Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (8 page)

The man responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, along with many of his top lieutenants, was making his escape. Why was there no effort to put more American boots on the ground, beyond the total of several dozen Delta operators, Green Berets,
U.S. Air Force tactical air controllers, and CIA officers already in Tora Bora? Lieutenant General DeLong says the Pentagon did not want to put many American soldiers on the ground because of a concern that they
would be treated like enemies by the locals: “The mountains of Tora Bora are situated deep in territory controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and any outsiders. 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.”

Contributing to the sense that Afghans were implacably opposed to foreign troops on their soil was an article titled “Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires” in the November 2001 issue of the influential
Foreign Affairs
magazine, by veteran CIA officer Milton Bearden, who had overseen the Agency’s effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets. Bearden
made the case that large numbers of American boots on the ground would simply replicate the failures of the Soviets in Afghanistan in the twentieth century and the British in the nineteenth century.

The Pentagon was also quite risk-averse at the time, something that is hard now to recall following the years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
At this stage in the Afghan War, more journalists had died in the conflict than U.S. soldiers, and during the 1999 conflict in Kosovo,
not a single American had died in combat. The leaders of the U.S. military seemed to have convinced themselves that the American public could not tolerate casualties—even in pursuit of Osama bin Laden.

There was also the matter of Iraq, which had diverted the Pentagon’s attention. In late November, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told General Franks that President Bush “wants us to
look for options in Iraq.” Already in the middle of one war, in Afghanistan, Franks was nonplussed, telling his staff, “Goddam!
What the fuck are they talking about?” Yet on December 4, he briefed
Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials regarding war plans for Iraq, drawing on the existing contingency plan,
an eight-hundred-page document. Rumsfeld did not find the war plans at all satisfactory. “Well, General,” he admonished Franks, “you have a lot of work ahead of you.”
Franks then rebriefed Rumsfeld on the plan for the invasion of Iraq, on December 12, the very same day that al-Qaeda’s leaders began their escape from Tora Bora under cover of a cease-fire agreement.

Years later, Franks
explained why he did not send more U.S. soldiers to take on al-Qaeda’s hard core at Tora Bora:

General Dell Dailey, who headed Joint Special Operations Command, shared some of Franks’s concerns: “
There was no question it would have taken a huge number of folks to seal Tora Bora.… We’re talking December. Every hilltop is covered in snow at this point, every location needed logistics support.” Dailey’s ground commander dismissed the idea of introducing more troops, saying to Dailey, “
No fucking way. We have won this war with special operations and CIA without a conventional footprint and without any of the negativeness that comes back with a massive U.S. force. Let’s
not do it.” Brigadier General James N. Mattis, the commander of twelve hundred marines then stationed near Kandahar,
traveled up to Bagram Air Base, near Kabul, to discuss with Dailey the idea of putting a force of marines into Tora Bora. In the end, no marines or any other additional U.S. military forces were deployed to Tora Bora.

Susan Glasser, who covered the Tora Bora battle for the
Washington Post
, recalled that initially there were “fifty to seventy journalists; at the height of the battle a week or so in, perhaps one hundred.” That was slightly more than the total number of Western soldiers at Tora Bora. Given that scores of journalists made it to the battle, could the Pentagon have deployed additional soldiers to Tora Bora? Yes. There were
about two thousand American troops already in the Afghan theater. In Afghanistan’s neighbor to the north, Uzbekistan, were stationed some one thousand soldiers of the Tenth Mountain Division. More than one thousand marines were also stationed near Kandahar. And it would have taken
less than a week to deploy an additional eight hundred soldiers of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division from their headquarters at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, to Tora Bora. Of course, such a force would have had to deal with the treacherous weather conditions and high altitudes of Tora Bora and with fierce resistance from al-Qaeda. There was also a limited number of helicopters in theater, which would have made getting more troops into Tora Bora
logistically difficult. However, no effort was made to see if these obstacles might be overcome.

Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, later said that there were “conflicting reports” about bin Laden’s whereabouts at the time, and that
President Bush was never asked to make a decision about sending more soldiers into Tora Bora, which
Bush confirms. Why this didn’t happen remains a mystery that may, in part, be explained by the fact that the Bush administration had just achieved one of the signal military victories of the modern era, overthrowing
the Taliban regime in just three weeks with
only some three hundred U.S. Special Forces and one hundred CIA officers on the ground. Why change an approach that had worked so well up to that point?

Beginning December 12, with no blocking forces from the marines or any other American military unit to stop them,
a group of more than two dozen of bin Laden’s bodyguards hiked out of Tora Bora and toward Pakistan. They were arrested in Pakistan on December 15 and handed over to the Americans. Bin Laden was not with them. He and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had shrewdly decided to split up and stay in Afghanistan. Zawahiri left the mountainous redoubt with Uthman,
one of bin Laden’s sons.
Bin Laden went to say good-bye to Uthman, not knowing when, or if, he would see him again, saying, “My son, we are keeping our oath, fighting jihad in the path of Allah.”
Accompanied by some of his guards, al-Qaeda’s leader fled with another of his sons, seventeen-year-old Muhammad.

As bin Laden abandoned the battlefield at Tora Bora, he wrote
a final testament warning his children away from his path in life: “Forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have chosen a road fraught with dangers and for this sake suffered from hardships, embitterment, betrayal, and treachery … I advise you not to work with al-Qaeda.” To his wives, he said, “You knew that the road was full of thorns and mines. You left the comfort of your relatives and chose to share the same hardships with me. You renounced worldly pleasure with me; renounce them more after me. Do not think of remarrying and you need only to look after our children.”

Bin Laden went to the house of Awad Gul, a trusted ally near Jalalabad,
to rest. Before the battle, bin Laden had entrusted Gul
with $100,000. Soon after, bin Laden, an accomplished rider,
went by horse to the northeast, to Kunar province, an ideal place to disappear. Its twelve-thousand-foot peaks, dense trees, and evergreen shrubs made detection of movement from the air difficult; it had a small population hostile to outsiders; and there was no central government to speak of.

A couple of weeks after the Tora Bora battle had ended, a visibly aged
bin Laden released a video in which he contemplated his own death. “I am just a poor slave of God,” he said. “If I live or die, the war will continue.” He did not move his left side during the half-hour videotape, which suggested that he had sustained some kind of serious injury. A few months later, on an al-Qaeda website, the ten-year-old Hamza bin Laden posted a poem
bemoaning the fate that had befallen him and his family: “Oh, Father! Why have they showered us with bombs like rain, having no mercy for a child?” On the same website, bin Laden replied, “Pardon me, my son, but I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security is gone, but danger remains.”

On January 4, 2002, at President Bush’s vacation ranch in Texas, Michael Morell had the delicate task of informing Bush that it was the CIA’s assessment that bin Laden had fought at the Battle of Tora Bora and survived.
Bush was incensed at this and became hostile, as if Morell himself were the culprit.

Two and a half years later, during a close election race, Democratic nominee John Kerry made a campaign issue of whether bin Laden could have been finished off at Tora Bora. The notion that there had been a real opportunity to kill bin Laden at that point was a “
wild claim,” Bush said, and Vice President Dick Cheney termed it “
absolute garbage.” Nevertheless, from the totality of the available
accounts, it is clear that when 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 away, disappeared from the American radar, and slowly began rebuilding his organization.

B
IN LADEN RETREATED
into the mountains of Kunar with his organization on life support. Al-Qaeda, “the base” in Arabic, had just lost the best base it ever had. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda had run something of a parallel state to that of the Taliban, conducting its own independent foreign policy by attacking American embassies, warships, and the centers of U.S. military and economic power, as well as churning out thousands of militant foot soldiers in its training camps.

This pre-9/11 al-Qaeda was quite bureaucratic, with its various committees for media outreach, military planning, business affairs, and even farming; its top-down CEO; the salaries it paid many of its members; the comprehensive training it provided its recruits; and the detailed application forms that were required to attend its training camps.
The group’s bylaws, which ran to thirty-two pages in an English translation, covered annual budgets, salaries, medical benefits, policies for al-Qaeda members with disabilities, grounds for dismissal from the group, and vacation allowances.

Al-Qaeda’s leaders were the type of micromanagers familiar to
anyone who has toiled in the office of a large organization. Mohammed Atef, the group’s military commander, once fired off a memo to a subordinate, complaining, “
I was very upset with what you did. I obtained 75,000 rupees for your family’s trip to Egypt. I learned that you did not submit the voucher to the accountant, and that you made reservations for 40,000 rupees and kept the remainder.” In a similar vein, Ayman al-Zawahiri chastised members of al-Qaeda in Yemen who had
splurged on an expensive fax machine. For an organization devoted to revolutionary holy war, the pre-9/11 al-Qaeda sometimes had the feel of an insurance company, albeit a heavily armed one.

This bureaucratic structure was demolished by bin Laden’s foolhardy decision to attack the United States. In June 2002 an al-Qaeda member wrote
a letter to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the operational commander of 9/11, admonishing him, “Stop rushing into action and consider all the fatal and successive disasters that have afflicted us during a period of no more than six months.” The writer complained that bin Laden ignored any advice that didn’t fit with his view that attacking the United States had been a master stroke: “If someone opposes him, he immediately puts forward another person to render an opinion in his support.” Bin Laden, the writer continued, didn’t understand what had befallen al-Qaeda since the 9/11 attacks, and kept pushing for action by KSM; meanwhile, jihadist groups in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe had all suffered tremendous losses. The writer urged KSM to halt completely any further terrorist attacks “until we sit down and consider the disaster we caused.”

This internal critique of bin Laden was substantially amplified in public two years later, when
Abu Musab al-Suri published on the Internet a fifteen-hundred-page history of the jihadist movement. Suri was a deeply serious Syrian intellectual who had known bin Laden
since the 1980s—perhaps the most thoughtful strategist of bin Laden’s inner circle. He had spent much of the 1990s living in Spain and later in London, where he wrote for obscure militant jihadist publications. In the year before 9/11 Suri had run his own training camp in Afghanistan, where he advocated a flatter, more networked structure for al-Qaeda, rather than the hierarchical structure then in force.

In hiding after the fall of the Taliban, and knowing that he was likely to be arrested at some point (as he eventually was, in Pakistan in 2005), Suri spent much of his time on the run, writing his massive history of the jihadist movement. It recounts the devastation that al-Qaeda and allied groups suffered following 9/11: “
We are passing through the most difficult of circumstances and are living the climax of affliction.… The Americans have eliminated the majority of the armed jihadist movement’s leadership, infrastructure, supporters, and friends.”
Suri wrote that common estimates that three thousand to four thousand militant jihadists had been killed or captured since 9/11 were actually on the low side.

He concluded: “
America destroyed the Islamic Emirate [of the Taliban] in Afghanistan, which had become the refuge for the mujahideen. They killed hundreds of mujahideen who defended the Emirate. Then America captured more than six hundred Jihadists from different Arab countries and Pakistan and jailed them. The Jihad movement rose to glory in the 1960s, and continued through the ’70s and ’80s, and resulted in the rise of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, but it was destroyed after 9/11.” For a longtime intimate of bin Laden and a major jihadist strategist to say publicly that the attacks on Manhattan and Washington had resulted in the wholesale destruction of much of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied militant groups was quite significant.