The 9/11 Wars (13 page)

Lying in a crook in the Kabul river and surrounded by glades of palm trees, well-irrigated fields, with busy bazaars and a famous university, Jalalabad had always been one of the most cultured and wealthy cities of Afghanistan. Yet the fall of the Taliban – or rather the arrival of the various militia forces from Pakistan – brought mixed reactions that surprised many of the Western, especially American, reporters who drove in from Pakistan and gave an early indication that reality on the ground might be more complex than the simple narrative of liberation repeated in Western capitals suggested. ‘I am sick when I see what is happening. There is no discipline here. There is no police, no army, no government. Everyone has a Kalashnikov,’ said Rehmat Ali Khan, a spice trader in the once busy bazaar, eyeing the militia men who had flooded the city. ‘Thank you, Britain and America, for allowing these men [Gamsharik, Hazrat Ali and Qadir] to come back and rob and beat us again,’ another man shouted. Others worried loudly about the presence of Northern Alliance troops. ‘We are Pashtuns,’ one man said. ‘The Tajiks have never been good to us.’ At the filthy and battered local hospital where more than 300 civilian victims of the bombing raids had been treated in the last two months, Waly Yad, a twenty-four-year-old doctor, was unafraid to voice his support for the Taliban. ‘They followed Islamic law, and that is the only way to resist America’s tyranny … Osama is a very good Muslim. This is all wrong now.’
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‘THE BASE’ DISINTEGRATES AND TORA BORA

Bin Laden himself had spent the first weeks of the war moving between Kandahar, Kabul and Khost, where he took time to meet local villagers and hand out cash.
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Though constantly mobile, he had nonetheless found time to receive a veteran Saudi Arabian militant cleric. Though bin Laden had given at least two major interviews during the war and issued two communiqués, he had hitherto avoided claiming direct responsibility for the attacks, possibly wanting to see what the reaction in the Muslim world to them would be before admitting or boasting that they were his work. Sitting in what appeared to be the guestroom of an ostensibly ordinary Afghan middle-class home with his visitor, however, he happily described how he had always been convinced that the impact of planes loaded with fuel would bring down the Twin Towers. A video of their conversation later found by the CIA and released by the White House furnished the first indisputable proof of bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.
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On November 8, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were in Kabul, where they attended a memorial service for the Uzbek militant leader Juma Khan Namangani, who had been killed in a US air strike a day or so before, and met a Pakistani journalist.
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The next day the pair set out for Jalalabad, where bin Laden had lived on his arrival in Afghanistan from the Sudan five years before. Four days later, Jalalabad itself was to fall to the forces led by Haji Zaheer and his rivals but with Kabul clearly on the point of being lost, must have nonetheless seemed relatively safe to the al-Qaeda leaders. Their small convoy shunned the direct route from the capital to the eastern city, itself a bone-shaking five-hour drive, and instead took smaller, even worse roads further south, where sympathetic local tribes provided greater security. After a night spent near Jagdallak, the al-Qaeda senior commanders had arrived at their destination on November 10.
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There was rout in the air, and Jalalabad’s streets were full of refugees and demoralized Taliban fighters. The city had been home to a large population of older international militants and workers with Islamic NGOs, who now choked the streets as they loaded their families into buses or pick-up trucks heading for supposed safety to the east. Large contingents from Pakistani militant groups or the tribal militias raised by radical Pakistani clerics slept on the floors of mosques or in the gardens of the run-down governor’s residence, resting briefly on their way back to their home villages across the border. On the evening of November 11, local tribal leaders and Taliban notables from the area gathered in an Islamic centre in the city to hear bin Laden make a rousing speech about resistance.
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The al-Qaeda leader handed out $100,000 and then left the next day in a small group of vehicles, crossing over the old metal bridge that marks Jalalabad’s southern limits, climbing the short, steep slope off the river plain and heading due south towards the mountains lining the horizon 30 miles away.
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The convoy drove up the increasingly poor roads and on towards the small village of Ghani Khel, a cluster of mud-walled homes, a couple of mulberry trees and a small run-down concrete mosque, tucked in among the foothills of the ranges behind. Arriving at the village in the late evening, the occupants then left their vehicles and walked higher still towards Tora Bora, the name given by local people to the shelf of wooded hills below the final high snowy ridges of the White Mountains that mark the border with Pakistan.
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A day after bin Laden’s flight, a second convoy left Jalalabad. It too headed south, carrying the local Taliban leadership and several hundred fighters, and also passed by Ghani Khel before working its way up the slopes above the village and then stopping where four or five cars were drawn up in a heavily guarded clearing. The Taliban sent fighters to learn what was happening. They returned angry. Bin Laden was there, recently returned from a brief reconnaissance of the rocky slopes above, and his guards had warned them away. Mullah Jan Mohammed, the private secretary of the governor of Taliban Nangahar, remembered his irritation. ‘It was our country. How could they tell us where to go?’ he said. Overhead, B-52s were already leaving their distinctive traces in the sky.
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The two convoys in mid-November were only a minute part of a vast exodus which saw tens of thousands of people moving across Afghanistan’s western frontier by foot, motorbike, in SUVs, buses and trucks in the last six weeks of 2001. Some fugitives even travelled by plane. The most northern element of this chaotic retreat was the flight of several thousand militant fighters from combat zones around Mazar-e-Sharif, Kunduz and Taloqan, many hundred of whom were transported in an extraordinary airlift organized by the Pakistani secret services. Others, including Mullah Dadaullah Akhund, the brutal Taliban leader who had overseen the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, slipped into north-western Pakistan after paying off local Northern Alliance commanders.
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Further south, either side of Jalalabad, scores of tracks and dirt roads along a long stretch of frontier saw heavy traffic of fugitives from mid-November onwards. Malik Habib Gul, a tribal elder, described how he arranged mule trains for over 600 militants in the first two weeks of December, charging between 5,000 and 50,000 Pakistani rupees to lead them out, not over the high mountain ridge behind Tora Bora itself but by longer but more practicable routes to the east and north.
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One local smuggler on the Pakistani side of the mountains described leading 100 fighters to safety across these passes in five separate trips through late November.
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Rehmat Ali, a farmer from Ghani Khel, spoke of accompanying ‘sixty or seventy foreigners’ over the same period.
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Other fighters slipped out by crossing the Kabul river and then heading east into Pakistan through the deforested hills and steep valleys of Kunar province along tracks that had been used by Alexander the Great’s army as it fought its way down to the Indus more than two millennia before. There, a single local commander helped up to seventy-five to escape – after relieving them of vehicles and valuables.
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Finally there was the exodus along the roads around the Afghan city of Khost and across the long unguarded frontier running down to the official border post at Chaman. Most of those who had left Kabul on the eve of its fall had driven across eastern Afghanistan and crossed without difficulty into Pakistan. The foreigners in Afghanistan had a tougher time than the locals. The Pakistanis arrested somewhere between 600 and 700 of them.
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They included Ali al-Bahlul, the al-Qaeda media specialist who had listened to the news of the 9/11 attacks with bin Laden, who was detained at the frontier near Khost on December 15. Bin Laden’s three current wives and dozen or so children, however, crossed the border without incident.
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Reports of the fighting at Tora Bora gave the impression of a pitched battle, the Americans and the Afghans below, bin Laden and his men on the high ridges above. But the accounts that have emerged over recent years point to something much more chaotic and much more dispersed. The fighting at Tora Bora was scrappy in the extreme. Though there was a hardcore of militants determined to seek martyrdom, many of those who filled the defences scraped in the mountainsides stayed only for a couple of days, sometimes even a few hours, before once more moving on through the wooded peaks on their way out of Afghanistan. One was Mohammed Umr, a young Afghan-born militant who had been raised in Saudi Arabia and who, despite a budding career as a professional footballer, had left his home in the Saudi city of Medina to get training in the militant camps in Afghanistan.
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When the 9/11 attacks took place, Umr had left his camp when warned about likely bombing and had crossed the country on buses, passing through Kabul a day or so before its fall and arriving in Jalalabad just a few days after bin Laden had left. After hearing that ‘the sheikh’ was in the mountains to the south of the city, he too had got a lift to Ghani Khel and then walked on up into the hills, finally finding a small group of other Saudis who were fortifying an old stone shepherd’s shelter built around a shallow cave. All over the hillsides around the small band Umr had joined were other groups, a random selection from the various extremist groups which had been present in Afghanistan under the Taliban. All were building up positions as best they could to resist the assault they knew was coming. ‘The trenches were all hand-dug, not linked and poorly defended,’ one twenty-two-year-old Algerian who shared a foxhole with four others later recalled.
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Arms and ammunition had been brought in on donkeys but were still in short supply. ‘There were sixteen Kalashnikovs for two hundred people,’ said another survivor of the battle. ‘There was no one in charge.’
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According to the official American military history of the campaign, analysts within both the CIA and US Central Command (CentCom) had been speculating for several weeks that bin Laden would make a stand along the northern peaks of the Spin Ghar mountains at a place they called ‘Tora Gora’.
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It took some time, however, for a significant force to be deployed, with the first special forces units arriving in Jalalabad on December 2.
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Eventually, around ninety American special forces troops supplemented by a handful of their British and Australian counterparts had taken up positions on the lower slopes. As auxiliaries they had recruited several thousand Afghan fighters under the command of Hazrat Ali, Zaman Gamsharik and Haji Zaheer, the three commanders who had raced for Jalalabad three weeks earlier and who were now being paid by the CIA. The plan was for the Afghans to act as beaters moving up the northern slopes of the Spin Ghar mountains while other Afghans blocked the escape routes to the east and west. As the opposing militants revealed their positions to the special forces accompanying the lightly armed irregulars, air strikes would then be called in with the laser guiding technology used over previous weeks. After some debate, the idea of using American troops – 1,000 Marines had recently arrived in the south of Afghanistan – to block the southern escape routes over the back of the mountain range behind Tora Bora was rejected by the White House and Tommy Franks, the commanding general directing the operation from the headquarters of CentCom in Florida. So too were suggestions from the field to parachute in special forces. The task fell to the Pakistanis instead.
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The assault was launched on December 8.

After just forty-eight hours of fighting, American special forces commanders were confident they were closing in on their target. Though they had had great difficulty getting the local forces to close with the enemy – or indeed preventing them from returning to their bases below the mountain when dusk fell – the air strikes were beginning to tell on the militants high on the mountain. On the 12th a communication was heard by the American troops indicating that bin Laden was joining one of the groups of fugitives that continued to pour over or around the mountain range.
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On December 14, bin Laden appears to have completed his last will and testament on a laptop computer. ‘Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life,’ the al-Qaeda leader wrote, adding that ‘if it were not for treachery, the situation would not be what it is now’.
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Around December 15, bin Laden’s voice was heard over the radio, giving permission for a general withdrawal to his troops.
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By the 16th or 17th, more than a month after they had passed through Jalalabad and thirteen days since the start of the battle, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were gone, leaving subordinates to lead any remaining fighters to safety. Their departure was precipitate and inglorious. [Bin Laden] even ‘left his bodyguards in Tora Bora’, one captured militant later told interrogators. ‘[He] suddenly departed Tora Bora with a few individuals [he] selected,’ another remembered. A third said bin Laden left owing one local commander $7,000, a debt only paid ten months later. Though many Taliban fugitives, including the convoy of leaders that had been irritated by being warned off by the al-Qaeda leadership’s guards at Ghani Khel, headed south from Tora Bora into the narrow salient of Pakistani land that extends into Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri appear to have headed in the other direction, north and away from the Pakistani border, slipping through the lines of the special forces and their Afghan auxiliaries, lying low in the house of an Afghan sympathizer near Jalalabad for a few days before heading on into the rough and remote Kunar on little-known trails, probably on horseback. Then, deep in the mountains, they disappeared.
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