The 9/11 Wars (11 page)

Equally, though Bush had said that the White House would ‘rally the world’, Afghanistan would be an American campaign. Tony Blair, who had immediately offered to supply any help the US required, was told that joining the coalition involved ‘accepting the doctrine’ and that though ‘the wider the coalition the better, [we] are going to do this anyway’.
⁸⁰
The Bush administration, and especially Rumsfeld, was determined to avoid any repetition of the ‘war by committee’ that had been seen during the Kosovo campaign of 1999 and, they felt, had severely hampered the use of US military power. When NATO invoked Article Five of its charter, summoning all members to the aid of one who had been attacked, the gesture went unacknowledged by the White House. Building a coalition, Rumsfeld insisted, should not become an end in itself as conditions posed by participants risked ‘limiting the ability of the president … to protect the United States’. The coalition should not be allowed to define the mission, he told subordinates and wrote in the
New York Times
.
⁸¹

Once it had been decided to avoid the use of large numbers of American troops on the ground, the question of the military capacities of the Northern Alliance, the rough coalition of the various militia which made up the opposition to the Taliban in Afghanistan, became critical. The CIA’s poor view of their competence and reliability was shared by General Tommy Franks, the commander of the US military operation, and was only reinforced as more was learned about General Mohammed Fahim, the late Massood’s uninspiring and uncharismatic successor. The State Department also had serious concerns about the consequences for a post-war Afghanistan if the opposition groups ended up with too much power. The Pakistanis had made their own reservations about the disparate factions of the anti-Taliban opposition taking power abundantly clear to the Americans, enlisting the Saudis in a fairly unsubtle lobbying campaign, and important voices within the CIA were ‘sensitive to Islamabad’s concerns’.
⁸²
This led to a natural tendency in the intelligence community to favour the strategy of undermining the Taliban’s hold on the south and the east of Afghanistan by exploiting tribal splits and discontents rather than throwing American military and diplomatic weight entirely behind the rag-tag anti-Taliban forces in the north. The senior leadership at the Department of Defense disagreed, and the result was a compromise. Though the first option remained the ‘southern strategy’ of provoking a rebellion among the Pashtun populations who provided the bedrock support for the Taliban, measures were taken to prepare a ‘northern strategy’ if it proved necessary. Teams of CIA operatives were thus airdropped into the north of Afghanistan to link up with the Northern Alliance.

The first American boots arrived on the ground in Afghanistan at about the time when, after convincing the army high command that his decision to offer full cooperation to the US was the only viable option, President Musharraf went on Pakistani state television to explain that he had acted in his nation’s interests by accepting American demands. In Washington the reaction to his announcement was watched warily, as it was clear from secret polling that support in Pakistan for Mullah Omar’s regime had actually hardened after 9/11.
⁸³
There was, however, little real opposition to Musharraf’s decision. Religious parties organized a few relatively small rallies around the country. In Peshawar police baton-charged students from the religious schools around the city, but the anger seemed half-hearted. At most rallies the police exercised restraint. A pair of fingers that the author saw lying in the road had been severed from the hand of a demonstrator by a simple tear gas canister. Other protests, however, degenerated, and authorities, fearful of a wider breakdown of law and order, ordered the use of live rounds. Inevitably, a handful of demonstrators were shot and killed. They became the first victims of the 9/11 Wars outside America.
⁸⁴

3
War in Afghanistan

FIRST STRIKES

On the eve of war Mullah Omar addressed his followers. He told them that they were facing an extremely powerful enemy and that defeat and death were probable – though the forces of Islam would eventually prevail over the very long term. He admitted his own very human fear at the prospect of losing his family, his friends, position, privileges and, quite probably, his life. However, his reasons for fighting were clear. Omar said he ‘did not want to become a friend of the non-Muslims for [they] are against all my beliefs and my religion’ and was thus ‘ready to lose everything’. He would trust, he told his troops, only ‘in Islam’ and his own ‘Afghan bravery’.
¹
There was no reason to doubt the sincerity of the Taliban leader’s words. The chances that Mullah Omar would even discuss agreeing to US demands and handing over the Saudi-born militant who was theoretically his guest, however poor relations often were between Afghans and the Arabs living in their country, were always extremely slim. However, beyond the rhetoric and the genuine emotion was another purely rational calculation. If Omar had surrendered bin Laden even to a ‘third country’, his credibility and thus authority within the Taliban would have been destroyed, and the movement would have most likely disintegrated. If he refused to hand over bin Laden, however, the Taliban would probably be defeated but not necessarily decisively. Certainly the movement’s ideological credentials would remain untarnished, as would Mullah Omar’s own moral authority. His refusal of the American ultimatum and of Pakistani attempts to mediate some kind of deal was thus predictable.
²
‘Try as we did we could not persuade Mullah Omar to let go of bin Laden in the window available before the deadline imposed by President Bush,’ General Musharraf later recalled. With the cursory diplomacy over, the war could start.
³
The bombing began on October 7.

To start with, there was little in the way of ‘shock and awe’, as Rumsfeld had originally wanted. Sorties were flown against fifty-three targets in the first twenty-four hours and continued through the following days at the same relatively low intensity.
⁴
To the frustration of the defense secretary, the strikes were steered deliberately away from frontline positions by General Tommy Franks, the military commander in charge of the campaign, to allow the CIA’s ‘southern strategy’ to develop. Bob Grenier, the CIA chief in Pakistan, had twice met one of the Taliban’s most senior military commanders in the luxurious surroundings of the Serena hotel in the western Pakistani city of Quetta, only 110 miles from Kandahar itself, first to reiterate the American offer of negotiations if bin Laden was handed over and, at the second meeting, to suggest a possibility of an internal coup against Mullah Omar.
⁵
Elsewhere, the CIA and to a lesser extent MI6 were handing out dozens of satellite phones accompanied by packets of $10,000 to warlords and tribal chiefs within Afghanistan and approaching scores more.
⁶
Many took the cash and handed the telephone to the Taliban. Others simply rejected the CIA’s offer. The Taliban themselves had a rudimentary but effective intelligence system and made scores of arrests in Jalalabad, in Kabul and in the eastern city of Khost, where, at least before the US-led air strikes started, local tribes had looked to be wavering.
⁷
The bombing continued, largely ineffectually, with Taliban commanders mocking the American efforts, for a second week and then a third. Early bombing had been directed at the sort of rear area targets that would have been useful when fighting a more conventional enemy – supplies depots, vehicle parks – but anyone who knew Afghanistan at the time knew that talk in Pentagon press conferences of ‘degrading command and control systems’ and suppressing anti-aircraft defences was nonsense. The local version of the former was a man sitting on a rug with a radio, of the latter Soviet-era heavy machine guns that needed to be manually sighted. ‘We are not running out of targets … Afghanistan is,’ General Richard Myers, chairman of America’s joint chiefs of staff, said.
⁸
But this was a problem. With no sign of any significant movement against the Taliban among the tribes in the south and the east, frustration in Washington and among the teams of American operatives in the north mounted. The latter sent back cables pleading for more resources. The Islamabad CIA station insisted their strategy would work if given sufficient time.
⁹

ABDUL HAQ

The coming war did not just pose challenges to states and their security services, however.

A few days after September 11 a portly forty-three-year-old Afghan flew into Peshawar from Dubai. His name was Abdul Rauf Humayun Arsala, but everyone called him Abdul Haq. His life had been profoundly intertwined with the conflicts that had racked south-west Asia over previous decades, and his death would be too. Though a very minor player in the great scheme of what was happening in late September 2001, Haq’s story was a useful reminder of the reality on the ground in the places where the 9/11 Wars were to be fought over the coming months and years. For in places like Peshawar or Jalalabad and for men like Haq the grand rhetoric of a ‘global war on terrorism’ meant very little.

A Pashtun from a landowning family from the eastern Afghan province of Nangahar with a long history of serving their country’s monarchs, Abdul Haq and his two elder brothers had been among the first to start fighting the Afghan Communists who had seized power in 1973, ending the thirty-year-long rule of King Zahir Shah. His brothers, Abdul Qadir and Din Mohammed, had both been influenced by new Islamist doctrines coming from the Middle East, and Abdul Haq, a rebel by temperament, quickly found himself involved in active violence.
¹⁰
Haq’s entry into the world of violent political dissidence showed many of the factors that would prove later so common among militants of a different stamp: the example of respected peers or family members; a temperamental disposition to adventure or practical action; generalized support among his community for the cause in the name of which he was acting; a particular incident which triggered the transition from talk to execution – in Haq’s case a public reprimand from a detested Communist teacher at school.
¹¹

Across Afghanistan at the time there were thousands of other local leaders launching similar attacks by similar bands of rebels against efforts of the committed Marxists of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan to forcibly haul their country out of its ‘feudal torpor’ and into the bright new era of revolutionary Socialism.
¹²
By 1978 the tiny clique of hardline Communists in Kabul had lost control of vast swathes of the Afghan countryside, and Moscow began to contemplate a ‘temporary’ armed intervention. When the Soviets invaded to bolster the tottering regime in December 1979, aiming to stay only for a few months, Haq and his brothers found themselves fighting a new enemy.

Haq had a good war. Active in the faction of the Hezb-e-Islami party loyal to the senior cleric Younis Khalis, boisterous, charismatic, energetic, with moderate political views, good English and, at least early on in the conflict, a relatively impressive combat record, he got on well with representatives of Western intelligence agencies and journalists.
¹³
He got on less well, however, with the ISI, who favoured hardliners such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamist former engineering student with whom they had had an ongoing relationship since the early 1970s and who now headed the main Hezb-e-Islami, or Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, whose group was mainly bankrolled by the Saudi Arabians. By 1992, with the Soviets gone, the regime they had left deposed, the various
mujahideen
factions in Kabul and the country plunging towards a vicious civil war, Haq had left for exile in Dubai, where he had contented himself with a series of minor business ventures in the United Arab Emirates. His taste for political manoeuvring had never left him, however. He kept up contacts with British intelligence developed during the war against the Soviets and had been one of the Afghans who had walked through the twin gates and airlock doors of the headquarters of MI6 in London’s Vauxhall with the much younger Hamid Karzai in the months before the 9/11 attacks.
¹⁴
For Haq the 9/11 attacks, which he watched on a television screen in the internet café he ran in Dubai, were not an ‘attack on freedom’, as President Bush described them, nor was the reaction to them ‘the new Jewish crusade campaign on the soil of Pakistan and Afghanistan’, as bin Laden described it in his first public communication after 9/11.
¹⁵
Instead, they signified the latest phase in the ever-shifting matrix of Afghan politics and, crucially, an opportunity to return to his native land and, potentially, to wealth and possibly power. Haq, however, had underestimated the complexity of the game currently being played out by the Pakistanis, their intelligence services, the CIA, those directing the war from Washington and a variety of local actors in Afghanistan.
¹⁶