers as "the sheikh."
For several days in early December, Fury's special ops troops moved up the mountains in pairs with fighters from the Afghan militias. The Americans used GPS devices and laser range finders to pinpoint caves and pockets of enemy fighters for the bombers. It was clear from what they could see and what they were hearing in the intercepted conversations that relentless bombing was taking its toll.
On December 9, a C-130 cargo plane dropped the 15,000-pound bomb, known as a Daisy Cutter, on the Tora Bora complex. The weapon had not been used since Vietnam and there were early fears that its impact had not been as great as expected. But later reports confirmed that the bomb struck with massive force. A captured al Qaeda fighter who was there later told American interrogators that men deep in caves had been vaporized in what he called "a hideous explosion." That day and others, Fury described intercepting radio communications in which al Qaeda fighters called for the "red truck to move wounded" and frantic pleas from a fighter to his commander.
Given the radio signals, Fury hoped his special operations forces were getting close to capture. They were not. The United States was relying on two relatively minor warlords from the Jalalabad area for Afghan support. Haji Hazarat Ali had a fourth-grade education and a reputation as a bully. He had fought the Soviets as a teenager in the 1980s and later joined the Taliban for a time. The other, Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, was a wealthy drug smuggler who had been persuaded by the United States to return from France. Together, they fielded a force of about 2,000 men, and there were questions from the outset about the competence and loyalties of the fighters. The two warlords and their men distrusted each other and both groups appeared to distrust their American allies.
Those concerns were underscored each time the Afghans insisted on retreating from the mountains as darkness fell. But the suspicions were confirmed by events that started on the afternoon of Dec. 11, a day U.S. forces heard bin Laden tell his men it was OK to surrender. Ghamsharik approached Fury and told him that al Qaeda fighters wanted to give up. He said all they needed to end the siege was a 12-hour ceasefire to allow the fighters to climb down the mountains and turn in their weapons. Intercepted radio chatter seemed to confirm that the fighters had lost their resolve under the relentless bombing, but Fury remained suspicious.
The U.S. Special Operations Command official history records that Centcom refused to back the ceasefire, suspecting a ruse, but it said the special ops forces agreed reluctantly to an overnight pause in the bombing to avoid killing any surrendering fighters. Ghamsharik negotiated by radio with representatives of al Qaeda. He initially told Fury that a large number of Algerians wanted to surrender. Then he said that he could turn over the entire al Qaeda leadership. Fury's suspicions increased with each bold promise. By the morning of Dec. 12, no al Qaeda fighters had appeared and the Delta Force commander concluded that the whole episode was a hoax. Intelligence estimates are that as many as 800 al Qaeda fighters escaped that night -- but not bin Laden.
Despite the unreliability of his Afghan allies, Fury refused to give up and started plotting ways his forces could go at bin Laden on their own. One plan was to corner bin Laden from a direction he wouldn't anticipate -- through the back door. The peaks to the south rose to 14,000 feet and the valleys and precipitous mountain passes were already deep in snow. "The original plan that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the Pakistan side," he explained. "Over the mountains and come in and get a drop on bin Laden from behind."
The audacious assault was nixed somewhere up the chain of command. Undeterred, Fury suggested dropping hundreds of landmines along the passes leading to Pakistan to block bin Laden's escape. "First guy blows his leg off, everybody else stops," he said. "That allows aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. OK, there is a big large group of al Qaeda moving south. They can engage that." That proposal was rejected, too.
From the outset of the invasion and bin Laden operation, according to former CIA Director George Tenet, it was evident that aerial bombing would not be enough to get bin Laden at Tora Bora. Henry Crumpton, the head of special operations for the CIA's counterterrorism operation, for instance, had made entreaties for more troops to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks long before December. Crumpton even urged Franks to move 1,000 Marines from Kandahar to the "back door" into Tora Bora and briefed Bush and Vice President **** Cheney on the need for a greater presence on the ground. But Centcom rejected these ideas, saying it would take too long to get a large enough U.S. contingent on the scene.
On Dec. 14, the day bin Laden finished his will, Dalton Fury finally convinced Ali and his men to stay overnight in one of the canyons that they had captured during daylight. Over the next three days, the Afghan militia and their American advisers moved steadily through the canyons, calling in airstrikes and taking out lingering pockets of fighters. The resistance seemed to have vanished, prompting Ali to declare victory on Dec. 17. Most of the Tora Bora complex was abandoned and many of the caves and tunnels were buried in debris. Only about 20 stragglers were taken prisoner. The consensus was that al Qaeda fighters who had survived the fierce bombing had escaped into Pakistan or melted into the local population. Bin Laden was nowhere to be found. Two days later, Fury and his Delta Force colleagues left Tora Bora, hoping that someone would eventually find bin Laden buried in one of the caves.
There was no body because bin Laden did not die at Tora Bora. Later U.S. intelligence reports and accounts by journalists and others said that he and a contingent of bodyguards departed Tora Bora on Dec. 16. With help from Afghans and Pakistanis who had been paid in advance, the group made its way on foot and horseback across the mountain passes and into Pakistan without encountering any resistance.
The ultimate fault for the failure to capture bin Laden lies not in the U.S. effort, but in the U.S. strategy. Franks and Rumsfeld decided to attempt to deliver a swift and economical knockout blow to the Taliban through airpower and the limited application of troops on the ground. Instead of employing the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, the Afghan model for Operation Enduring Freedom depended on airpower and on highly mobile paramilitary teams, working in concert with opposition warlords and tribal leaders. Franks capped the number of boots on the ground at 10,000.
For this reason -- the relative scarcity of U.S. soldiers -- Franks and Rumsfeld refused to send more troops to Tora Bora to block, capture, or kill bin Laden. But soldiers and scholars alike have since argued that there were sufficient troops available in Afghanistan and nearby Uzbekistan to mount a genuine assault on bin Laden's position at Tora Bora. And they could have been augmented within about a week by reinforcements from the Persian Gulf and the United States.
Peter Krause provides the most detailed description of this untaken option -- a "block and sweep" -- in an article in Security Studies, "The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora." The plan is simple enough: One group of American forces would have blocked the likely exit avenues to Pakistan on the south side of Tora Bora. A second contingent would have moved against al Qaeda's positions from the north. The assault would not have required thousands of conventional forces; in fact, a large number of troops would have taken too long to deploy and alerted al Qaeda to the approaching attack. The preferred choice would have been a small, agile force capable of deploying quickly and quietly and trained to operate in difficult terrain against unconventional enemies. The U.S. military has large numbers of soldiers and Marines who meet those criteria: Delta Forces, Green Berets, Navy Seals, Marine special operations units, Army Rangers, and paratroopers.
In all, an initial force of roughly 2,000 to 3,000 troops would have been sufficient to begin the block-and-sweep mission, with reinforcements following as time and circumstances allowed. Franks had set the ceiling of 10,000 U.S. troops to maintain a light footprint. Still, within that number there were enough ready and willing to go after bin Laden. In late November, about the time U.S. intelligence placed bin Laden squarely at Tora Bora, more than 1,000 members of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units, among the military's most mobile arms, established a base southwest of Kandahar, only a few hours flight away. They were primarily interdicting traffic and supporting the special operations teams working with Afghan militias. Another 1,000 troops from the Army's 10th Mountain Division were split between a base in southern Uzbekistan and Bagram Air Base, a short helicopter flight from Tora Bora. The Army troops were engaged mainly in military police functions, according to reports at the time.
Ironically, one of the guiding principles of the Afghan model was to avoid immersing the United States in a protracted insurgency by sending in too many troops and stirring up anti-American sentiment. In the end, the unwillingness to bend the operational plan to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden paved the way for exactly what we had hoped to avoid: a protracted insurgency that has cost more lives than anyone estimates would have been lost in a full-blown assault on Tora Bora.
Bin Laden's demise would not have erased the worldwide threat from extremists. But the failure to kill or capture him has allowed bin Laden to exert a malign influence over events in the region and nearly 60 countries where his followers have established extremist groups. History shows that terrorist groups are invariably much stronger with their charismatic leaders than without them, and the ability of bin Laden and his terrorist organization to recover from the loss of their Afghan sanctuary reinforces the lesson.
Eight years after its expulsion from Afghanistan, al Qaeda has reconstituted itself and bin Laden has survived to inspire a new generation of extremists who have adopted and adapted the al Qaeda doctrine and are now capable of attacking from any number of places. The impact of this threat is greatest in Pakistan, the United States' nuclear-armed ally, where al Qaeda's continued presence and resources have emboldened domestic extremists waging an increasingly bloody insurrection. Closer to home, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says two recent suspected plots disrupted by U.S. authorities involved long-time residents of the United States who had traveled to Pakistan and trained at bases affiliated with Al Qaeda.
Plus, the costs to the United States -- human and financial -- have been staggering. The first eight years cost an estimated $243 billion and about $70 billion has been appropriated for the current fiscal year, not including President Barack Obama's 30,000 troop increase. But the highest price is being paid on a daily basis in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where 68,000 American troops and hundreds of U.S. civilians are engaged in the ninth year of a protracted conflict and the Afghan people endure a third decade of violence. So far, about 950 U.S. troops and nearly 600 allied soldiers have lost their lives in Operation Enduring Freedom, a conflict in which the outcome remains in grave doubt in large part because the extremists behind the violence were not eliminated in 2001.
ROMEO GACAD/AFP/Getty Images
How Osama bin Laden Escaped | Foreign Policy
ppgj
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DAWN.COM | World | Bin Laden: symbolic icon in impenetrable fortress
Bin Laden: symbolic icon in impenetrable fortress
Monday, 14 Dec, 2009
This undated file handout picture received on August 2, 1998 shows Saudi dissident Osama bin Ladin (C) in an undisclosed place inside Afghanistan. — AFP
ISLAMABAD: The United States may be expanding its war against Al-Qaeda, but experts warn that prize target Osama bin Laden has become a symbolic icon whose liquidation alone would not destroy the terror network.
The Saudi-born mastermind, now in his 50s and rumoured to be in poor health, is the world's most-wanted man with 25 million dollars on his head. But intelligence on his whereabouts is vague and contradictory.
The received wisdom is that he is out of reach in mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which Washington says is Al-Qaeda's chief sanctuary, thick with Taliban and tribesmen fiercely hostile to outsiders.
General Stanley McChrystal, the commander overseeing a surge in Nato and US troops in Afghanistan, warns that taking bin Laden out would not spell the final demise of Al-Qaeda.
‘I believe he is an iconic figure at this point whose survival emboldens Al-Qaeda as a franchising organisation across the world,’ McChrystal said last week.
‘It would not defeat Al-Qaeda to have him captured or killed, but I don't think that we can finally defeat Al-Qaeda until he's captured or killed.’
Many experts believe bin Laden is now little more than a guiding light for extreme militant cells operating across the globe.
‘Ayman al-Zawahiri is more the target today — the real number one of the network, the most active and most radical,’ one Western counter-terrorism official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Pakistani authorities say a CIA missile just missed Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's Egyptian ideologue, in January 2006 in Bajaur, in the semi-autonomous tribal belt near the Afghan border. Since then, he has disappeared.
Writing in The New York Times, anthropologist Scott Atran said bin Laden and company had not directly commanded a successful attack in the United States or Europe since September 11, 2001.
‘The American invasion of Afghanistan devastated Al-Qaeda's core of top personnel and its training camps,’ he wrote.
‘The real threat is home-grown youths who gain inspiration from Osama bin Laden but little else beyond an occasional self-financed spell at a degraded Qaeda-linked training facility.’
Under President Barack Obama, the United States has stepped up drone attacks against Taliban and Al-Qaeda suspects in the tribal belt.
National Security Advisor James Jones believes bin Laden is somewhere around the Pakistani region of North Waziristan, ‘sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border’.
The border features some of the most inaccessible terrain in the world, with its towering mountains, plunging valleys, narrow ravines and network of caves.
‘It's a real black hole, where Western and Pakistani intelligence services have no presence at all,’ said the Western official.
His safety lies in a mix of adoration, ignorance in a tribal population cut off from the outside world, and absolute terror, likely in an impenetrable area totally in Al-Qaeda's hands.
‘There are valleys so narrow, especially in Waziristan, that drone attacks are impossible because they can't fire vertically,’ the official added.
A senior Pakistani counter-terrorism official said the tribal belt was ‘well known to (bin Laden) and his followers’.
‘It is out of bounds for intelligence agents to penetrate,’ he told AFP on condition of anonymity.
In September, bin Laden appeared — in a still image only — on a video released by Al-Qaeda around the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks and purportedly called on Americans to rethink their policies.
‘Osama is so cautious about his security, he doesn't meet people and moves very little,’ said Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of the few journalists to have interviewed bin Laden, twice in 1998 in Afghanistan.
‘He doesn't use fax, phone, mobile or anything else. His followers are very loyal,’ the Pakistani correspondent said.
The Al-Qaeda supremo is protected both by his inner circle and a wider reign of terror. People are beheaded on the least suspicion and video evidence distributed as a warning to others, Pakistani officials say.
Bodies are regularly found dumped on the roadside, their chests etched with the words ‘American spy’.
Bin Laden: symbolic icon in impenetrable fortress
Monday, 14 Dec, 2009
This undated file handout picture received on August 2, 1998 shows Saudi dissident Osama bin Ladin (C) in an undisclosed place inside Afghanistan. — AFP
ISLAMABAD: The United States may be expanding its war against Al-Qaeda, but experts warn that prize target Osama bin Laden has become a symbolic icon whose liquidation alone would not destroy the terror network.
The Saudi-born mastermind, now in his 50s and rumoured to be in poor health, is the world's most-wanted man with 25 million dollars on his head. But intelligence on his whereabouts is vague and contradictory.
The received wisdom is that he is out of reach in mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which Washington says is Al-Qaeda's chief sanctuary, thick with Taliban and tribesmen fiercely hostile to outsiders.
General Stanley McChrystal, the commander overseeing a surge in Nato and US troops in Afghanistan, warns that taking bin Laden out would not spell the final demise of Al-Qaeda.
‘I believe he is an iconic figure at this point whose survival emboldens Al-Qaeda as a franchising organisation across the world,’ McChrystal said last week.
‘It would not defeat Al-Qaeda to have him captured or killed, but I don't think that we can finally defeat Al-Qaeda until he's captured or killed.’
Many experts believe bin Laden is now little more than a guiding light for extreme militant cells operating across the globe.
‘Ayman al-Zawahiri is more the target today — the real number one of the network, the most active and most radical,’ one Western counter-terrorism official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Pakistani authorities say a CIA missile just missed Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's Egyptian ideologue, in January 2006 in Bajaur, in the semi-autonomous tribal belt near the Afghan border. Since then, he has disappeared.
Writing in The New York Times, anthropologist Scott Atran said bin Laden and company had not directly commanded a successful attack in the United States or Europe since September 11, 2001.
‘The American invasion of Afghanistan devastated Al-Qaeda's core of top personnel and its training camps,’ he wrote.
‘The real threat is home-grown youths who gain inspiration from Osama bin Laden but little else beyond an occasional self-financed spell at a degraded Qaeda-linked training facility.’
Under President Barack Obama, the United States has stepped up drone attacks against Taliban and Al-Qaeda suspects in the tribal belt.
National Security Advisor James Jones believes bin Laden is somewhere around the Pakistani region of North Waziristan, ‘sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border’.
The border features some of the most inaccessible terrain in the world, with its towering mountains, plunging valleys, narrow ravines and network of caves.
‘It's a real black hole, where Western and Pakistani intelligence services have no presence at all,’ said the Western official.
His safety lies in a mix of adoration, ignorance in a tribal population cut off from the outside world, and absolute terror, likely in an impenetrable area totally in Al-Qaeda's hands.
‘There are valleys so narrow, especially in Waziristan, that drone attacks are impossible because they can't fire vertically,’ the official added.
A senior Pakistani counter-terrorism official said the tribal belt was ‘well known to (bin Laden) and his followers’.
‘It is out of bounds for intelligence agents to penetrate,’ he told AFP on condition of anonymity.
In September, bin Laden appeared — in a still image only — on a video released by Al-Qaeda around the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks and purportedly called on Americans to rethink their policies.
‘Osama is so cautious about his security, he doesn't meet people and moves very little,’ said Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of the few journalists to have interviewed bin Laden, twice in 1998 in Afghanistan.
‘He doesn't use fax, phone, mobile or anything else. His followers are very loyal,’ the Pakistani correspondent said.
The Al-Qaeda supremo is protected both by his inner circle and a wider reign of terror. People are beheaded on the least suspicion and video evidence distributed as a warning to others, Pakistani officials say.
Bodies are regularly found dumped on the roadside, their chests etched with the words ‘American spy’.
ppgj
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South Asia Dec 12, 2009
Osama can run, how long can he hide?
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
"I believe that al-Qaeda can be defeated overall but I believe it is an ideology and he [Osama bin Laden] is an iconic leader, so I think to complete the destruction of that organization, it does mean that he needs to be either captured or killed, or brought to justice."
- General Stanley McChrystal, United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander in Afghanistan
"We don't know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is, if we did, we'd go get him."
Robert Gates, a former US Central Intelligence Agency director and the current defense secretary.
ISLAMABAD - General Stanley McChrystal, as in the testimony quoted above to United States congressional committees this week, is unequivocal on the need to first roll back Taliban gains in Afghanistan as a prerequisite for the capture or elimination of Osama bin Laden and then the "ultimate defeat of al-Qaeda".
Apart from the difficulty of rolling back the Taliban, despite an additional 30,000 US troops surging into the country, US intelligence, as per admissions this month, are further away from catching bin Laden than they were eight years ago, when US forces notoriously let him slip through their grasp in the Tora Bora mountains.
There is little dispute that bin Laden and his close associates, including his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, move around in the vast and inhospitable mountainous territory that straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; the porous border exists only as a line on a map.
"Intelligence reports suggest that the al-Qaeda chief is somewhere inside North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border," US National Security Adviser James Jones said this week.
The US has a US$50 million bounty for the "capture, killing or information leading to the capture or killing" of bin Laden. This had been doubled from $25 million in 2007. He remains on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's most wanted list.
Apart from one legal border crossing, 15 mountain passes are frequently used to travel between Pakistan and Afghanistan, by militants, traders, smugglers and innocent travelers. These paths originate in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and feed into the Afghan provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar, Nuristan, Khost, Pakita and Paktika.
It is this area that will become the stage for the next chapter in the hunt for bin Laden, with US forces on the Afghan side and Pakistan troops on the other. The theory is that al-Qaeda and its allies will be caught in the middle.
Interaction with generally well-connected militant sources leads Asia Times Online to believe that bin Laden, 52, is alive and healthy, despite a history of kidney trouble. Since the construction of a US base in 2007 at the intersection of the Afghan province of Kunar and Bajaur Agency in Pakistan, bin Laden is confirmed to have flitted from place to place on either side of the border.
He is definitely known to have spent time in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area, but all sources say that nowadays he is more often than not in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden has numerous safe houses and is protected by a strong network of diehards in the Pakistani tribal areas, in addition to an intelligence network on both sides of the border that has to date managed to stay a step ahead of both Western and Pakistani intelligence.
Top Taliban and other commanders adopt a similar pattern in avoiding the attention of unwelcome visitors. Even though a former Afghan premier, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is known to move around Kunar and Nuristan provinces in Afghanistan, he remains at large. Hekmatyar also makes brief trips into the adjacent Pakistani regions of Chitral and Dir.
Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of legendary Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, runs the largest and most effective Taliban network in Afghanistan. He moves in the provinces of Khost and Paktia, and also in North Waziristan, always one step ahead of his pursuers - including drones.
Similarly, Ilyas Kashmiri, now one of al-Qaeda's most wanted men as he is intimately involved in defining and directing al-Qaeda's and the Taliban's struggle, moves between bases of operation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, never staying in one place for more than a night or two.
Not so fortunate was Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader killed in a drone attack earlier this year. He stayed only in the districts of Ladha and Makeen in South Waziristan and did not have other sanctuaries, making it easier to track him down.
The difficulty in trying to trace bin Laden is that he moves across such a broad area, and that, unlike even the Taliban, there is no defined target. Coalition forces have a broad idea of where the Taliban's command centers are and in which areas to expect resistance.
By comparison, bin Laden and his few dozen al-Qaeda deputies are shadows shifting across an endless landscape on which Taliban fighters, Pakistani tribal people and jihadi youths are more visible.
There is no recent credible first-hand information on when bin Laden was last seen. A few Taliban fighters who were arrested a few weeks ago could only share with their American interrogators what they had heard from their contacts - that bin Laden had moved between North Waziristan and South Waziristan.
It is safe to assume that he has not been in South Waziristan since the Pakistani military began major operations there about two months ago to take on the Pakistani Taliban. His most likely immediate destination would have been Khost, directly across the border.
Such speculation, though, has been around for years and bin Laden is nowhere nearer to being caught, let alone his chasers seeing his dust trail. Indeed, from the Pakistani perspective, their last verifiable sighting was in September 2003 near Bush Mountain in the Shawal Valley of North Waziristan. By the time the army arrived, he had long gone; all that was left were first-hand accounts of his having resided in the area.
All the same, the net might be getting tighter. Late on Thursday night, CBS News reported that a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone had killed a top al-Qaeda official in the Pakistani border area. Unnamed officials said the person killed was not bin Laden or Zawahiri, but that he was "one of the top five terrorists on the US wanted list", according to the report.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at [email protected]
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan
Osama can run, how long can he hide?
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
"I believe that al-Qaeda can be defeated overall but I believe it is an ideology and he [Osama bin Laden] is an iconic leader, so I think to complete the destruction of that organization, it does mean that he needs to be either captured or killed, or brought to justice."
- General Stanley McChrystal, United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander in Afghanistan
"We don't know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is, if we did, we'd go get him."
Robert Gates, a former US Central Intelligence Agency director and the current defense secretary.
ISLAMABAD - General Stanley McChrystal, as in the testimony quoted above to United States congressional committees this week, is unequivocal on the need to first roll back Taliban gains in Afghanistan as a prerequisite for the capture or elimination of Osama bin Laden and then the "ultimate defeat of al-Qaeda".
Apart from the difficulty of rolling back the Taliban, despite an additional 30,000 US troops surging into the country, US intelligence, as per admissions this month, are further away from catching bin Laden than they were eight years ago, when US forces notoriously let him slip through their grasp in the Tora Bora mountains.
There is little dispute that bin Laden and his close associates, including his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, move around in the vast and inhospitable mountainous territory that straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; the porous border exists only as a line on a map.
"Intelligence reports suggest that the al-Qaeda chief is somewhere inside North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border," US National Security Adviser James Jones said this week.
The US has a US$50 million bounty for the "capture, killing or information leading to the capture or killing" of bin Laden. This had been doubled from $25 million in 2007. He remains on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's most wanted list.
Apart from one legal border crossing, 15 mountain passes are frequently used to travel between Pakistan and Afghanistan, by militants, traders, smugglers and innocent travelers. These paths originate in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and feed into the Afghan provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar, Nuristan, Khost, Pakita and Paktika.
It is this area that will become the stage for the next chapter in the hunt for bin Laden, with US forces on the Afghan side and Pakistan troops on the other. The theory is that al-Qaeda and its allies will be caught in the middle.
Interaction with generally well-connected militant sources leads Asia Times Online to believe that bin Laden, 52, is alive and healthy, despite a history of kidney trouble. Since the construction of a US base in 2007 at the intersection of the Afghan province of Kunar and Bajaur Agency in Pakistan, bin Laden is confirmed to have flitted from place to place on either side of the border.
He is definitely known to have spent time in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area, but all sources say that nowadays he is more often than not in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden has numerous safe houses and is protected by a strong network of diehards in the Pakistani tribal areas, in addition to an intelligence network on both sides of the border that has to date managed to stay a step ahead of both Western and Pakistani intelligence.
Top Taliban and other commanders adopt a similar pattern in avoiding the attention of unwelcome visitors. Even though a former Afghan premier, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is known to move around Kunar and Nuristan provinces in Afghanistan, he remains at large. Hekmatyar also makes brief trips into the adjacent Pakistani regions of Chitral and Dir.
Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of legendary Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, runs the largest and most effective Taliban network in Afghanistan. He moves in the provinces of Khost and Paktia, and also in North Waziristan, always one step ahead of his pursuers - including drones.
Similarly, Ilyas Kashmiri, now one of al-Qaeda's most wanted men as he is intimately involved in defining and directing al-Qaeda's and the Taliban's struggle, moves between bases of operation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, never staying in one place for more than a night or two.
Not so fortunate was Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader killed in a drone attack earlier this year. He stayed only in the districts of Ladha and Makeen in South Waziristan and did not have other sanctuaries, making it easier to track him down.
The difficulty in trying to trace bin Laden is that he moves across such a broad area, and that, unlike even the Taliban, there is no defined target. Coalition forces have a broad idea of where the Taliban's command centers are and in which areas to expect resistance.
By comparison, bin Laden and his few dozen al-Qaeda deputies are shadows shifting across an endless landscape on which Taliban fighters, Pakistani tribal people and jihadi youths are more visible.
There is no recent credible first-hand information on when bin Laden was last seen. A few Taliban fighters who were arrested a few weeks ago could only share with their American interrogators what they had heard from their contacts - that bin Laden had moved between North Waziristan and South Waziristan.
It is safe to assume that he has not been in South Waziristan since the Pakistani military began major operations there about two months ago to take on the Pakistani Taliban. His most likely immediate destination would have been Khost, directly across the border.
Such speculation, though, has been around for years and bin Laden is nowhere nearer to being caught, let alone his chasers seeing his dust trail. Indeed, from the Pakistani perspective, their last verifiable sighting was in September 2003 near Bush Mountain in the Shawal Valley of North Waziristan. By the time the army arrived, he had long gone; all that was left were first-hand accounts of his having resided in the area.
All the same, the net might be getting tighter. Late on Thursday night, CBS News reported that a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone had killed a top al-Qaeda official in the Pakistani border area. Unnamed officials said the person killed was not bin Laden or Zawahiri, but that he was "one of the top five terrorists on the US wanted list", according to the report.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at [email protected]
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan
jakojako777
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CIA in al-Qaeda's trap?
South Asia
Jan 5, 2010
US spies walked into al-Qaeda's trap
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
ISLAMABAD - The suicide attack on the United States Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) forward operating base of Chapman in the Afghan province of Khost last week was planned in the Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan.
The attacker - a handpicked plant in the Afghan National Army (ANA) - detonated his explosive vest in a gym at the base, killing seven agents, including the station chief, and wounding six. The base was officially for civilians involved in reconstruction.
The plan was executed following several weeks of preparation by al-Qaeda's Lashkar al-Zil (Shadow Army), Asia Times Online has learned. This was after Lashkar al-Zil's intelligence outfit informed
its chief commander, Ilyas Kashmiri, that the CIA planned to broaden the monitoring of the possible movement of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Well-connected sources in militant camps say that Lashkar al-Zil had become aware of the CIA's escalation of intelligence activities to gather information on high-value targets for US drone attacks. It emerged that tribesmen from Shawal and Datta Khel, in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area, had been invited by US operatives, through middlemen, to Khost, where the operatives tried to acquire information on al-Qaeda leaders. Such activities have been undertaken in the past, but this time they were somewhat different.
"This time there was clearly an obsession to hunt down something big in North Waziristan. But in this obsession, they [operatives] blundered and exposed the undercover CIA facility," a senior leader in al-Qaeda's 313 Brigade said. The brigade, led by Ilyas Kashmiri, comprises jihadis with extensive experience in Pakistan's Kashmir struggle with India.
Once it became clear that efforts to track down al-Qaeda were being stepped up and that the base in Khost was being extensively used by the CIA, the Lashkar al-Zil (Brigade 055) moved into top gear. It is the soul of al-Qaeda, having being involved in several events since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US. Under the command of Ilyas Kashmiri, its intelligence network's coordination with its special guerrilla action force has changed the dynamics of the Afghan war theater. Instead of traditional guerrilla warfare in which the Taliban have taken most of the casualties, the brigade has resorted to special operations, the one on the CIA base being the latest and one of the most successful.
Lashkar al-Zil comprises the Pakistani Taliban, 313 Brigade, the Afghan Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan and former Iraqi Republican Guards. It has taken on special significance since the US announcement of a 30,000 troop surge in Afghanistan, due to kick into action this week.
Leaders of the Lashkar al-Zil now knew that CIA operatives were trying to recruit reliable tribal people from Afghanistan so that the latter could develop an effective intelligence network along the border with North Waziristan's Shawal and Datta Khel regions, where high-profile al-Qaeda leaders often move around.
Laskhar al-Zil then laid its trap.
Over the past months, using connections in tribal structures and ties with former commanders of the Taliban and the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan, the militants have planted a large number of men in the ANA.
One of these plants, an officer, was now called into action. He contacted US personnel in Khost and told them he was linked to a network in the tribal areas and that he had information on where al-Qaeda would hold its shura (council) in North Waziristan and on the movement of al-Qaeda leaders.
The ANA officer was immediately invited to the CIA base in Khost to finalize a joint operation of Predator drones and ground personnel against these targets.
Once inside, he set off his bomb, with deadly results.
"It's a devastating blow," Times Online quoted Michael Scheuer as saying. "[Among others] we lost an agent with 14 years' experience in Afghanistan." Scheuer is a former head of Alec Station, the unit created to monitor bin Laden five years before the attacks of September 11.
Unlike the Taliban's mostly rag-tag army, Laskhar al-Zil is a sophisticated unit, with modern equipment such as night-vision technology, the latest light weapons and finely honed guerrilla tactics. It has a well-funded intelligence department, much like the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan had during the resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s when it had access to advance information on the movement of the Red Army.
However, Laskhar al-Zil is one step ahead of the Hezb's former intelligence outfit in that it has been able to plant men in the ANA, and these "soldiers" are now at the forefront of al-Qaeda-led sabotage activities in Afghanistan.
In addition, a large number of senior government officials both in the capital, Kabul, and in the provinces are sympathetic to the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan, and, by extension, to the Taliban. Similarly, several former top Taliban commanders have been given responsibilities by the central government in district areas, and as the insurgency has grown, these former militants have been increasingly useful to the Taliban-led insurgency.
In sum, the US troop surge, coupled with increased US efforts to track down al-Qaeda, has resulted in a shift in southeastern Afghanistan. There has been hardly any uprising against foreign troops in which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) could hit the Taliban hard. The insurgents now select specific targets for the most effective outcome, such as the spy base in Khost - it took just one insurgent's life for the "devastating" result.
Consequently, for the first time in the many years that Afghanistan has been at war, the winter season is hot. Last October, the US withdrew its troops from its four key bases in Nuristan, on the border with Pakistan, leaving the northeastern province as a safe haven for the Taliban, under the command of Qari Ziaur Rahman. Kurangal Valley in Kunar province is heavily under siege and Taliban attacks on US bases there could see US forces pulling back from Kunar as well.
And in the meantime, Lashkar al-Zil can be expected to be planning more strikes of its own.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page.html
South Asia
Jan 5, 2010
US spies walked into al-Qaeda's trap
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
ISLAMABAD - The suicide attack on the United States Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) forward operating base of Chapman in the Afghan province of Khost last week was planned in the Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan.
The attacker - a handpicked plant in the Afghan National Army (ANA) - detonated his explosive vest in a gym at the base, killing seven agents, including the station chief, and wounding six. The base was officially for civilians involved in reconstruction.
The plan was executed following several weeks of preparation by al-Qaeda's Lashkar al-Zil (Shadow Army), Asia Times Online has learned. This was after Lashkar al-Zil's intelligence outfit informed
its chief commander, Ilyas Kashmiri, that the CIA planned to broaden the monitoring of the possible movement of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Well-connected sources in militant camps say that Lashkar al-Zil had become aware of the CIA's escalation of intelligence activities to gather information on high-value targets for US drone attacks. It emerged that tribesmen from Shawal and Datta Khel, in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area, had been invited by US operatives, through middlemen, to Khost, where the operatives tried to acquire information on al-Qaeda leaders. Such activities have been undertaken in the past, but this time they were somewhat different.
"This time there was clearly an obsession to hunt down something big in North Waziristan. But in this obsession, they [operatives] blundered and exposed the undercover CIA facility," a senior leader in al-Qaeda's 313 Brigade said. The brigade, led by Ilyas Kashmiri, comprises jihadis with extensive experience in Pakistan's Kashmir struggle with India.
Once it became clear that efforts to track down al-Qaeda were being stepped up and that the base in Khost was being extensively used by the CIA, the Lashkar al-Zil (Brigade 055) moved into top gear. It is the soul of al-Qaeda, having being involved in several events since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US. Under the command of Ilyas Kashmiri, its intelligence network's coordination with its special guerrilla action force has changed the dynamics of the Afghan war theater. Instead of traditional guerrilla warfare in which the Taliban have taken most of the casualties, the brigade has resorted to special operations, the one on the CIA base being the latest and one of the most successful.
Lashkar al-Zil comprises the Pakistani Taliban, 313 Brigade, the Afghan Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan and former Iraqi Republican Guards. It has taken on special significance since the US announcement of a 30,000 troop surge in Afghanistan, due to kick into action this week.
Leaders of the Lashkar al-Zil now knew that CIA operatives were trying to recruit reliable tribal people from Afghanistan so that the latter could develop an effective intelligence network along the border with North Waziristan's Shawal and Datta Khel regions, where high-profile al-Qaeda leaders often move around.
Laskhar al-Zil then laid its trap.
Over the past months, using connections in tribal structures and ties with former commanders of the Taliban and the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan, the militants have planted a large number of men in the ANA.
One of these plants, an officer, was now called into action. He contacted US personnel in Khost and told them he was linked to a network in the tribal areas and that he had information on where al-Qaeda would hold its shura (council) in North Waziristan and on the movement of al-Qaeda leaders.
The ANA officer was immediately invited to the CIA base in Khost to finalize a joint operation of Predator drones and ground personnel against these targets.
Once inside, he set off his bomb, with deadly results.
"It's a devastating blow," Times Online quoted Michael Scheuer as saying. "[Among others] we lost an agent with 14 years' experience in Afghanistan." Scheuer is a former head of Alec Station, the unit created to monitor bin Laden five years before the attacks of September 11.
Unlike the Taliban's mostly rag-tag army, Laskhar al-Zil is a sophisticated unit, with modern equipment such as night-vision technology, the latest light weapons and finely honed guerrilla tactics. It has a well-funded intelligence department, much like the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan had during the resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s when it had access to advance information on the movement of the Red Army.
However, Laskhar al-Zil is one step ahead of the Hezb's former intelligence outfit in that it has been able to plant men in the ANA, and these "soldiers" are now at the forefront of al-Qaeda-led sabotage activities in Afghanistan.
In addition, a large number of senior government officials both in the capital, Kabul, and in the provinces are sympathetic to the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan, and, by extension, to the Taliban. Similarly, several former top Taliban commanders have been given responsibilities by the central government in district areas, and as the insurgency has grown, these former militants have been increasingly useful to the Taliban-led insurgency.
In sum, the US troop surge, coupled with increased US efforts to track down al-Qaeda, has resulted in a shift in southeastern Afghanistan. There has been hardly any uprising against foreign troops in which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) could hit the Taliban hard. The insurgents now select specific targets for the most effective outcome, such as the spy base in Khost - it took just one insurgent's life for the "devastating" result.
Consequently, for the first time in the many years that Afghanistan has been at war, the winter season is hot. Last October, the US withdrew its troops from its four key bases in Nuristan, on the border with Pakistan, leaving the northeastern province as a safe haven for the Taliban, under the command of Qari Ziaur Rahman. Kurangal Valley in Kunar province is heavily under siege and Taliban attacks on US bases there could see US forces pulling back from Kunar as well.
And in the meantime, Lashkar al-Zil can be expected to be planning more strikes of its own.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page.html
ppgj
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the americans used to always make distinction between those groups involved in j&k (may be curry PA favour) and the rest of the terror groups. india had been saying, for long, these groups are loosely bound and work in consort with the other. this incident only underscores that.
hope this will goad the US to see reality and stop making distinctions and help india too in stopping this scourge.
hope this will goad the US to see reality and stop making distinctions and help india too in stopping this scourge.
jakojako777
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hope this will goad the US to see reality and stop making distinctions and help india too in stopping this scourge
Perhaps by saying that you deliberately forget on Pakistani role in all those "groups" ....as you know things are more complicated than that.
I doubt that USA can have simple approach to the problem at the moment.
There are even indicators of involvement of the Pakistani secret service in 9/11
jakojako777
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Walking Into the Al-Qaeda Trap in Yemen
Touch Yemen, Get Burned
By PATRICK COCKBURN
December 31, 2009
Skip to End of Article:
It is extraordinary to see the US begin to make the same mistakes in Yemen as it previously made in Afghanistan and Iraq. What it is doing is much to al-Qa’ida’s advantage. The real strength of al-Qa’ida is not that it can ‘train’ a fanatical Nigerian student to sew explosives into his underpants, but that it can provoke an exaggerated US response to every botched attack. Al-Qa’ida leaders openly admitted at the time of 9/11 that the aim of such operations is to provoke the US into direct military intervention in Muslim countries. It is a formula which worked under President George W Bush and it still appears to work under President Barack Obama.
In Yemen the US is walking into the al-Qa’ida trap. Once there it will face the same dilemma it faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It became impossible to exit these conflicts because the loss of face would be too great. Just as Washington saved banks and insurance giants from bankruptcy in 2008 because they were “too big to fail,” so these wars become too important to lose because to do so would damage the US claim to be the sole super power.
In Iraq the US is getting out more easily than seemed likely at one stage because Washington has persuaded Americans that they won a non-existent success. The ultimate US exit from Afghanistan may eventually be along very similar lines. But the danger of claiming spurious victories is that such distortions of history make it impossible for the US to learn from past mistakes and instead to repeat them by intervening in other countries such as Yemen.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq‘ and ‘Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq‘.
Phi Beta Iota: we have cut to the chase, above is how the article ends. We are reminded of the brilliant and equally down to earth comment of Steve Carmel, a shipping executive, who pointed out in an interview that most terrorist or piracy events were a minor traffic accident, and that it was the terrible decisions of the U.S. Government that were costing the shipping industry billions of dollars. Flash back to when we and others pointed out that in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the spending ratio for US $500,000 for every dollar spent by Al Qaeda. Today that spending ratio is closer to $5 million for every dollar spent by Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, as we neglect everything else, the true cost of an incoherent, incompetent, insouciant government, rises vastly beyond the trillions in debt that has been run up “in our name.”
Journal: Walking Into Al Qaeda’s Trap in Yemen Public Intelligence Blog
ppgj
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no jako. i am not discounting that. that is well established. i was only commenting on CIA loss and their govt's position regarding the groups.
i agree with you.
jakojako777
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Perhaps this event will tilt USA ear towards India's little bit more... but I wouldn't be to optimistic as long as the priorities rest in USA-China & USA-Paki relations.
For me the right questions is;
Are USA going to recognize India as true regional power and therefore start to look on Afghan solution and all problems related more from India's perspective? Or they will try to contain India with their little secret chat with China and even smaller secret deals with Pakis
So I agree with you also that India shouldn't be pleased with situation as it is which just confirms not very transparent USA deals and objectives in region...
jakojako777
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Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed By the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns On U.S. Troops
They defeated the Soviets with Washington’s help, but now they attack Americans as the new occupiers
By Anna Mulrine
Posted July 11, 2008
Click here to find out more!
Hekmatyar with fighters three years after the Soviet pullout.
Hekmatyar with fighters three years after the Soviet pullout.
Haqqani in 2001, when he was the Taliban's minister for tribal affairs.
Haqqani in 2001, when he was the Taliban's minister for tribal affairs.
At the highest levels, Hekmatyar and the Haqqani network cooperate and find sanctuary in Pakistan, where the country's political turmoil and suspension of operations in the lawless tribal areas have facilitated increased attacks in Afghanistan. Of the two warlords, Hekmatyar, by U.S. military
estimates, "has a wider geographic coverage" and greater political credibility. A recent press release issued by Hekmatyar's spokesman thanked the Pakistani "mujahideen" for their support in the Afghan war against American and other "occupation forces." It noted, however, that the efforts allow the international community to blame Pakistan for meddling in Afghan affairs and requested that fighters restrict their activities for now to "U.S. installations and interests within Pakistan."
A former politician, Hekmatyar founded the Hizb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (known as hig), an offshoot of which remains a popular party in the Afghan parliament. "There's blue—or 'good'—hig and red—or 'bad'—hig," says the senior U.S. military official. "About half of his group sides with the government; the more recalcitrant are still joining the insurgency."
But though the Hekmatyar and Haqqani networks have loose alliances and similar goals, each has its own turf. "They are swimming in the same stream, but they are not unified. There is no Ho Chi Minh," says the U.S. military official. "They have the same broad generic approaches, and it works. The bottom line is that if your only mission is to wreak havoc in Afghanistan, you don't have to be coordinated—and what they're doing is plenty good enough to stir up problems in this country."
In the course of conducting these operations, insurgents have benefited greatly from the shortage of U.S. and allied troops here, say U.S. officials. Earlier this month, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that he is "deeply troubled" by the increasing violence in Afghanistan but emphasized that troop levels in Iraq precluded a further increase in forces. "We need more troops there," he said in Washington. "But I don't have the troops I can reach for."
There are signs, however, that the Pentagon's priorities are shifting as conditions improve in Iraq. The Defense Department last week moved an aircraft carrier from Iraq war duty in the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, shortening the distance that strike planes must fly to provide air support in Afghanistan. And the Pentagon recently announced that it is extending by one month the seven-month deployment of 2,200 of the 3,200 marines sent to Afghanistan in March.
Still, U.S. officials are in widespread agreement that there aren't enough forces in the country. There are currently 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan backed by some 25,000 allied troops under NATO command, in total roughly 37 percent of force levels in Iraq. "There should be another 20,000 marines" in Afghanistan, says the U.S. official. "We're advancing, but we're doing it with troop levels that are unacceptably low." Mullen, too, has raised questions about the consequences of what he calls an "economy of force" campaign. "What we're going through right now is an ability to, in almost every single case, win from the combat standpoint," said Mullen. He added, however, that "we don't have enough troops there to hold. And that is key, clearly, to the future of being able to succeed in Afghanistan."
Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed By the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns On U.S. Troops - US News and World Report
They defeated the Soviets with Washington’s help, but now they attack Americans as the new occupiers
By Anna Mulrine
Posted July 11, 2008
Click here to find out more!
Hekmatyar with fighters three years after the Soviet pullout.
Hekmatyar with fighters three years after the Soviet pullout.
Haqqani in 2001, when he was the Taliban's minister for tribal affairs.
Haqqani in 2001, when he was the Taliban's minister for tribal affairs.
At the highest levels, Hekmatyar and the Haqqani network cooperate and find sanctuary in Pakistan, where the country's political turmoil and suspension of operations in the lawless tribal areas have facilitated increased attacks in Afghanistan. Of the two warlords, Hekmatyar, by U.S. military
estimates, "has a wider geographic coverage" and greater political credibility. A recent press release issued by Hekmatyar's spokesman thanked the Pakistani "mujahideen" for their support in the Afghan war against American and other "occupation forces." It noted, however, that the efforts allow the international community to blame Pakistan for meddling in Afghan affairs and requested that fighters restrict their activities for now to "U.S. installations and interests within Pakistan."
A former politician, Hekmatyar founded the Hizb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (known as hig), an offshoot of which remains a popular party in the Afghan parliament. "There's blue—or 'good'—hig and red—or 'bad'—hig," says the senior U.S. military official. "About half of his group sides with the government; the more recalcitrant are still joining the insurgency."
But though the Hekmatyar and Haqqani networks have loose alliances and similar goals, each has its own turf. "They are swimming in the same stream, but they are not unified. There is no Ho Chi Minh," says the U.S. military official. "They have the same broad generic approaches, and it works. The bottom line is that if your only mission is to wreak havoc in Afghanistan, you don't have to be coordinated—and what they're doing is plenty good enough to stir up problems in this country."
In the course of conducting these operations, insurgents have benefited greatly from the shortage of U.S. and allied troops here, say U.S. officials. Earlier this month, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that he is "deeply troubled" by the increasing violence in Afghanistan but emphasized that troop levels in Iraq precluded a further increase in forces. "We need more troops there," he said in Washington. "But I don't have the troops I can reach for."
There are signs, however, that the Pentagon's priorities are shifting as conditions improve in Iraq. The Defense Department last week moved an aircraft carrier from Iraq war duty in the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, shortening the distance that strike planes must fly to provide air support in Afghanistan. And the Pentagon recently announced that it is extending by one month the seven-month deployment of 2,200 of the 3,200 marines sent to Afghanistan in March.
Still, U.S. officials are in widespread agreement that there aren't enough forces in the country. There are currently 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan backed by some 25,000 allied troops under NATO command, in total roughly 37 percent of force levels in Iraq. "There should be another 20,000 marines" in Afghanistan, says the U.S. official. "We're advancing, but we're doing it with troop levels that are unacceptably low." Mullen, too, has raised questions about the consequences of what he calls an "economy of force" campaign. "What we're going through right now is an ability to, in almost every single case, win from the combat standpoint," said Mullen. He added, however, that "we don't have enough troops there to hold. And that is key, clearly, to the future of being able to succeed in Afghanistan."
Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed By the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns On U.S. Troops - US News and World Report
jakojako777
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Top Ranking CIA Operatives Admit Al-qaeda Is a Complete Fabrication
by Mr. Charrington on January 7, 2008
BBC’s killer documentary called “The Power of Nightmares“. Top CIA officials openly admit, Al-qaeda is a total and complete fabrication, never having existed at any time. The Bush administration needed a reason that complied with the Laws so they could go after “the bad guy of their choice” namely laws that had been set in place to protect us from mobs and “criminal organizations” such as the Mafia. They paid Jamal al Fadl, hundreds of thousands of dollars to back the U.S. Government’s story of Al-qaeda, a “group” or criminal organization they could “legally” go after. This video documentary is off the hook…
FULL ARTICLE -VIDEO
C.I.A. no al-qaeda ever existed - BBC documentary "the power of nightmares" | Polidics.com
ppgj
Senior Member
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2009
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The Battle For Tora Bora | The New Republic
The Battle for Tora Bora
How Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp: The definitive account.
Peter Bergen
December 22, 2009 | 12:00 am
Four days before the fall of Kabul in November 2001, Osama bin Laden was still in town. The Al Qaeda leader’s movements before and after September 11 are difficult to trace precisely, but, just prior to the attacks, we know that he appeared in Kandahar and urged his followers to evacuate to safer locations in anticipation of U.S. retaliation. Then, on November 8, he was in Kabul, despite the fact that U.S. forces and their Afghan allies were closing in on the city. That morning, while eating a meal of meat and olives, he gave an interview to Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who was writing his biography. He defended the attacks on New York and Washington, saying, “America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal.” Six months later, when I met Mir in Pakistan, he told me that the Al Qaeda leader had, on that day, appeared to be in remarkably good spirits.
Kabul fell on November 12, and bin Laden, along with other Al Qaeda leaders, fled to Jalalabad, a compact city in eastern Afghanistan surrounded by lush fruit groves. (He was quite familiar with the area, having maintained a compound in a Jalalabad suburb in the 1990s.) Tracking bin Laden closely was Gary Berntsen, a bear-sized CIA officer with a pronounced Long Island accent, who arrived in Kabul on the day it fell. Berntsen had been serving in Latin America on September 11 when he was yanked to run the CIA’s fast-moving ground operations in Afghanistan. It was a perfect job for an operative with a distinctly independent and aggressive style.
By November 14, Berntsen was receiving a stream of intelligence reports from the Northern Alliance that the Al Qaeda leader was in Jalalabad, giving pep talks to an ever-growing caravan of fighters. Berntsen dispatched an eight-man CIA team to the city. To provide them with local guides, he made contact with Hazarat Ali--an Afghan commander, longtime opponent of the Taliban, and nose-picking semi-illiterate. Ali sent three teenaged fighters to escort the U.S. team into Jalalabad, which was now crawling with fleeing Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.
But bin Laden wasn’t in Jalalabad for long. Following the fall of Kabul, Jalalabad descended into chaos; no one was in charge for at least a week. Abdullah Tabarak, a Moroccan who is alleged to be one of bin Laden’s bodyguards, reportedly told interrogators that, during the month of Ramadan, which began on November 17, bin Laden and his top deputy, Egyptian surgeon Ayman Al Zawahiri, left Jalalabad and headed about 30 miles south. Their destination was Tora Bora, a series of mountain caves near the Pakistani border. Berntsen’s team remained one step behind them, for now.
Tora Bora was not yet a familiar name to many Americans. But what would unfold there over the subsequent days remains, eight years later, the single most consequential battle of the war on terrorism. Presented with an opportunity to kill or capture Al Qaeda’s top leadership just three months after September 11, the United States was instead outmaneuvered by bin Laden, who slipped into Pakistan, largely disappeared from U.S. radar, and slowly began rebuilding his organization.
What really happened at Tora Bora? Not long after the battle ended, the answer to that question would become extremely clouded. Americans perceived the Afghan war as a stunning victory, and the failure at Tora Bora seemed like an unfortunate footnote to an otherwise upbeat story. By 2004, with George W. Bush locked in a tough reelection battle, some U.S. officials were even asserting, inaccurately, that bin Laden himself may not have been present at the battle.
The real history of Tora Bora is far more disturbing. Having reconstructed the battle--based on interviews with the top American ground commander, three Afghan commanders, and three CIA officials; accounts by Al Qaeda eyewitnesses that were subsequently published on jihadist websites; recollections of captured survivors who were later questioned by interrogators or reporters; an official history of the Afghan war by the U.S. Special Operations Command; an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and visits to the battle sites themselves--I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It was no accident that bin Laden had chosen to retreat to Tora Bora. He knew the place well. Huthaifa Azzam, a Jordanian who was close to bin Laden during the anti-Soviet jihad, when both were crossing back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan, recalls that, in 1987, the Al Qaeda leader used bulldozers from his family’s construction company to build a road through the mountains. The aim was to allow for the movement of his Arab fighters from his base at Jaji, near the Pakistani border, to Jalalabad, then occupied by the Soviets. Bin Laden spent more than six months building the road.
That year, bin Laden engaged Soviet forces in a battle at Jaji. He joined about 50 other Arab fighters in managing to hold off a much larger group of Soviet soldiers. Jaji received considerable attention in the Arab world, and, for the first time, bin Laden was widely seen not as a mere financier of jihad but also as a successful military commander. After a week, bin Laden was forced to retreat from Jaji. But the battle was arguably a resounding victory for the future Al Qaeda leader, as he burnished his image--and lived to fight another day.
During the years leading up to September 11, bin Laden maintained a mountain retreat in a settlement near Tora Bora called Milawa--a three-hour drive up a narrow mud-and-stone road from Jalalabad. The buildings that made up the settlement were strung across ridges that, in winter, lay far above the snow line, commanding striking views of the expanses below. They included a series of scattered lookout posts, a bakery, and bin Laden’s two-bedroom house, all built of the baked mud and stone that typifies Afghan villages. Next to the house was a rudimentary swimming pool. Spread in front of it was a broad field--today scarred by massive bomb craters--where Al Qaeda members cultivated crops. From bin Laden’s home, all he could see was his own fiefdom; the nearest village was thousands of feet below and out of sight.
In the winter of 1996, the Al Qaeda leader took Abdel Bari Atwan, a Palestinian journalist based in London, on a walking tour of a frigid Tora Bora. “I really feel secure in the mountains,” he told Atwan. “I really enjoy my life when I’m here.” Bin Laden sat for photos with Atwan in the Tora Bora caves. He surely understood that the setting would have a certain resonance in the Muslim world, since it was in a mountain cave that the Prophet Muhammad first received the revelations of the Koran.
According to his son, Omar, bin Laden would routinely hike from Tora Bora into neighboring Pakistan on walks that could take anywhere between seven and 14 hours. “My brothers and I all loathed these grueling treks that seemed the most pleasant of outings to our father,” Omar bin Laden later recalled. Bin Laden told his sons they had to memorize every rock on the routes to Pakistan. “We never know when war will strike,” he instructed them. “We must know our way out of the mountains.”
Now bin Laden had chosen Tora Bora as the place for his climactic confrontation with the United States. Fouad Al Rabia--a Kuwait Airways engineer, then in his mid-forties, who was in Afghanistan on something of a religious vacation--was with Al Qaeda when the group retreated from Jalalabad to Tora Bora. “Simply being out on the street was an invitation to be killed,” he later told officials at Guantánamo. “We walked from there to the baseline edge of the mountains. ... This was an escape route to get out of the country, because it is the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. That was the only way to get out.”
At least five Guantánamo detainees have given eyewitness accounts of bin Laden’s presence at Tora Bora. Typical of this group is Sulaiman Al Nahdi, a 27-year-old Yemeni who explained that he saw bin Laden “in a valley that was downward of the mountains,” where he “talked about the jihad for approximately one hour,” after which Ayman Al Zawahiri “made a few comments.” Similarly, Khaled Qasim, a 24-year-old Yemeni, was in the mountains in November 2001 when he saw bin Laden. The Al Qaeda leader, Qasim recalled, “was passing by and just said ‘hi’ and went on his way.”
Khalid Al Hubayshi, a Saudi explosives expert, was in the Tora Bora trenches as the Al Qaeda leader prepared for his showdown with the United States. Bin Laden, Hubayshi told The Washington Post, “was convinced” that American soldiers would land in the mountains. “We spent five weeks like that, manning our positions in case the Americans landed,” he recalled.
As bin Laden set about preparing for a U.S. maneuver that never came, Gary Berntsen’s team remained on his trail. Several days after arriving in Jalalabad, the group moved into a schoolhouse in the foothills near Tora Bora, which they used as a base. Berntsen’s sources on the ground continued to tell him that bin Laden was in the area.
At the end of November, the team of eight decided to split into two groups of four, one of which would head farther into the mountains with ten Afghan fighters as guides. The team’s members included an Air Force combat controller who specialized in calling in airstrikes, and they took with them a laser capable of “painting” targets with a signal that U.S. bombers could then lock onto. The expedition was delayed when a poorly packed RPG carried on a mule blew up, killing two of the Afghan guides. Finally, the group reached a mountaintop from which it could see several hundred of bin Laden’s men arrayed below. For the following 56 hours straight, the team called in airstrikes from all of the bombers available in theater.
Berntsen had not asked anyone for permission to begin the battle of Tora Bora. About 24 hours after the airstrikes had begun, Berntsen’s supervisor, Hank Crumpton, head of counterterrorism special operations at the CIA, called him and asked, “Are you conducting a battle in Tora Bora?” Not quite knowing what his boss’s reaction might be, Berntsen simply said, “Yes.” Crumpton replied, “Congratulations! Good job!”
As the fighting got underway, bin Laden initially sought to project an easy confidence to his men. Abu Bakr, a Kuwaiti who was at Tora Bora, said that, early in the battle, he saw bin Laden at the checkpoint he was manning. The Al Qaeda leader sat with some of his foot soldiers for half an hour, drinking a cup of tea and telling them, “Don’t worry. Don’t lose your morale, and fight strong. I’m here. I’m always asking about you guys.”
But, despite Al Qaeda’s arsenal of rockets, tanks, machine guns, and artillery, its position was becoming perilous. At altitudes of up to 14,000 feet above sea level, Tora Bora’s thin air provides a tough environment at any time of year--and, in December, temperatures drop to well below zero at night. As the battle raged in the mountains, snow was falling steadily. What’s more, it was Ramadan, and the ultra-religious members of Al Qaeda were likely observing the fast from dawn to dusk. Meanwhile, U.S. bombs rained down on the snow-covered peaks unceasingly, preventing sleep. Between December 4 and 7 alone, U.S. bombers dropped 700,000 pounds of ordnance on the mountains.
Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor who was treating the Al Qaeda wounded, believed that the situation was growing untenable. “I was out of medicine and I had a lot of casualties,” Batarfi later told the Associated Press. “I did a hand amputation by a knife, and I did a finger amputation with scissors.” Batarfi said he personally told bin Laden that, if they did not leave Tora Bora soon, “no one would stay alive” under the U.S. bombardment. But the Al Qaeda leader seemed mainly preoccupied with his own escape. “He did not prepare himself for Tora Bora,” Batarfi said, “and, to be frank, he didn’t care about anyone but himself.”
Bin Laden recounted his experiences at Tora Bora on an audiotape that aired on Al Jazeera in 2003. He recalled that, on the morning of December 3, heavy U.S. bombing began around the clock, with B-52s dropping some 20 to 30 bombs each. “American forces were bombing us by smart bombs that weigh thousands of pounds and bombs that penetrate caves,” bin Laden said.
On December 9, a U.S. plane dropped an immense BLU-82 bomb on Al Qaeda’s positions. Known as a Daisy Cutter, the 15,000-pound bomb was used in the Gulf war to clear minefields. Berntsen remembers that the Daisy Cutter was followed by a wave of additional U.S. airstrikes. “We came right in behind it with B-52s,” he says. “Like three or four of them. ... Each of them has twenty-five five-hundred-pounders, so everything goes in there. Killed a lot of people. A lot of bad guys.” That night, Al Qaeda member Abu Jaafar Al Kuwaiti and others “were awakened to the sound of massive and terrorizing explosions very near to us.” The following day, he later recounted on an Al Qaeda website, he “received the horrifying news” that the “trench of Sheik Osama had been destroyed.”
But bin Laden was not dead. A subsequent account on an Al Qaeda website offered an explanation of how he saved himself: Bin Laden had dreamed about a scorpion descending into one of the trenches that his men had dug, so he evacuated his trench. A day or so later, it was destroyed by a bomb.
The United States appeared to have Al Qaeda on the ropes. But, on the U.S. side, all was not well. A dispute was raging among officials about how to conduct the battle. By late November, Crumpton--a soft-spoken Georgian widely regarded as one of the most effective CIA officers of his generation--feared that bin Laden might try to escape Tora Bora. He explained this to Bush and Cheney personally at the White House and presented satellite imagery showing that the Pakistani military did not have its side of the border covered. CIA Director George Tenet remembers Bush asking Crumpton if the Pakistanis had enough troops to seal the border. “No, sir,” the CIA veteran replied. “No one has enough troops to prevent any possibility of escape in a region like that.” Still, Crumpton thought the United States should try--and that meant more troops would be required.
continued...
The Battle for Tora Bora
How Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp: The definitive account.
Peter Bergen
December 22, 2009 | 12:00 am
Four days before the fall of Kabul in November 2001, Osama bin Laden was still in town. The Al Qaeda leader’s movements before and after September 11 are difficult to trace precisely, but, just prior to the attacks, we know that he appeared in Kandahar and urged his followers to evacuate to safer locations in anticipation of U.S. retaliation. Then, on November 8, he was in Kabul, despite the fact that U.S. forces and their Afghan allies were closing in on the city. That morning, while eating a meal of meat and olives, he gave an interview to Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who was writing his biography. He defended the attacks on New York and Washington, saying, “America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal.” Six months later, when I met Mir in Pakistan, he told me that the Al Qaeda leader had, on that day, appeared to be in remarkably good spirits.
Kabul fell on November 12, and bin Laden, along with other Al Qaeda leaders, fled to Jalalabad, a compact city in eastern Afghanistan surrounded by lush fruit groves. (He was quite familiar with the area, having maintained a compound in a Jalalabad suburb in the 1990s.) Tracking bin Laden closely was Gary Berntsen, a bear-sized CIA officer with a pronounced Long Island accent, who arrived in Kabul on the day it fell. Berntsen had been serving in Latin America on September 11 when he was yanked to run the CIA’s fast-moving ground operations in Afghanistan. It was a perfect job for an operative with a distinctly independent and aggressive style.
By November 14, Berntsen was receiving a stream of intelligence reports from the Northern Alliance that the Al Qaeda leader was in Jalalabad, giving pep talks to an ever-growing caravan of fighters. Berntsen dispatched an eight-man CIA team to the city. To provide them with local guides, he made contact with Hazarat Ali--an Afghan commander, longtime opponent of the Taliban, and nose-picking semi-illiterate. Ali sent three teenaged fighters to escort the U.S. team into Jalalabad, which was now crawling with fleeing Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.
But bin Laden wasn’t in Jalalabad for long. Following the fall of Kabul, Jalalabad descended into chaos; no one was in charge for at least a week. Abdullah Tabarak, a Moroccan who is alleged to be one of bin Laden’s bodyguards, reportedly told interrogators that, during the month of Ramadan, which began on November 17, bin Laden and his top deputy, Egyptian surgeon Ayman Al Zawahiri, left Jalalabad and headed about 30 miles south. Their destination was Tora Bora, a series of mountain caves near the Pakistani border. Berntsen’s team remained one step behind them, for now.
Tora Bora was not yet a familiar name to many Americans. But what would unfold there over the subsequent days remains, eight years later, the single most consequential battle of the war on terrorism. Presented with an opportunity to kill or capture Al Qaeda’s top leadership just three months after September 11, the United States was instead outmaneuvered by bin Laden, who slipped into Pakistan, largely disappeared from U.S. radar, and slowly began rebuilding his organization.
What really happened at Tora Bora? Not long after the battle ended, the answer to that question would become extremely clouded. Americans perceived the Afghan war as a stunning victory, and the failure at Tora Bora seemed like an unfortunate footnote to an otherwise upbeat story. By 2004, with George W. Bush locked in a tough reelection battle, some U.S. officials were even asserting, inaccurately, that bin Laden himself may not have been present at the battle.
The real history of Tora Bora is far more disturbing. Having reconstructed the battle--based on interviews with the top American ground commander, three Afghan commanders, and three CIA officials; accounts by Al Qaeda eyewitnesses that were subsequently published on jihadist websites; recollections of captured survivors who were later questioned by interrogators or reporters; an official history of the Afghan war by the U.S. Special Operations Command; an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and visits to the battle sites themselves--I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It was no accident that bin Laden had chosen to retreat to Tora Bora. He knew the place well. Huthaifa Azzam, a Jordanian who was close to bin Laden during the anti-Soviet jihad, when both were crossing back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan, recalls that, in 1987, the Al Qaeda leader used bulldozers from his family’s construction company to build a road through the mountains. The aim was to allow for the movement of his Arab fighters from his base at Jaji, near the Pakistani border, to Jalalabad, then occupied by the Soviets. Bin Laden spent more than six months building the road.
That year, bin Laden engaged Soviet forces in a battle at Jaji. He joined about 50 other Arab fighters in managing to hold off a much larger group of Soviet soldiers. Jaji received considerable attention in the Arab world, and, for the first time, bin Laden was widely seen not as a mere financier of jihad but also as a successful military commander. After a week, bin Laden was forced to retreat from Jaji. But the battle was arguably a resounding victory for the future Al Qaeda leader, as he burnished his image--and lived to fight another day.
During the years leading up to September 11, bin Laden maintained a mountain retreat in a settlement near Tora Bora called Milawa--a three-hour drive up a narrow mud-and-stone road from Jalalabad. The buildings that made up the settlement were strung across ridges that, in winter, lay far above the snow line, commanding striking views of the expanses below. They included a series of scattered lookout posts, a bakery, and bin Laden’s two-bedroom house, all built of the baked mud and stone that typifies Afghan villages. Next to the house was a rudimentary swimming pool. Spread in front of it was a broad field--today scarred by massive bomb craters--where Al Qaeda members cultivated crops. From bin Laden’s home, all he could see was his own fiefdom; the nearest village was thousands of feet below and out of sight.
In the winter of 1996, the Al Qaeda leader took Abdel Bari Atwan, a Palestinian journalist based in London, on a walking tour of a frigid Tora Bora. “I really feel secure in the mountains,” he told Atwan. “I really enjoy my life when I’m here.” Bin Laden sat for photos with Atwan in the Tora Bora caves. He surely understood that the setting would have a certain resonance in the Muslim world, since it was in a mountain cave that the Prophet Muhammad first received the revelations of the Koran.
According to his son, Omar, bin Laden would routinely hike from Tora Bora into neighboring Pakistan on walks that could take anywhere between seven and 14 hours. “My brothers and I all loathed these grueling treks that seemed the most pleasant of outings to our father,” Omar bin Laden later recalled. Bin Laden told his sons they had to memorize every rock on the routes to Pakistan. “We never know when war will strike,” he instructed them. “We must know our way out of the mountains.”
Now bin Laden had chosen Tora Bora as the place for his climactic confrontation with the United States. Fouad Al Rabia--a Kuwait Airways engineer, then in his mid-forties, who was in Afghanistan on something of a religious vacation--was with Al Qaeda when the group retreated from Jalalabad to Tora Bora. “Simply being out on the street was an invitation to be killed,” he later told officials at Guantánamo. “We walked from there to the baseline edge of the mountains. ... This was an escape route to get out of the country, because it is the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. That was the only way to get out.”
At least five Guantánamo detainees have given eyewitness accounts of bin Laden’s presence at Tora Bora. Typical of this group is Sulaiman Al Nahdi, a 27-year-old Yemeni who explained that he saw bin Laden “in a valley that was downward of the mountains,” where he “talked about the jihad for approximately one hour,” after which Ayman Al Zawahiri “made a few comments.” Similarly, Khaled Qasim, a 24-year-old Yemeni, was in the mountains in November 2001 when he saw bin Laden. The Al Qaeda leader, Qasim recalled, “was passing by and just said ‘hi’ and went on his way.”
Khalid Al Hubayshi, a Saudi explosives expert, was in the Tora Bora trenches as the Al Qaeda leader prepared for his showdown with the United States. Bin Laden, Hubayshi told The Washington Post, “was convinced” that American soldiers would land in the mountains. “We spent five weeks like that, manning our positions in case the Americans landed,” he recalled.
As bin Laden set about preparing for a U.S. maneuver that never came, Gary Berntsen’s team remained on his trail. Several days after arriving in Jalalabad, the group moved into a schoolhouse in the foothills near Tora Bora, which they used as a base. Berntsen’s sources on the ground continued to tell him that bin Laden was in the area.
At the end of November, the team of eight decided to split into two groups of four, one of which would head farther into the mountains with ten Afghan fighters as guides. The team’s members included an Air Force combat controller who specialized in calling in airstrikes, and they took with them a laser capable of “painting” targets with a signal that U.S. bombers could then lock onto. The expedition was delayed when a poorly packed RPG carried on a mule blew up, killing two of the Afghan guides. Finally, the group reached a mountaintop from which it could see several hundred of bin Laden’s men arrayed below. For the following 56 hours straight, the team called in airstrikes from all of the bombers available in theater.
Berntsen had not asked anyone for permission to begin the battle of Tora Bora. About 24 hours after the airstrikes had begun, Berntsen’s supervisor, Hank Crumpton, head of counterterrorism special operations at the CIA, called him and asked, “Are you conducting a battle in Tora Bora?” Not quite knowing what his boss’s reaction might be, Berntsen simply said, “Yes.” Crumpton replied, “Congratulations! Good job!”
As the fighting got underway, bin Laden initially sought to project an easy confidence to his men. Abu Bakr, a Kuwaiti who was at Tora Bora, said that, early in the battle, he saw bin Laden at the checkpoint he was manning. The Al Qaeda leader sat with some of his foot soldiers for half an hour, drinking a cup of tea and telling them, “Don’t worry. Don’t lose your morale, and fight strong. I’m here. I’m always asking about you guys.”
But, despite Al Qaeda’s arsenal of rockets, tanks, machine guns, and artillery, its position was becoming perilous. At altitudes of up to 14,000 feet above sea level, Tora Bora’s thin air provides a tough environment at any time of year--and, in December, temperatures drop to well below zero at night. As the battle raged in the mountains, snow was falling steadily. What’s more, it was Ramadan, and the ultra-religious members of Al Qaeda were likely observing the fast from dawn to dusk. Meanwhile, U.S. bombs rained down on the snow-covered peaks unceasingly, preventing sleep. Between December 4 and 7 alone, U.S. bombers dropped 700,000 pounds of ordnance on the mountains.
Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor who was treating the Al Qaeda wounded, believed that the situation was growing untenable. “I was out of medicine and I had a lot of casualties,” Batarfi later told the Associated Press. “I did a hand amputation by a knife, and I did a finger amputation with scissors.” Batarfi said he personally told bin Laden that, if they did not leave Tora Bora soon, “no one would stay alive” under the U.S. bombardment. But the Al Qaeda leader seemed mainly preoccupied with his own escape. “He did not prepare himself for Tora Bora,” Batarfi said, “and, to be frank, he didn’t care about anyone but himself.”
Bin Laden recounted his experiences at Tora Bora on an audiotape that aired on Al Jazeera in 2003. He recalled that, on the morning of December 3, heavy U.S. bombing began around the clock, with B-52s dropping some 20 to 30 bombs each. “American forces were bombing us by smart bombs that weigh thousands of pounds and bombs that penetrate caves,” bin Laden said.
On December 9, a U.S. plane dropped an immense BLU-82 bomb on Al Qaeda’s positions. Known as a Daisy Cutter, the 15,000-pound bomb was used in the Gulf war to clear minefields. Berntsen remembers that the Daisy Cutter was followed by a wave of additional U.S. airstrikes. “We came right in behind it with B-52s,” he says. “Like three or four of them. ... Each of them has twenty-five five-hundred-pounders, so everything goes in there. Killed a lot of people. A lot of bad guys.” That night, Al Qaeda member Abu Jaafar Al Kuwaiti and others “were awakened to the sound of massive and terrorizing explosions very near to us.” The following day, he later recounted on an Al Qaeda website, he “received the horrifying news” that the “trench of Sheik Osama had been destroyed.”
But bin Laden was not dead. A subsequent account on an Al Qaeda website offered an explanation of how he saved himself: Bin Laden had dreamed about a scorpion descending into one of the trenches that his men had dug, so he evacuated his trench. A day or so later, it was destroyed by a bomb.
The United States appeared to have Al Qaeda on the ropes. But, on the U.S. side, all was not well. A dispute was raging among officials about how to conduct the battle. By late November, Crumpton--a soft-spoken Georgian widely regarded as one of the most effective CIA officers of his generation--feared that bin Laden might try to escape Tora Bora. He explained this to Bush and Cheney personally at the White House and presented satellite imagery showing that the Pakistani military did not have its side of the border covered. CIA Director George Tenet remembers Bush asking Crumpton if the Pakistanis had enough troops to seal the border. “No, sir,” the CIA veteran replied. “No one has enough troops to prevent any possibility of escape in a region like that.” Still, Crumpton thought the United States should try--and that meant more troops would be required.
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Back in Kabul, Berntsen was thinking along the same lines. On the evening of December 3, one member of his team, a former Delta Force operator who had gone deep into Tora Bora, came to the Afghan capital to brief Berntsen about the lay of the land. He told Berntsen that taking out Al Qaeda’s hard core would require 800 Rangers, elite soldiers who had gone through the Army’s most rigorous physical training. That night, Berntsen sent a lengthy message to CIA headquarters asking for 800 Rangers to assault the complex of caves where bin Laden and his lieutenants were believed to be hiding, and to block their escape routes. Crumpton says, “I remember the message. I remember talking not only to Gary every day, but to some of his men who were at Tora Bora. Directly. And their request could not have been more direct, more clear, more certain: that we needed U.S. troops there. More men on the ground.”
That bin Laden was at Tora Bora was not, by this point, a secret. The New York Times had reported it on November 25. Four days later, when asked by ABC News whether the Al Qaeda leader was at Tora Bora, **** Cheney said, “I think he’s probably in that general area.”
Meanwhile, the additional forces that Crumpton and Berntsen were requesting were certainly available. There were around 2,000 U.S. troops in or near the Afghan theater at the time. At the U.S. airbase known as K2 in Uzbekistan were stationed some 1,000 soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division, whose specialty is fighting in harsh terrain. Hundreds of those soldiers had already deployed to Bagram Air Force Base, 40 miles north of Kabul. In addition, 1,200 Marines were stationed at Forward Operating Base Rhino, near Kandahar, from the last week of November onward. Brigadier General James Mattis, the commander of the Marines in the Afghan theater, reportedly asked to send his men into Tora Bora, but his request was turned down. In the end, there were more journalists--about 100, according to Nic Robertson of CNN and Susan Glasser of The Washington Post, who both covered the battle--in and around Tora Bora than there were Western soldiers.
Yet, when Crumpton called General Tommy Franks to ask for more troops, Franks pushed back. The general, who had overall control of the Tora Bora operation, pointed out that the light-footprint approach--U.S. reliance on local proxies--had already succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban, and he argued that it would take time to get more U.S. troops to Tora Bora.
The U.S. force was to remain tiny throughout the battle. On December 7, on-the-ground responsibility for Tora Bora passed from Berntsen to a 37-year-old major in the elite and secretive Delta Force, who would later write a memoir using the pen name Dalton Fury. Under Fury’s command during the battle were 40 Delta operators from the “black” Special Forces, 14 Green Berets from the less secretive “white” Special Forces, six CIA operatives, a few Air Force specialists, including signals operators, and a dozen British commandos from the elite Special Boat Service. They were joined by three main Afghan commanders: Hajji Zaman Gamsharik, who had been living in exile in the comfortable environs of Dijon, France, before he returned to Afghanistan as the Taliban fell; Hajji Zahir, the 27-year-old son of a Jalalabad warlord; and Ali, the commander who had been helping Berntsen. The Afghan commanders disliked each other more than they did Al Qaeda. “For the most important mission to date in the global war on terror,” Fury later wrote, “our nation was relying on a fractious bunch of AK-47-toting lawless bandits and tribal thugs who were not bound by any recognized rules of warfare.”
Why was the Pentagon so unwilling to send more troops? Recently, I asked Franks to comment on his decision. He reiterated his preference for a light footprint and his concern about the time it would take to put additional troops on the ground. He also said that he could not be sure that bin Laden was at Tora Bora because of “conflicting intelligence” that alternately placed him in Kashmir, around Kandahar, and near the Afghan-Iranian border.
Lt. General Michael DeLong, Franks’s top deputy, recalled in his 2004 memoir that the Pentagon did not want to put many American soldiers on the ground because of a concern that they would be treated like antibodies by the locals. “The mountains of Tora Bora are situated deep in territory controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and any outsiders,” he wrote. “The reality is if we put our troops in there we would inevitably end up fighting Afghan villagers--creating bad will at a sensitive time--which was the last thing we wanted to do.”
There may also have been a reluctance to send soldiers into harm’s way. The Pentagon’s risk aversion is now hard to recall following the years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the thousands of American soldiers who have died--but it was quite real. In the most recent U.S. war--the 1999 conflict in Kosovo--not a single American had been killed in combat. And, at that point in the Afghan war, more journalists had died than American soldiers. Fury says that the 14 Green Berets who were on the ground at Tora Bora from the “white” Special Forces were told to “stay well short of even the foothills,” some four kilometers from any action--“pretty much out of harm’s way.” The Green Berets did call in airstrikes but were not allowed to engage in firefights with Al Qaeda because of concerns that the battle would turn into a “meat grinder.”
Then there was Iraq. In late November, Donald Rumsfeld told Franks that Bush “wants us to look for options in Iraq.” Rumsfeld instructed the general to “dust off” the Pentagon’s blueprint for an Iraq invasion and brief him in a week’s time. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers would later write, “I realized that one week was not giving Tom and his staff much time to sharpen” the plan. Franks points out in his autobiography that his staff was already working seven days a week, 16-plus hours a day, as the Tora Bora battle was reaching its climax. Although Franks doesn’t say so, it is impossible not to wonder if the labor-intensive planning ordered by his boss for another major war was a distraction from the one he was already fighting.
Franks briefed Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials about the war plan for Iraq on December 4. But both men agreed that the plan needed work. Rumsfeld gave Franks and his staff eight days to revise it. “Well, General,” he told Franks, “you have a lot of work ahead of you. Today is Tuesday. Let’s get together again next Wednesday.”
On December 10, American signals-intelligence operators picked up an important intercept from Tora Bora: “Father [bin Laden] is trying to break through the siege line.” This was then communicated to the Delta operators on the ground. Around 4 p.m. that same day, Afghan soldiers said they had bin Laden in their sights, according to the official U.S. military history of the battle. Later that evening, Fury received a new piece of signals intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts. The information was so precise that it appeared to pinpoint the Al Qaeda leader’s location to within ten meters. At the time, Fury was in the schoolhouse that he had been using as a base. About 15 minutes later, he received another bit of intelligence--somewhat less precise--placing bin Laden two kilometers from the first location. To this day, Fury doesn’t know which information was more recent and therefore more accurate, but he drove into the foothills and got to within about 1,900 meters of the first location.
Fury now found himself in a quandary. This was almost certainly the closest to bin Laden’s position U.S. forces had ever been, but, at the same time, three of his men were pinned down in a ferocious firefight with some Al Qaeda foot soldiers. And, as dusk fell, Fury’s key Afghan ally, Hazarat Ali, had retreated from the battlefield back home to break his Ramadan fast. Fury was under explicit orders not to take the lead in the battle and only to act in a supporting role for the hundreds of Afghans in Hazarat Ali’s ragtag army. Now, he had no Afghan allies to guide him at night into the craggy moonscape of upper Tora Bora. Fury reluctantly made the decision to bail on that night’s mission.
Muhammad Musa, who commanded 600 Afghan soldiers at Tora Bora, later said that he was not impressed by the U.S. forces on the ground. “[They] were not involved in the fighting,” he said. “There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the air strikes. ... My personal view is, if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, Al Qaeda would not have had a way to escape. The Americans were my guests here, but they didn’t know about fighting.”
In fact, the five dozen or so Americans on the ground at Tora Bora fought well. There were just far too few of them to cordon off a huge, mountainous area and prevent Al Qaeda from escaping into Pakistan.
December 12 and 13 were eventful days. December 12 was when Franks briefed Rumsfeld on the revised war plans for Iraq. December 13 was the day that Pakistani militants attacked the Indian parliament, raising the possibility of war between two nuclear-armed states. India moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers to its border with Pakistan. “We had to respond,” Pakistani Minister of the Interior Moinuddin Haider told me. “All our armed forces went to combat that situation, and we also moved to the borders.” Suddenly, Pakistan’s attention was diverted away from sealing its northwestern border against an Al Qaeda escape.
As it turned out, December 12 and 13 also marked the defining moment in the battle of Tora Bora. Hajji Zaman, one of the Afghan warlords allied with the United States, had opened negotiations with members of Al Qaeda for a surrender agreement. “They talked on the radio with Hajji Zaman,” an Afghan frontline commander told me, “saying they were ready to surrender at four p.m. Commander Zaman told the other commanders and the Americans about this. Then Al Qaeda said, ‘We need to have a meeting with our guys. Will you wait until eight a.m. tomorrow?’ So we agreed to this.”
News of the cease-fire did not sit well with the group of 20 Delta operators who, by December 12, had made their way deeper into Tora Bora, to an area near bin Laden’s now-destroyed two-room house. In Kabul, Berntsen went ballistic when he heard about the proposed surrender. “Essentially I used the f-word. ... I was screaming at them on the phone. And telling them, ‘No cease-fire. No negotiation. We continue airstrikes.’”
As Fury remembers it, U.S. forces only observed the cease-fire for about two hours on December 12--resuming bombing around 5 p.m. that day. At some point during the episode, an American pilot protested the proposed surrender by drawing a giant “8” in the sky, followed by the word “ON.” Zaman’s deadline of 8 a.m. came and went on December 13 without any of the militants inside Tora Bora surrendering.
That afternoon, American signals operators picked up bin Laden speaking to his followers. Fury kept a careful log of these communications in his notebook, which he would type up at the end of every day and pass up his chain of command. “The time is now,” bin Laden said. “Arm your women and children against the infidel!” Following several hours of high-intensity bombing, the Al Qaeda leader spoke again. Fury paraphrases: “Our prayers have not been answered. Times are dire. We didn’t receive support from the apostate nations who call themselves our Muslim brothers.” Bin Laden apologized to his men for having involved them in the fight and gave them permission to surrender.
Khalid Al Hubayshi, one of the Saudis holed up in Tora Bora, says that bin Laden’s aides instructed the hundreds of mostly Arab fighters who remained alive in the mountainous complex to head to Pakistan and turn themselves in to their embassies. Al Hubayshi is still angry about the behavior of the Al Qaeda leader: “We had been ready to lay down our lives for him, and he couldn’t make the effort to speak to us personally,” he told journalist Robert Lacey.
The following day, on December 14, bin Laden’s voice was again picked up by American signals operators, but, according to the interpreter who was translating for the Delta team, it sounded more like a pre-recorded sermon than a live transmission. It appeared that bin Laden had already left the battlefield area. He had likely used the cover of Al Qaeda’s “surrender” to begin his retreat.
Abdullah Tabarak, the Moroccan who was allegedly one of bin Laden’s bodyguards, says that the top leaders of Al Qaeda separated as they made their escape to Pakistan. Ayman Al Zawahiri left the mountainous redoubt with Uthman, one of bin Laden’s eleven sons. Osama fled with another of his sons, 18-year-old Muhammad, accompanied by his guards. Tabarak continued to use bin Laden’s satellite phone as the Al Qaeda leader escaped, on the reasonable assumption that it was being monitored by U.S. intelligence.
By December 17, the battle of Tora Bora was over. Fury estimated that there were some 220 dead militants and 52 captured fighters--mostly Arabs, as well as a dozen Afghans, and a sprinkling of Chechens and Pakistanis. Around 20 of the captured prisoners were paraded for the cameras of the international press. They were a bedraggled, scrawny lot who did not look much like the fearsome warriors everyone assumed them to be.
Ten days later, a videotape surfaced of bin Laden. He appeared to be visibly aged and contemplating his own death. “I am just a poor slave of God,” he said. “If I live or die, the war will continue.” During the 34-minute video, he did not move his entire left side.
Tora Bora would return, briefly, to the forefront of American politics in 2004. With just over a month to go before election day, John Kerry attacked President Bush for failing to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora. Franks, who had by this point retired from the military (and who would go on to join the boards of Bank of America and Chuck E. Cheese’s), retorted several weeks later with a New York Times op-ed, writing, “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora.” Cheney weighed in the same day, calling Kerry’s criticisms “absolute garbage.” On October 27, Bush said Kerry’s remarks about the battle were part of a “pattern of saying anything it takes to get elected.”
Kerry remains furious about Tora Bora today. “They declared Osama bin Laden the world’s number-one criminal, and went out boldly proclaiming, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ and talking about the dangers of Al Qaeda,” he told me recently. “And when they had an opportunity to completely, not only decapitate it, but probably to leave it with the minuscule, last portion of its tail, they never showed up.” His anger is justified. Bin Laden was clearly at Tora Bora, and sending so few troops was indeed a major failure. It’s a lesson that bears remembering today as the United States continues to pursue Islamist militants in both Afghanistan and Pakistan: In the hunt for members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, there is simply no substitute for boots on the ground. Afghan proxies, Pakistani soldiers, drones--these are not unimportant tools in the war on terrorism. But they are not effective substitutes for U.S. troops. If we want to kill bin Laden and Zawahiri--and other top Al Qaeda leaders--we are probably going to have to do it ourselves.
The major participants in the battle of Tora Bora have long since moved on with their lives--Fury and Berntsen both retired and wrote books; Crumpton left the CIA and became the Bush State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism--yet the sense that something went very wrong in late 2001 has not left them. Fury is haunted by the moment on December 10 when bin Laden may have been less than 2,000 meters away. In his memoir, he wrote that the incident “still bothers me. In some ways, I can’t suppress the feeling of somehow letting down our nation at a critical time.” Earlier this month, he elaborated: “It’s a tough stigma to live with and one I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
As for bin Laden: If his 1987 escape at Jaji created his mythic persona, then his 2001 escape from Tora Bora helped to cement it. While he no longer presides over Al Qaeda as directly as he once did, there can be little doubt that he remains its general guide--and that he played a key role in rejuvenating the organization after 2001. Still, in 2005, the CIA shuttered Alec Station, the unit that had been tasked with hunting bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s other top leaders for the previous decade. The analysts and officers were reassigned to other missions. Today, most informed observers believe bin Laden is in or near Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province on the Afghan border, perhaps in Bajaur or Chitral. But the fact is, as a longtime American intelligence analyst puts it, “there is very limited collection on him personally.” That’s spook-speak for a blunt truth: We haven’t a clue where he is.
The Al Qaeda leader, who is now nearing his fifty-third birthday, has released several audio recordings in recent years, but the last time he was seen on video was in September 2007. In the course of a long statement that touched on everything from the Kennedy assassination to taxes, he taunted the United States for “being the greatest economic power and possessing the most powerful and up-to-date military arsenal,” yet failing to stop the September 11 attacks. His once-graying beard had been dyed jet black. He looked healthy and rested and confident, like a man who had been granted a new lease on life and was planning to make the most of it.
Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know.
That bin Laden was at Tora Bora was not, by this point, a secret. The New York Times had reported it on November 25. Four days later, when asked by ABC News whether the Al Qaeda leader was at Tora Bora, **** Cheney said, “I think he’s probably in that general area.”
Meanwhile, the additional forces that Crumpton and Berntsen were requesting were certainly available. There were around 2,000 U.S. troops in or near the Afghan theater at the time. At the U.S. airbase known as K2 in Uzbekistan were stationed some 1,000 soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division, whose specialty is fighting in harsh terrain. Hundreds of those soldiers had already deployed to Bagram Air Force Base, 40 miles north of Kabul. In addition, 1,200 Marines were stationed at Forward Operating Base Rhino, near Kandahar, from the last week of November onward. Brigadier General James Mattis, the commander of the Marines in the Afghan theater, reportedly asked to send his men into Tora Bora, but his request was turned down. In the end, there were more journalists--about 100, according to Nic Robertson of CNN and Susan Glasser of The Washington Post, who both covered the battle--in and around Tora Bora than there were Western soldiers.
Yet, when Crumpton called General Tommy Franks to ask for more troops, Franks pushed back. The general, who had overall control of the Tora Bora operation, pointed out that the light-footprint approach--U.S. reliance on local proxies--had already succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban, and he argued that it would take time to get more U.S. troops to Tora Bora.
The U.S. force was to remain tiny throughout the battle. On December 7, on-the-ground responsibility for Tora Bora passed from Berntsen to a 37-year-old major in the elite and secretive Delta Force, who would later write a memoir using the pen name Dalton Fury. Under Fury’s command during the battle were 40 Delta operators from the “black” Special Forces, 14 Green Berets from the less secretive “white” Special Forces, six CIA operatives, a few Air Force specialists, including signals operators, and a dozen British commandos from the elite Special Boat Service. They were joined by three main Afghan commanders: Hajji Zaman Gamsharik, who had been living in exile in the comfortable environs of Dijon, France, before he returned to Afghanistan as the Taliban fell; Hajji Zahir, the 27-year-old son of a Jalalabad warlord; and Ali, the commander who had been helping Berntsen. The Afghan commanders disliked each other more than they did Al Qaeda. “For the most important mission to date in the global war on terror,” Fury later wrote, “our nation was relying on a fractious bunch of AK-47-toting lawless bandits and tribal thugs who were not bound by any recognized rules of warfare.”
Why was the Pentagon so unwilling to send more troops? Recently, I asked Franks to comment on his decision. He reiterated his preference for a light footprint and his concern about the time it would take to put additional troops on the ground. He also said that he could not be sure that bin Laden was at Tora Bora because of “conflicting intelligence” that alternately placed him in Kashmir, around Kandahar, and near the Afghan-Iranian border.
Lt. General Michael DeLong, Franks’s top deputy, recalled in his 2004 memoir that the Pentagon did not want to put many American soldiers on the ground because of a concern that they would be treated like antibodies by the locals. “The mountains of Tora Bora are situated deep in territory controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and any outsiders,” he wrote. “The reality is if we put our troops in there we would inevitably end up fighting Afghan villagers--creating bad will at a sensitive time--which was the last thing we wanted to do.”
There may also have been a reluctance to send soldiers into harm’s way. The Pentagon’s risk aversion is now hard to recall following the years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the thousands of American soldiers who have died--but it was quite real. In the most recent U.S. war--the 1999 conflict in Kosovo--not a single American had been killed in combat. And, at that point in the Afghan war, more journalists had died than American soldiers. Fury says that the 14 Green Berets who were on the ground at Tora Bora from the “white” Special Forces were told to “stay well short of even the foothills,” some four kilometers from any action--“pretty much out of harm’s way.” The Green Berets did call in airstrikes but were not allowed to engage in firefights with Al Qaeda because of concerns that the battle would turn into a “meat grinder.”
Then there was Iraq. In late November, Donald Rumsfeld told Franks that Bush “wants us to look for options in Iraq.” Rumsfeld instructed the general to “dust off” the Pentagon’s blueprint for an Iraq invasion and brief him in a week’s time. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers would later write, “I realized that one week was not giving Tom and his staff much time to sharpen” the plan. Franks points out in his autobiography that his staff was already working seven days a week, 16-plus hours a day, as the Tora Bora battle was reaching its climax. Although Franks doesn’t say so, it is impossible not to wonder if the labor-intensive planning ordered by his boss for another major war was a distraction from the one he was already fighting.
Franks briefed Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials about the war plan for Iraq on December 4. But both men agreed that the plan needed work. Rumsfeld gave Franks and his staff eight days to revise it. “Well, General,” he told Franks, “you have a lot of work ahead of you. Today is Tuesday. Let’s get together again next Wednesday.”
On December 10, American signals-intelligence operators picked up an important intercept from Tora Bora: “Father [bin Laden] is trying to break through the siege line.” This was then communicated to the Delta operators on the ground. Around 4 p.m. that same day, Afghan soldiers said they had bin Laden in their sights, according to the official U.S. military history of the battle. Later that evening, Fury received a new piece of signals intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts. The information was so precise that it appeared to pinpoint the Al Qaeda leader’s location to within ten meters. At the time, Fury was in the schoolhouse that he had been using as a base. About 15 minutes later, he received another bit of intelligence--somewhat less precise--placing bin Laden two kilometers from the first location. To this day, Fury doesn’t know which information was more recent and therefore more accurate, but he drove into the foothills and got to within about 1,900 meters of the first location.
Fury now found himself in a quandary. This was almost certainly the closest to bin Laden’s position U.S. forces had ever been, but, at the same time, three of his men were pinned down in a ferocious firefight with some Al Qaeda foot soldiers. And, as dusk fell, Fury’s key Afghan ally, Hazarat Ali, had retreated from the battlefield back home to break his Ramadan fast. Fury was under explicit orders not to take the lead in the battle and only to act in a supporting role for the hundreds of Afghans in Hazarat Ali’s ragtag army. Now, he had no Afghan allies to guide him at night into the craggy moonscape of upper Tora Bora. Fury reluctantly made the decision to bail on that night’s mission.
Muhammad Musa, who commanded 600 Afghan soldiers at Tora Bora, later said that he was not impressed by the U.S. forces on the ground. “[They] were not involved in the fighting,” he said. “There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the air strikes. ... My personal view is, if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, Al Qaeda would not have had a way to escape. The Americans were my guests here, but they didn’t know about fighting.”
In fact, the five dozen or so Americans on the ground at Tora Bora fought well. There were just far too few of them to cordon off a huge, mountainous area and prevent Al Qaeda from escaping into Pakistan.
December 12 and 13 were eventful days. December 12 was when Franks briefed Rumsfeld on the revised war plans for Iraq. December 13 was the day that Pakistani militants attacked the Indian parliament, raising the possibility of war between two nuclear-armed states. India moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers to its border with Pakistan. “We had to respond,” Pakistani Minister of the Interior Moinuddin Haider told me. “All our armed forces went to combat that situation, and we also moved to the borders.” Suddenly, Pakistan’s attention was diverted away from sealing its northwestern border against an Al Qaeda escape.
As it turned out, December 12 and 13 also marked the defining moment in the battle of Tora Bora. Hajji Zaman, one of the Afghan warlords allied with the United States, had opened negotiations with members of Al Qaeda for a surrender agreement. “They talked on the radio with Hajji Zaman,” an Afghan frontline commander told me, “saying they were ready to surrender at four p.m. Commander Zaman told the other commanders and the Americans about this. Then Al Qaeda said, ‘We need to have a meeting with our guys. Will you wait until eight a.m. tomorrow?’ So we agreed to this.”
News of the cease-fire did not sit well with the group of 20 Delta operators who, by December 12, had made their way deeper into Tora Bora, to an area near bin Laden’s now-destroyed two-room house. In Kabul, Berntsen went ballistic when he heard about the proposed surrender. “Essentially I used the f-word. ... I was screaming at them on the phone. And telling them, ‘No cease-fire. No negotiation. We continue airstrikes.’”
As Fury remembers it, U.S. forces only observed the cease-fire for about two hours on December 12--resuming bombing around 5 p.m. that day. At some point during the episode, an American pilot protested the proposed surrender by drawing a giant “8” in the sky, followed by the word “ON.” Zaman’s deadline of 8 a.m. came and went on December 13 without any of the militants inside Tora Bora surrendering.
That afternoon, American signals operators picked up bin Laden speaking to his followers. Fury kept a careful log of these communications in his notebook, which he would type up at the end of every day and pass up his chain of command. “The time is now,” bin Laden said. “Arm your women and children against the infidel!” Following several hours of high-intensity bombing, the Al Qaeda leader spoke again. Fury paraphrases: “Our prayers have not been answered. Times are dire. We didn’t receive support from the apostate nations who call themselves our Muslim brothers.” Bin Laden apologized to his men for having involved them in the fight and gave them permission to surrender.
Khalid Al Hubayshi, one of the Saudis holed up in Tora Bora, says that bin Laden’s aides instructed the hundreds of mostly Arab fighters who remained alive in the mountainous complex to head to Pakistan and turn themselves in to their embassies. Al Hubayshi is still angry about the behavior of the Al Qaeda leader: “We had been ready to lay down our lives for him, and he couldn’t make the effort to speak to us personally,” he told journalist Robert Lacey.
The following day, on December 14, bin Laden’s voice was again picked up by American signals operators, but, according to the interpreter who was translating for the Delta team, it sounded more like a pre-recorded sermon than a live transmission. It appeared that bin Laden had already left the battlefield area. He had likely used the cover of Al Qaeda’s “surrender” to begin his retreat.
Abdullah Tabarak, the Moroccan who was allegedly one of bin Laden’s bodyguards, says that the top leaders of Al Qaeda separated as they made their escape to Pakistan. Ayman Al Zawahiri left the mountainous redoubt with Uthman, one of bin Laden’s eleven sons. Osama fled with another of his sons, 18-year-old Muhammad, accompanied by his guards. Tabarak continued to use bin Laden’s satellite phone as the Al Qaeda leader escaped, on the reasonable assumption that it was being monitored by U.S. intelligence.
By December 17, the battle of Tora Bora was over. Fury estimated that there were some 220 dead militants and 52 captured fighters--mostly Arabs, as well as a dozen Afghans, and a sprinkling of Chechens and Pakistanis. Around 20 of the captured prisoners were paraded for the cameras of the international press. They were a bedraggled, scrawny lot who did not look much like the fearsome warriors everyone assumed them to be.
Ten days later, a videotape surfaced of bin Laden. He appeared to be visibly aged and contemplating his own death. “I am just a poor slave of God,” he said. “If I live or die, the war will continue.” During the 34-minute video, he did not move his entire left side.
Tora Bora would return, briefly, to the forefront of American politics in 2004. With just over a month to go before election day, John Kerry attacked President Bush for failing to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora. Franks, who had by this point retired from the military (and who would go on to join the boards of Bank of America and Chuck E. Cheese’s), retorted several weeks later with a New York Times op-ed, writing, “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora.” Cheney weighed in the same day, calling Kerry’s criticisms “absolute garbage.” On October 27, Bush said Kerry’s remarks about the battle were part of a “pattern of saying anything it takes to get elected.”
Kerry remains furious about Tora Bora today. “They declared Osama bin Laden the world’s number-one criminal, and went out boldly proclaiming, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ and talking about the dangers of Al Qaeda,” he told me recently. “And when they had an opportunity to completely, not only decapitate it, but probably to leave it with the minuscule, last portion of its tail, they never showed up.” His anger is justified. Bin Laden was clearly at Tora Bora, and sending so few troops was indeed a major failure. It’s a lesson that bears remembering today as the United States continues to pursue Islamist militants in both Afghanistan and Pakistan: In the hunt for members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, there is simply no substitute for boots on the ground. Afghan proxies, Pakistani soldiers, drones--these are not unimportant tools in the war on terrorism. But they are not effective substitutes for U.S. troops. If we want to kill bin Laden and Zawahiri--and other top Al Qaeda leaders--we are probably going to have to do it ourselves.
The major participants in the battle of Tora Bora have long since moved on with their lives--Fury and Berntsen both retired and wrote books; Crumpton left the CIA and became the Bush State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism--yet the sense that something went very wrong in late 2001 has not left them. Fury is haunted by the moment on December 10 when bin Laden may have been less than 2,000 meters away. In his memoir, he wrote that the incident “still bothers me. In some ways, I can’t suppress the feeling of somehow letting down our nation at a critical time.” Earlier this month, he elaborated: “It’s a tough stigma to live with and one I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
As for bin Laden: If his 1987 escape at Jaji created his mythic persona, then his 2001 escape from Tora Bora helped to cement it. While he no longer presides over Al Qaeda as directly as he once did, there can be little doubt that he remains its general guide--and that he played a key role in rejuvenating the organization after 2001. Still, in 2005, the CIA shuttered Alec Station, the unit that had been tasked with hunting bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s other top leaders for the previous decade. The analysts and officers were reassigned to other missions. Today, most informed observers believe bin Laden is in or near Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province on the Afghan border, perhaps in Bajaur or Chitral. But the fact is, as a longtime American intelligence analyst puts it, “there is very limited collection on him personally.” That’s spook-speak for a blunt truth: We haven’t a clue where he is.
The Al Qaeda leader, who is now nearing his fifty-third birthday, has released several audio recordings in recent years, but the last time he was seen on video was in September 2007. In the course of a long statement that touched on everything from the Kennedy assassination to taxes, he taunted the United States for “being the greatest economic power and possessing the most powerful and up-to-date military arsenal,” yet failing to stop the September 11 attacks. His once-graying beard had been dyed jet black. He looked healthy and rested and confident, like a man who had been granted a new lease on life and was planning to make the most of it.
Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know.
anoop_mig25
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Pakistan seeks role as mediator in possible Taliban-Afghanistan peace talks
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
LAHORE, PAKISTAN -- Pakistan, which once sponsored Taliban forces but turned against them under American pressure in 2001, now hopes to play a role as a broker in proposed negotiations among Taliban leaders and the Afghan government, with support from the United States.
As leaders of 60 countries meet in London on Thursday to discuss how to help Afghanistan stop its downward spiral into instability, the possibilities for reconciliation and talks with both Taliban leaders and foot soldiers will top the agenda.
Until recently, Pakistan had been on hostile terms with the neighboring government in Kabul and had sought to distance itself from the problems of insurgency across the border, while struggling to curb a homegrown Taliban movement that has carried out dozens of bombings and suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past several years.
Now, however, Pakistani officials have taken a sudden interest in promoting peace in Afghanistan, a change analysts attribute to a combination of self-interest and fear. Pakistan, they say, hopes a power-sharing arrangement in Kabul that includes the Taliban would be friendlier to its interests; and it worries that if the Afghan conflict drags on, its domestic extremist problem will spin out of control.
But analysts said any overt mediation role by the Pakistani government could backfire for several reasons, including deep mistrust among Afghan leaders, unpredictable reactions by Pakistani militants, Taliban resentment of pressure from its former backers and unrealistic Pakistani expectations of Western gratitude.
"The crisis in Pakistan has created a big change in its thinking. The country is suffering enormously from the Pakistani Taliban, and this may be a way to get off the hook," said Ahmed Rashid, a Lahore-based expert on the Taliban and on Afghanistan-Pakistan relations. "Pakistan still exerts some influence on the Afghan Taliban, but Kabul will be extremely wary of Pakistani bias. It is a very tricky situation."
U.S. officials are watching the evolution of Pakistani thinking with interest.
"What this is really about is whether the Pakistanis want to be part of the problem or part of the solution," said one American diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Turkey this week, said there is an urgent need for peace talks. Echoing Karzai's comments about the Taliban being "sons of the soil," Zardari said that if insurgents are "reconcilable and want to give up their way of life, a democracy always welcomes them back."
The real key players
The key Pakistani players in this drama are not civilian leaders but the army and especially the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which once sponsored the Taliban, worked closely with the group when it ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s and reportedly has continued to assist Taliban leaders in exile after the regime was overthrown by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in 2001.
Rashid said the Afghan militants have been chafing under the Pakistani agency's efforts to control them. Other analysts said Pakistan's influence on the Taliban waned years ago, when the militia's leaders ignored Islamabad's pleas to spare the historic Bamiyan Buddha statues and to turn over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the Americans.
But the analysts also said that with so many Taliban leaders and their families based in Pakistan, their relations with that nation are still close -- perhaps too close for officials in Kabul, who have seen their fledgling postwar democracy torn apart by renewed conflict and hundreds of terrorist attacks in the past several years.
In a newspaper interview with McClatchy published this week, a former Pakistani intelligence official described the Taliban as "big-hearted" and extremely loyal to Mohammed Omar, the movement's fugitive leader. He called Omar a reasonable, patriotic man who has no desire to ruin his country. "He's the only answer," the officer said.
Omar has vehemently rejected any suggestion of talks, and experts said the Taliban forces, which are now active in 33 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, feel confident they can outlast the international military presence. Some analysts who favor talks said they doubt rank-and-file Taliban members could be weaned away from the cause with promises of jobs and money, a pillar of the U.S. and Afghan reintegration proposal.
Other Afghan insurgent leaders have hinted at a more open outlook. A close aide to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fugitive former militia leader who now opposes the West, told a meeting in the Pakistani city of Peshawar this week that Pakistan can "play a major role" and even achieve a "breakthrough" by brokering an Afghan peace process.
A unique relationship
Several military experts said that although Pakistan's longtime relationship with the Taliban has put it in a unique position to promote negotiations, it could also undermine them. They said the country must prove to Afghanistan and the world that after years of trying to manipulate Afghan politics, it now wants to take a constructive and neutral stance.
"Pakistan needs to reassure Karzai and the Americans that it wants to play a very different role this time," said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and analyst in Islamabad, the capital. "The Taliban should welcome Pakistan as an interlocutor if they are willing to compromise, but if the ISI overplays its hand, it could upset a very delicate situation."
Officials at the Pakistani foreign ministry could not be reached for comment on the issue this week, nor could army spokesmen. But some analysts said that by offering to help resolve the Afghan conflict, Pakistani officials are hoping chiefly to bolster the country's stature and security -- possibly at the expense of its next-door rival India, which has established a robust presence in Afghanistan.
"Pakistan's role could be crucial, but it will not do this for free. It will only facilitate these talks to protect its national interests," Rashid said. "It will demand its pound of flesh."
Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.
last line is important It will demand its pound of flesh.
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
LAHORE, PAKISTAN -- Pakistan, which once sponsored Taliban forces but turned against them under American pressure in 2001, now hopes to play a role as a broker in proposed negotiations among Taliban leaders and the Afghan government, with support from the United States.
As leaders of 60 countries meet in London on Thursday to discuss how to help Afghanistan stop its downward spiral into instability, the possibilities for reconciliation and talks with both Taliban leaders and foot soldiers will top the agenda.
Until recently, Pakistan had been on hostile terms with the neighboring government in Kabul and had sought to distance itself from the problems of insurgency across the border, while struggling to curb a homegrown Taliban movement that has carried out dozens of bombings and suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past several years.
Now, however, Pakistani officials have taken a sudden interest in promoting peace in Afghanistan, a change analysts attribute to a combination of self-interest and fear. Pakistan, they say, hopes a power-sharing arrangement in Kabul that includes the Taliban would be friendlier to its interests; and it worries that if the Afghan conflict drags on, its domestic extremist problem will spin out of control.
But analysts said any overt mediation role by the Pakistani government could backfire for several reasons, including deep mistrust among Afghan leaders, unpredictable reactions by Pakistani militants, Taliban resentment of pressure from its former backers and unrealistic Pakistani expectations of Western gratitude.
"The crisis in Pakistan has created a big change in its thinking. The country is suffering enormously from the Pakistani Taliban, and this may be a way to get off the hook," said Ahmed Rashid, a Lahore-based expert on the Taliban and on Afghanistan-Pakistan relations. "Pakistan still exerts some influence on the Afghan Taliban, but Kabul will be extremely wary of Pakistani bias. It is a very tricky situation."
U.S. officials are watching the evolution of Pakistani thinking with interest.
"What this is really about is whether the Pakistanis want to be part of the problem or part of the solution," said one American diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Turkey this week, said there is an urgent need for peace talks. Echoing Karzai's comments about the Taliban being "sons of the soil," Zardari said that if insurgents are "reconcilable and want to give up their way of life, a democracy always welcomes them back."
The real key players
The key Pakistani players in this drama are not civilian leaders but the army and especially the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which once sponsored the Taliban, worked closely with the group when it ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s and reportedly has continued to assist Taliban leaders in exile after the regime was overthrown by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in 2001.
Rashid said the Afghan militants have been chafing under the Pakistani agency's efforts to control them. Other analysts said Pakistan's influence on the Taliban waned years ago, when the militia's leaders ignored Islamabad's pleas to spare the historic Bamiyan Buddha statues and to turn over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the Americans.
But the analysts also said that with so many Taliban leaders and their families based in Pakistan, their relations with that nation are still close -- perhaps too close for officials in Kabul, who have seen their fledgling postwar democracy torn apart by renewed conflict and hundreds of terrorist attacks in the past several years.
In a newspaper interview with McClatchy published this week, a former Pakistani intelligence official described the Taliban as "big-hearted" and extremely loyal to Mohammed Omar, the movement's fugitive leader. He called Omar a reasonable, patriotic man who has no desire to ruin his country. "He's the only answer," the officer said.
Omar has vehemently rejected any suggestion of talks, and experts said the Taliban forces, which are now active in 33 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, feel confident they can outlast the international military presence. Some analysts who favor talks said they doubt rank-and-file Taliban members could be weaned away from the cause with promises of jobs and money, a pillar of the U.S. and Afghan reintegration proposal.
Other Afghan insurgent leaders have hinted at a more open outlook. A close aide to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fugitive former militia leader who now opposes the West, told a meeting in the Pakistani city of Peshawar this week that Pakistan can "play a major role" and even achieve a "breakthrough" by brokering an Afghan peace process.
A unique relationship
Several military experts said that although Pakistan's longtime relationship with the Taliban has put it in a unique position to promote negotiations, it could also undermine them. They said the country must prove to Afghanistan and the world that after years of trying to manipulate Afghan politics, it now wants to take a constructive and neutral stance.
"Pakistan needs to reassure Karzai and the Americans that it wants to play a very different role this time," said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and analyst in Islamabad, the capital. "The Taliban should welcome Pakistan as an interlocutor if they are willing to compromise, but if the ISI overplays its hand, it could upset a very delicate situation."
Officials at the Pakistani foreign ministry could not be reached for comment on the issue this week, nor could army spokesmen. But some analysts said that by offering to help resolve the Afghan conflict, Pakistani officials are hoping chiefly to bolster the country's stature and security -- possibly at the expense of its next-door rival India, which has established a robust presence in Afghanistan.
"Pakistan's role could be crucial, but it will not do this for free. It will only facilitate these talks to protect its national interests," Rashid said. "It will demand its pound of flesh."
Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.
last line is important It will demand its pound of flesh.
anoop_mig25
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Afghan president plans meeting on reintegrating, reconciling with insurgents
Afghan president plans meeting on reintegrating, reconciling with insurgents
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
LONDON -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that he will convene a nationwide meeting of tribal, religious and political leaders in the next few weeks to discuss reintegrating and reconciling with insurgents. Afghan government officials said Taliban members would also be welcome to attend.
U.S. officials, who strongly support reintegration of low-level Taliban fighters but have drawn a bright red line against dealings with insurgents who have not forsworn violence or who have ties to al-Qaeda, appeared unsure of what Karzai had in mind.
Speaking to a one-day meeting of foreign ministers from nearly 70 countries here, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Karzai called on Saudi Arabia, which has offered to serve as a go-between with Taliban leaders, to play a "prominent role" in a process of "peace and reconciliation." He asked "all our neighbors, particularly Pakistan," where top Taliban leaders are based, to support it.
"We must reach out to all of our countrymen, especially our disenchanted brothers," Karzai told the gathering, which was convened by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to bolster international resolve and solidify a new strategy for the eight-year-old war.
"We didn't know they were going to do it," a senior Obama administration official said of the apparent breadth of Karzai's invitation. "We're very enthusiastic about reintegration," the official said. "We're not here to discuss reconciliation." That term generally refers to a negotiated settlement between opposing forces. The official said reconciliation did not come up in closed-door meetings Thursday, and it was not mentioned in a final communique that welcomed Karzai's outreach to "those willing to renounce violence" and "cut ties with al-Qaeda."
The conference covered a wide range of issues, with Karzai pledging to tackle corruption and saying that "the aspirations and demands of the people of Afghanistan today can be summarized in four simple words: Afghan leadership, Afghan ownership." International partners expressed confidence that President Obama's new Afghanistan strategy and increased troop numbers would be decisive on the battlefield and promised to better coordinate development assistance among each other and with the Afghans.Several governments announced contributions of additional troops to the Afghan effort, including as many as 850 from Germany and 500 from Spain. There were additional pledges to boost support for Afghan police training and civilian personnel.
The communique said Afghanistan's backers would provide "the necessary support to the phased growth and expansion of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police in order to reach 171,600 and 134,000 personnel by October 2011." It endorsed a transition to Afghan security control in selected provinces, to begin "by late 2010/early 2011." Obama has said U.S. combat troops will begin a phased withdrawal, based on ground conditions, in July 2011.
"The biggest deliverable of all" from the gathering, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said at a news conference, was "unity and cohesion in the international effort, and the alignment between" that effort and "a clear Afghan plan" that will be further spelled out at a follow-up conference in Kabul this spring.
But the meeting was dominated by talk about talks with insurgents, which Karzai said was his first priority.
The event followed a flurry of recent reports about negotiations with at least some Taliban factions, including a report by Reuters on Thursday that members of the Taliban's leadership council had met secretly with a U.N. representative on Jan. 8 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, to discuss laying down their arms.
The Obama administration has emphasized that there is no purely military solution to the Afghanistan war and that it ultimately must be resolved politically. "You don't make peace with your friends," Clinton said at a news conference Thursday. "You have to be willing to engage with your enemies if you expect to create a situation that ends an insurgency or . . . marginalizes the remaining insurgents."
Participants in the conference pledged $140 million to a "reintegration fund" to provide jobs and security to reformed insurgents-- a figure that is projected to total as much as $500 million over five years. Clinton said the United States will not contribute to the fund, although the U.S. military has authorized "significant" expenditures for reintegration efforts out of its own funds.
Those funds apparently are exempt from Treasury Department restrictions against any monetary connection with members of groups the United States has designated as terrorist organizations, including the Taliban. A senior State Department official said that an official U.S. contribution to the new fund would require a presidential waiver.
The Afghans themselves seemed unsure Thursday about whether any Afghan would be ruled out of attendance at the proposed meeting, or jirga, and whether participants had to first forswear violence and pledge to abide by Afghan law. U.S. officials said they did; Afghans appeared to leave the matter open.
Karzai said only that his offer applied "especially" to those "who are not part of al-Qaeda or other terrorist networks, who accept the Afghan constitution." But he noted that the United Nations this week dropped five Taliban members from its terrorist blacklist, and he encouraged "more progress in this regard."
Outgoing Afghan foreign minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, representing his government at the news conference with Miliband, said that even "hard-liner, ideology-oriented" Taliban members had to be "encouraged for reconciliation."
U.S. officials noted that the Taliban leadership has issued a number of public statements in recent days denouncing the reintegration program. One official said that U.S. intelligence and military commanders had reported increasingly frequent "reach-outs" from low-level fighters seeking assimilation.
During her two-day stay here, Clinton held separate talks with members of the P5+1 group (permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany) on negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program. Officials reported little progress in a meeting she held with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, whose government has resisted a U.S. push for new U.N. sanctions against Iran.
important question what would happen to afgan government having good Taliban members in it (did i write good
)when allied forces leave out?
and for india its time to pack our bags and come out safeially as soon as possible
Afghan president plans meeting on reintegrating, reconciling with insurgents
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
LONDON -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that he will convene a nationwide meeting of tribal, religious and political leaders in the next few weeks to discuss reintegrating and reconciling with insurgents. Afghan government officials said Taliban members would also be welcome to attend.
U.S. officials, who strongly support reintegration of low-level Taliban fighters but have drawn a bright red line against dealings with insurgents who have not forsworn violence or who have ties to al-Qaeda, appeared unsure of what Karzai had in mind.
Speaking to a one-day meeting of foreign ministers from nearly 70 countries here, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Karzai called on Saudi Arabia, which has offered to serve as a go-between with Taliban leaders, to play a "prominent role" in a process of "peace and reconciliation." He asked "all our neighbors, particularly Pakistan," where top Taliban leaders are based, to support it.
"We must reach out to all of our countrymen, especially our disenchanted brothers," Karzai told the gathering, which was convened by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to bolster international resolve and solidify a new strategy for the eight-year-old war.
"We didn't know they were going to do it," a senior Obama administration official said of the apparent breadth of Karzai's invitation. "We're very enthusiastic about reintegration," the official said. "We're not here to discuss reconciliation." That term generally refers to a negotiated settlement between opposing forces. The official said reconciliation did not come up in closed-door meetings Thursday, and it was not mentioned in a final communique that welcomed Karzai's outreach to "those willing to renounce violence" and "cut ties with al-Qaeda."
The conference covered a wide range of issues, with Karzai pledging to tackle corruption and saying that "the aspirations and demands of the people of Afghanistan today can be summarized in four simple words: Afghan leadership, Afghan ownership." International partners expressed confidence that President Obama's new Afghanistan strategy and increased troop numbers would be decisive on the battlefield and promised to better coordinate development assistance among each other and with the Afghans.Several governments announced contributions of additional troops to the Afghan effort, including as many as 850 from Germany and 500 from Spain. There were additional pledges to boost support for Afghan police training and civilian personnel.
The communique said Afghanistan's backers would provide "the necessary support to the phased growth and expansion of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police in order to reach 171,600 and 134,000 personnel by October 2011." It endorsed a transition to Afghan security control in selected provinces, to begin "by late 2010/early 2011." Obama has said U.S. combat troops will begin a phased withdrawal, based on ground conditions, in July 2011.
"The biggest deliverable of all" from the gathering, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said at a news conference, was "unity and cohesion in the international effort, and the alignment between" that effort and "a clear Afghan plan" that will be further spelled out at a follow-up conference in Kabul this spring.
But the meeting was dominated by talk about talks with insurgents, which Karzai said was his first priority.
The event followed a flurry of recent reports about negotiations with at least some Taliban factions, including a report by Reuters on Thursday that members of the Taliban's leadership council had met secretly with a U.N. representative on Jan. 8 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, to discuss laying down their arms.
The Obama administration has emphasized that there is no purely military solution to the Afghanistan war and that it ultimately must be resolved politically. "You don't make peace with your friends," Clinton said at a news conference Thursday. "You have to be willing to engage with your enemies if you expect to create a situation that ends an insurgency or . . . marginalizes the remaining insurgents."
Participants in the conference pledged $140 million to a "reintegration fund" to provide jobs and security to reformed insurgents-- a figure that is projected to total as much as $500 million over five years. Clinton said the United States will not contribute to the fund, although the U.S. military has authorized "significant" expenditures for reintegration efforts out of its own funds.
Those funds apparently are exempt from Treasury Department restrictions against any monetary connection with members of groups the United States has designated as terrorist organizations, including the Taliban. A senior State Department official said that an official U.S. contribution to the new fund would require a presidential waiver.
The Afghans themselves seemed unsure Thursday about whether any Afghan would be ruled out of attendance at the proposed meeting, or jirga, and whether participants had to first forswear violence and pledge to abide by Afghan law. U.S. officials said they did; Afghans appeared to leave the matter open.
Karzai said only that his offer applied "especially" to those "who are not part of al-Qaeda or other terrorist networks, who accept the Afghan constitution." But he noted that the United Nations this week dropped five Taliban members from its terrorist blacklist, and he encouraged "more progress in this regard."
Outgoing Afghan foreign minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, representing his government at the news conference with Miliband, said that even "hard-liner, ideology-oriented" Taliban members had to be "encouraged for reconciliation."
U.S. officials noted that the Taliban leadership has issued a number of public statements in recent days denouncing the reintegration program. One official said that U.S. intelligence and military commanders had reported increasingly frequent "reach-outs" from low-level fighters seeking assimilation.
During her two-day stay here, Clinton held separate talks with members of the P5+1 group (permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany) on negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program. Officials reported little progress in a meeting she held with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, whose government has resisted a U.S. push for new U.N. sanctions against Iran.
important question what would happen to afgan government having good Taliban members in it (did i write good
)when allied forces leave out?and for india its time to pack our bags and come out safeially as soon as possible
Taliban sends 'veiled' female bombers to wreak havoc in Punjab
Taliban sends 'veiled' female bombers to wreak havoc in Punjab
Tue, Feb 9 11:50 AM
Pakistani intelligence agencies have warned that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has sent eight female suicide bombers to target strategically important establishments in the province.
According to the intelligence reports, the would-be suicide bombers are veiled and covered from top to bottom to conceal their identities.
Following the report, security agencies have been directed to tighten security in the region and high alert has been sounded across the province.
Meanwhile, security officials arrested six suspected terrorists from Shahdara area here, including a would-be suicide bomber, who were allegedly plotting to attack a five-star hotel and kill US nationals.
Addressing a press conference, Senior Superintendent of Police (Investigation) Zulfiqar Hameed said the TTP-linked terrorists were planning to target foreigners staying at the Pearl Continental Hotel.
Hameed said Qari Baseer, one of the militant, is a prayer leader in a mosque in Jamrud, Khyber Agency, and is associated with an Afghan militant group led by Commander Nazir, The Dawn reports.
Several detonators, suicide jackets, 26 grenades, four kilogrammes of hashish and explosive material were also recovered from their possession.
Taliban sends 'veiled' female bombers to wreak havoc in Punjab
Tue, Feb 9 11:50 AM
Pakistani intelligence agencies have warned that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has sent eight female suicide bombers to target strategically important establishments in the province.
According to the intelligence reports, the would-be suicide bombers are veiled and covered from top to bottom to conceal their identities.
Following the report, security agencies have been directed to tighten security in the region and high alert has been sounded across the province.
Meanwhile, security officials arrested six suspected terrorists from Shahdara area here, including a would-be suicide bomber, who were allegedly plotting to attack a five-star hotel and kill US nationals.
Addressing a press conference, Senior Superintendent of Police (Investigation) Zulfiqar Hameed said the TTP-linked terrorists were planning to target foreigners staying at the Pearl Continental Hotel.
Hameed said Qari Baseer, one of the militant, is a prayer leader in a mosque in Jamrud, Khyber Agency, and is associated with an Afghan militant group led by Commander Nazir, The Dawn reports.
Several detonators, suicide jackets, 26 grenades, four kilogrammes of hashish and explosive material were also recovered from their possession.
Iran uneasy over the proposed reintegration of Taliban in Afghanistan
New Delhi, Feb 9 (IANS) Airing its unease over the proposed reintegration of Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran Tuesday rejected any distinction between good Taliban and bad Taliban, and sought closer cooperation with India in stabilising the violence-torn country.
'There is no good Taliban or bad Taliban,' Iranian ambassador to India Seyed Mehdi Nabizadeh said here.
Backing a regional approach, the Iranian envoy stressed that neighbouring countries could play a greater role in stabilising Afghanistan. India and Iran can work together in stabilsing Afghanistan, he said.
The envoy blamed Western forces, mainly the US and NATO, for the deepening quagmire in Afghanistan and said the government should be run by the Afghans only.
The volatile situation in Afghanistan and the regional situation figured prominently in discussions between Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Iranian leaders during the two-day annual diplomatic consultations in Tehran last week.
India and Iran share similar perspectives on the shifting situation in Afghanistan and are opposed to any power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban in that country.
Although India grudgingly accepted the proposal endorsed at the Jan 28 London conference on reintegration and reconciliation with the Taliban, New Delhi continues to have unease about the effectiveness of the proposal, an anxiety that is shared by Tehran.
Iran, an influential player in Afghanistan due to its relations with Hazara tribes, did not participate in the London conference.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20100209/812/tnl-no-good-or-bad-taliban-says-iran.html
Iran uneasy over the proposed reintegration of Taliban in Afghanistan
New Delhi, Feb 9 (IANS) Airing its unease over the proposed reintegration of Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran Tuesday rejected any distinction between good Taliban and bad Taliban, and sought closer cooperation with India in stabilising the violence-torn country.
'There is no good Taliban or bad Taliban,' Iranian ambassador to India Seyed Mehdi Nabizadeh said here.
Backing a regional approach, the Iranian envoy stressed that neighbouring countries could play a greater role in stabilising Afghanistan. India and Iran can work together in stabilsing Afghanistan, he said.
The envoy blamed Western forces, mainly the US and NATO, for the deepening quagmire in Afghanistan and said the government should be run by the Afghans only.
The volatile situation in Afghanistan and the regional situation figured prominently in discussions between Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Iranian leaders during the two-day annual diplomatic consultations in Tehran last week.
India and Iran share similar perspectives on the shifting situation in Afghanistan and are opposed to any power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban in that country.
Although India grudgingly accepted the proposal endorsed at the Jan 28 London conference on reintegration and reconciliation with the Taliban, New Delhi continues to have unease about the effectiveness of the proposal, an anxiety that is shared by Tehran.
Iran, an influential player in Afghanistan due to its relations with Hazara tribes, did not participate in the London conference.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20100209/812/tnl-no-good-or-bad-taliban-says-iran.html
