The 9/11 Wars (14 page)

The battle at Tora Bora was declared over on December 16, when the three Afghan commanders hired by the CIA paraded an unimpressive bunch of fifty-seven shell-shocked and half-starved Afghan and Arab prisoners before local journalists. Equally unimpressive were the famous ‘cave complexes’. These had been repeatedly described in Western media as vast bunkers with floor after floor of armoured gun positions, bedrooms, offices and ammunition stores all equipped with electrics and computer systems, sanitation and even power plants. There was not just one but many of these constructions, Donald Rumsfeld told a television interviewer, after being shown an astonishing graphic featuring a hollowed-out mountain fortress in the London
Sunday Times
.
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The reality was more mundane. Only simple caves existed. They offered some protection, however. ‘I remember the Afghans below and the American planes above,’ Mohammed Umr said later. ‘We got used to the bombing even when it was near us. Sometimes we got bombed when we were cooking so we had to keep moving the pot all the time. But otherwise it was OK.’ However, the total absence of interconnecting passages between the caves naturally cast some doubt on the lurid accounts of Western soldiers clearing cavern after cavern in vicious hand-to-hand fights as they advanced deeper and deeper into bin Laden’s lair in a real-life video game. Nor were there any extensive catering or medical facilities. ‘There was no normal food,’ said Abdullah al-Batarfi, a doctor who ended up at Tora Bora during the fighting. ‘I did a hand amputation with a knife … a finger amputation with scissors.’
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After the battle, reporters searching the caves found little more than basic field dressings, some petrol camping stoves and tin after tin of baby food and jam.
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The total number of militants actually killed at Tora Bora is unknown. Some estimates run into the low hundreds.
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‘Dalton Fury’, the leader of the American special forces during the fighting, says that 220 militants were killed and 52 fighters captured.
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Few bodies were found, however, though several dozen dead militants appear to have been buried in rapid makeshift graves during the battle by local tribesmen or their comrades. Some survivors spoke of dozens more being buried alive in caves by bombs.
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A few score died on the high passes on the way into Pakistan. One, Djamel Loiseau, had made his way to Afghanistan from Paris’ eleventh arrondissement and died of hypothermia high amid the ice and snow of the frontier ridge after volunteering to wait on the summit to guide groups of fugitives still making their way up the mountain in the dark.
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Several of the columns of fighters organized by the subordinate al-Qaeda leaders were badly shot up.
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But most of those defending Tora Bora escaped alive. Bin Laden himself claimed that only sixteen of a force of 300 had been killed.
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The truth probably lies somewhere between this claim and those of the US-led coalition. Either way the numbers of fighters who actually resisted the oncoming Afghan and American forces would appear to be substantially lower than often imagined. So too is the number who died.

Mohammed Umr was one of the last to leave. Around December 17, probably after the departure of bin Laden, Umr was told by the senior al-Qaeda commanders ‘to go to Pakistan’, make his way home to Saudi Arabia and wait to be contacted. For Umr, the only option for escape was to follow the most risky of the many routes that fugitives had taken the previous month. With around 100 others, most of the remainder of fighters then at Tora Bora, he walked for a night and most of a day through pine forests and then through snow fields at between 10,000 and 14,000 feet, before crossing into Pakistan. The group was found and then betrayed by local tribesmen, who revealed their location to the Pakistani army. Umr was eventually handed over to the Americans.
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Soon after the end of the fighting, recriminations over the failure to capture bin Laden began. If it had been difficult to read rapidly evolving events – senior British intelligence officials later spoke of ‘a fast-moving and confused situation’ on which ‘it was very difficult to get a real handle’ without the satellite surveillance capabilities that would later become almost banal – there was little excuse for the decision to believe that local auxiliaries could do as effective a job at Tora Bora as they had done around Mazar-e-Sharif or on the Shomali plains. Western troops and their commanders clearly had enormous difficulty simply grasping the nature of the war they were fighting, of their allies and of their enemies. For the Americans, this was a just war of righteous vengeance to eliminate a group of evil men opposed to all that was good in the world, summed up rhetorically as ‘freedom’. To the Afghan commanders, this was another round in a continual contest for power, influence and resources pitting individuals who had been competing for decades and communities that had been competing for centuries against one another. The Americans were new actors in this game, undoubtedly the richest and the best-armed to date, but, everyone suspected, unlikely to be playing too long.

The commander of the US special forces at Tora Bora later complained that all his Afghan allies would do was ‘go up, get into a skirmish, lose a guy or two, maybe kill an al-Qaeda guy or two and then leave’, adding that ‘it was almost like it was an agreement or an understanding between the two forces [to] put on a good show and then leave’. Unwittingly ‘Fury’ had nicely summed up the traditional style of Afghan combat. In a society where reaching adulthood was already an achievement and where communities were unwilling to waste precious lives, war was more often a negotiating tool in the perpetual bargaining for scarce resources rather than a means of annihilating opponents. The 1980s had taught the Afghans a bitter lesson about fully industrialized warfare and at Tora Bora they had logically reverted to older customs designed to preserve life more than take it. Most of the Afghan troops were neither professionals nor ideologically motivated. One fighter, returning to his makeshift camp at the end of the day, described the day’s fighting to the author as ‘work’, using the Pashto word for repetitive agricultural labour. Being a soldier was just a better-paid and more dangerous alternative to farming. And if there were other opportunities for further self-enrichment, all the better. The sub-commander designated to cut off one key escape route, paid $10,000 to do so, was simply paid more by escaping Arabs. Though a principal ally of the Americans, Hazrat Ali himself was overheard by reporters in the Spin Ghar hotel in Jalalabad negotiating the safe passage of senior militants.
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Some of his men appear to have attempted to levy money at checkpoints from the American special forces themselves.
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Such men were certainly unlikely, as one US officer angrily exhorted them, to ‘destroy, destroy, destroy’, not least because they were the ones who would have to live with the consequences of any destruction.
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The Pakistanis also had their own interests. Contrary to what is often said, the Pakistanis did in fact move large numbers of troops, both regular and paramilitary, up to the border behind Tora Bora and even ferried Bob Grenier, the Islamabad CIA station chief, up to the frontier to review them on two occasions.
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But coordination had been poor, and the senior Pakistani civilian and military leadership claim to have been unaware of what was happening at Tora Bora until very late. Maleeha Lodhi, the Pakistani ambassador in Washington at the time, remembers that the precise timing of American actions on the other side of the mountains was never communicated to the Pakistanis. General Ali Mohammed Jan Orakzai, the officer who commanded the deployment of the two Pakistani brigades to the frontier behind Tora Bora, claims to have learned of the December 8 offensive from CNN.
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Even once their troops were mobilized, Pakistani commanders had to negotiate access to the high valleys behind the Tora Bora massif with the local tribal elders, or the troops would have been attacked themselves. The result was that the Pakistani troops took up their positions several days after the American special forces and their Afghan auxiliaries had started pushing up the slopes of the mountains from the northern side. Even when they were in position, Afghan members of the Taliban were allowed to pass through their positions. President Musharraf had already made his position clear to Wendy Chamberlain, the US ambassador in Islamabad, telling her days after 9/11 that ‘we will hand over AQ but handle Pakistanis and other locals ourselves’.
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The troops who deployed behind Tora Bora were accompanied by ISI officers, who made sure that it was international militants who were detained while potentially useful proxies who might help the Pakistanis rebuild their Afghan strategy in the future were allowed to go free.
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In any case, the senior Pakistani generals and President Musharraf were, true to the historic prioritization of threats by Pakistani strategists, much more concerned by the reaction of India to a spectacular and bloody attack on the national assembly in New Delhi launched on December 13 by a group based in Pakistan than what was happening on their western borders.

Like the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, Tora Bora was one of those episodes which, though misunderstood at the time, gave a very clear indication of what kind of conflict was coming. The fighting there had revealed how combat in the 9/11 Wars was going to be. Hugely complex, it involved at least five different forces all fighting for different reasons. Often referred to as a battle, it was in fact more of a long-drawn-out sequence of inconclusive skirmishes than a climactic strategic event. Difficult to define in terms of time or space, simplified and mythologized in the popular imagination, Tora Bora was about small groups of militants scattered across a very large area of very broken terrain fighting a series of disjointed and chaotic actions of varying intensity with Western troops and their local auxiliaries, who had enormous difficulty bringing their massively superior firepower to bear. It was thus less the final engagement of the 2001 Afghan war and more the first major action of the conflict to come. Equally, the highest casualties may well have been among civilians. Within two days of bin Laden’s convoy passing through, the village of Ghani Khel had been virtually flattened by a massive bombing raid which, though it had killed at least forty Arabs, had also left an equal number of non-combatants, including the children of several of the elders of the village, dead. A second air strike days later on the nearby village of Pacheer Agam missed its intended target – a reported intermediary between al-Qaeda and local Afghans – and killed around seventy civilians.
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Other similar incidents went unreported, but the 300 civilians that doctors at Jalalabad’s hospital said they had treated indicated they were numerous.

While Tora Bora had been unfolding, the Taliban’s last redoubts had fallen. In the south Mullah Omar had been tracked by American special forces to a valley in the province of Helmand, west of Kandahar but predictably escaped an operation to capture him that, as at Tora Bora, relied on the use of local forces as auxiliaries to secure the village where he was believed to be hiding. The Taliban leader was last seen heading towards the southern Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death, on a motorbike.
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On December 7, Kandahar was secured by American special forces soldiers, who had as much trouble with skirmishes between rival ‘liberating’ groups as they did with the remnants of the Taliban and international militants. On December 11, Hamid Karzai, who had emerged as a consensus candidate among the various Afghan factions collected by the Americans under the auspices of the United Nations at a hotel near Bonn in Germany, received the news that he was to be the new leader of his country. Eleven days later, he was sworn in as chairman of the Interim Government in Afghanistan. The White House was careful to steer away from any triumphalism, but the new ‘coalition information centers’ that had been set up in London, Washington and Islamabad, where hundreds of journalists had gathered, issued a rousing pamphlet entitled ‘The Global War on Terrorism: The First 100 Days’, which boasted of how fewer than 3,000 troops had brought ‘broad military success’.
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The campaign had been cheap, short and apparently successful, a ‘bargain’ in the words of President Bush.
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In all, beyond the massive airpower deployed, the US commitment to overthrow the Taliban on the ground had been about 110 CIA officers and 316 special forces personnel.
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The former had distributed $70 million.
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Though eleven reporters had died, the military had not suffered a single combat fatality. When a soldier had been shot in the arm on December 4 it was front-page news.
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It had almost been too easy.

There were, however, various worrying postscripts to the war other than the escape of the al-Qaeda leadership from Tora Bora and Mullah Omar from Kandahar. The first was the secret airlift that had brought hundreds of Pakistani militants who had been fighting alongside the Taliban in Kunduz back home. With the carefully leaked news that the ISI had continued supplying arms and ammunition to the Taliban after the bombing had started on October 7 and the blind eye turned to the arrival of Taliban fugitives on their soil, this indicated that the Pakistanis’ reversal of their previous policy in Afghanistan clearly had limits.
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