The Longest War (15 page)

On December 7, the Delta team set up camp in the schoolhouse near Tora Bora from which they tried to press farther toward the al-Qaeda front lines and get “eyes on target.” Then they would
direct laser beams
on the targets so that accurate airstrikes could be called in on them. According to the official U.S. Special Forces history of the battle, by now “
the latest intelligence
placed senior AQ [al-Qaeda] leaders and UBL [Usama bin Laden] squarely in Tora Bora.”

But
locals were reluctant to give
the Delta team much in the way of useful information about al-Qaeda because civilians in the area had been killed in American bombing raids and bin Laden had been a generous guest over the several years that he had been their on-and-off neighbor. Many of the villagers also believed that the al-Qaeda men truly were holy warriors fighting infidels.
Years after the battle, on one of Tora Bora’s many rocky outcrops, several al-Qaeda graves became a well-maintained shrine marked by
flying pennants
of pink, green, blue, and orange.

As the fighting got under way, bin Laden 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 lose your morale. Don’t worry. I’m here always asking about you guys.” To the ultrafundamentalists of al-Qaeda, the fact that they were fighting the Americans during the holy month of Ramadan
would have had additional resonance
, since it was at the battle of Badr during Ramadan that the Prophet Mohammed had led a small group of Muslims to victory fourteen centuries earlier against a much larger army of infidels.

But by the first week of December, things were growing desperate. Rising up to fourteen thousand feet, Tora Bora’s mountains are a tough environment at any time of year—and, in the middle of December, temperatures drop to well below zero at night. As the battle raged in the mountains,
snow was falling steadily
. Meanwhile, American bombs rained down on the snow-covered peaks ceaselessly, preventing sleep. In one four-day period alone, between December 4 and 7, U.S. bombers dropped
seven hundred thousand pounds of ordnance
on the mountains. The militant
Abu Jaafar al-Kuwaiti recalled
that, together with bin Laden and a larger group, he took up a position in trenches at nine thousand feet that they had built to protect them “from the insane American strikes.”

Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor who was treating the al-Qaeda wounded, paints a scene of desperation. “
I was out of medicine
and I had a lot of casualties,” Batarfi later recalled. “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 American 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 recalled that “
day and night
, American forces were bombing us by smart bombs that weigh thousands of pounds and bombs that penetrate caves.” On December 9,
a U.S. bomber dropped
an immense BLU-82 bomb on al-Qaeda’s positions. Known as a daisy cutter, the fifteen-thousand-pound
bomb was used in the Gulf War to clear minefields.
Berntsen remembers
that the daisy cutter was followed by a wave of additional American airstrikes. “We came right in behind it with B-52s,” he says. “Each of them has twenty-five-hundred-pounders, so everything goes in there. Killed a lot of people.”

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, Abu Jaafar “received the horrifying news” that the “trench of Sheikh Osama had been destroyed.” But bin Laden was not dead. An al-Qaeda website offered the following description of what had happened:
bin Laden had dreamed about a scorpion
descending into one of the trenches that his men had dug, so he evacuated his trench, moving two hundred meters away.

On December 10, the U.S. National Security Agency, which sucks up signals intelligence around the world, 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
. the same day,
Afghan soldiers said
that they had spotted bin Laden and had him surrounded.
Later that evening
another intercept was picked up of bin Laden talking on the radio with some of his lieutenants, according to the Delta commander Dalton Fury. The information was so accurate that it appeared to pinpoint bin Laden’s location down to within ten meters. Another intercept that same night placed him two kilometers further away, suggesting that the al-Qaeda leader was on the move.

For Fury this posed something of a quandary. This was the closest to bin Laden’s position that any American forces had ever been, but at the same time three of Fury’s men were now pinned down in
a ferocious firefight
with some al-Qaeda fighters. And as dusk fell, Fury’s key Afghan ally, Hazarat Ali, had retreated from the battlefield back to Jalalabad for some dinner to break his Ramadan fast, as is the Afghan way. 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. “My decision to abort that effort to kill or capture bin Laden when we might have been within 2,000 meters of him, about 2,000 yards, still bothers me. It leaves me with a feeling of somehow letting down our nation at a critical time,” Fury says.

On December 12, a defining moment came in the Tora Bora battle, and al-Qaeda would swiftly exploit it. Haji Zaman Gamsharik, one of the Afghan warlords leading the attack against al-Qaeda, had opened negotiations with members of the group for a surrender agreement. “
They talked on the radio
with Haji Zaman,” an Afghan front-line commander explained, “saying they were ready to surrender at 4
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 8
A.M
. tomorrow?’ So we agreed to this. Those al-Qaeda who were not ready to be killed escaped that night. At 8
A.M
. the following day no one surrendered, so we started attacking again.”

News of the cease-fire with al-Qaeda did not sit well with the group of twenty Delta operators who by December 12 had made their way deeper into Tora Bora, into an area near bin Laden’s now-destroyed two-room house.
Strung out on a ridge
above the Americans were about two hundred of Haji Zaman’s men, who were looking down on what remained of bin Laden’s bombed-out house. Haji Zaman’s commanders told the Delta operators that al-Qaeda members would gather in the field in front of bin Laden’s wrecked house to surrender the following morning. Instead, during that night, many of the militants who were supposed to surrender likely instead fled the Tora Bora mountains.

Back in Kabul, the CIA ground commander, Gary Berntsen, was screaming profanities into the phone when he was told about the surrender agreement. Berntsen remembers, “
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.’” But there wasn’t much the small number of Delta operators on the ground at Tora Bora could do once their Afghan allies had dug their heels in about the cease-fire. 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.

The next afternoon, American signals operators who had spent the past four days on the ground at Tora Bora intercepting radio transmissions heard that “Father” (bin Laden) was again on the move. Bin Laden himself then spoke to his followers: “
The time is now
. Arm your women and children against the infidel!” Following several hours of high-intensity bombing, the al-Qaeda leader broke radio silence again, saying, “I am sorry for getting you involved in this battle; if you can no longer resist, you may surrender with my
blessing.”
One member of Berntsen’s team
, an Arabic-speaking CIA officer who had been listening to bin Laden’s voice for several years, was in Tora Bora monitoring
the al-Qaeda leader
talking to his followers over an open radio channel: “Listening to bin Laden pray with these guys. Apologizing to them, for what’s occurred. Asking them to fight on.”

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 were still alive in the mountainous complex to retreat to Pakistan and surrender to their embassies there.
Hubayshi remains bitter
about the behavior of his leader: “We had been ready to lay down our lives for him, and he couldn’t make the effort to speak to us personally.”

On December 14, bin Laden’s voice was again picked up by American signals operators, but,
according to an interpreter
translating for the Delta team, it sounded more like a prerecorded sermon than a live transmission, indicating that bin Laden had already left the battlefield area. He had likely used the cover of al-Qaeda’s “surrender” to begin his retreat during the early morning of December 13, which is
confirmed by the various American radio intercepts
later that day in which bin Laden made his final good-byes to his troops.

December 13 was the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, an
especially sacred day
in the Muslim calendar, when the Prophet Mohammed had received the first verses of the Koran. On the same holy day in 1987, not far from Tora Bora and surrounded by up to two hundred Soviet soldiers, bin Laden had witnessed a “miracle,” which he later recounted to a journalist: “
A Soviet airplane
, a MiG I believe, passed by in front of us, when a group of our Afghan Mujahideen brothers grouped together [and attacked]. The plane then broke to pieces as it fell right in front of our eyes.” Now bin Laden was once again delivered from the clutches of a superpower around the time of this most sacred day.

The top leaders of al-Qaeda separated as they made good their
escape from Tora Bora
; Ayman al-Zawahiri left the mountainous redoubt with Uthman, one of bin Laden’s sons. Osama himself fled with another of his sons, seventeen-year-old Muhammad, accompanied by his guards. Meanwhile, Abdallah Tabarak, bin Laden’s chief bodyguard, escaped Tora Bora with a group made up mainly of Yemenis and Saudis. He went in the direction of Pakistan, taking bin Laden’s satellite phone with him on the assumption
that U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring satellite calls in the region. Tabarak continued to use the satphone as his boss made his own escape, to divert attention away from the leader of al-Qaeda.

Ghanim al-Harbi, a Saudi in his twenties,
had gone to Afghanistan
a year before 9/11 and trained at an al-Qaeda camp. As the Taliban fell, Harbi
ended up with a group
of around sixty-five Arabs in Tora Bora. Sometime around December 15, his group recruited two local guides for the arduous trek to the Pakistani border. As this large group passed through one of the local villages, a massive American airstrike killed forty of the Arabs and Harbi suffered serious injuries. He was subsequently captured with a group of others from Yemen, Kuwait, Egypt, and Tunisia.

By December 17, the battle of Tora Bora was over. Dalton Fury, the Delta commander on the ground,
estimated that at battle’s end
there were some 220 dead militants and fifty-two captured fighters, who were mostly Arabs, with a dozen Afghans and a sprinkling of Chechens and Pakistanis. Around twenty 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 presumed them to be.

Across the border from Tora Bora, in Pakistan,
thousands of the paramilitary constabulary
of the Pakistani Frontier Corps were posted in the general vicinity. But Pakistan’s military leaders were distracted in the critical time period when al-Qaeda members started slipping out of Tora Bora, because of the
attack by a group
of Pakistani militants on the Indian Parliament on December 13. That attack led both countries to mobilize their soldiers on the India-Pakistan border and events in Afghanistan were quickly superseded by the possibility of war between the two nuclear-armed rival states. The Pakistani minister of the interior, Moinuddin Haider, recalled that India moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers to Pakistan’s border: “
We had to respond
. All our armed forces went to combat that situation and we also moved to the borders. All of our second-line forces which guard our borders, especially with Afghanistan, they were deployed.”

Despite the mobilization for a possible war with India, Pakistan’s military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, later claimed that Pakistani forces managed to arrest
up to 240 militants
retreating from Tora Bora, but clearly many others also escaped, including much of the leadership of al-Qaeda. And so was lost the last, best chance to capture bin Laden and his top deputies, at a time when they were confined to an area of several dozen square miles.
Al-Qaeda’s leaders fled into the tribal areas of western Pakistan, where they began the long process of rebuilding their devastated organization.

Why did the United States military—the most powerful armed force in history—not seal off the Tora Bora region, instead relying only on a small contingent of American Special Forces on the ground? Part of the answer is that the U.S. military was a victim of its own earlier successes. In Afghanistan the Pentagon and CIA had just secured one of the most stunning unconventional military victories in modern history, overthrowing the Taliban in a matter of weeks with only
some four hundred American soldiers
and intelligence officers on the ground, working with the tens of thousands of men in the Northern Alliance and the targeted wrath of the U.S. Air Force.