Al-Qaeda (44 page)

It was April 2002 and the ‘War on Terror’ was in full swing. With a dozen other reporters I had flown out of Bagram, the main airbase 30 miles north of Kabul, in a British Royal Air Force Chinook helicopter, swept low over the Shomali plains, skirted the capital’s western suburbs and then dropped through the hills that circle the city and out into Logar province. The Ministry of Defence had refused to tell us where the British component of ‘Operation Mountain Lion’, the US-led coalition’s campaign to clear Afghanistan of ‘AQT’ (Al-Qaeda and Taliban), had been deployed but, as the Chinooks circled above the landing zone, it was easy to work out where we were. On the southern horizon, beyond the town of Gardez, were the Shah-e-Kot mountains where the Americans had clashed with ‘AQT’ two months previously in the only set-piece engagement since Tora Bora. The US-led forces had found the resistance from a few hundred former Taliban and foreign fighters unexpectedly stiff and had suffered relatively heavy casualties. It was in the aftermath of that confrontation that fresh British combat forces had been deployed. On the eastern horizon I
could see the hills I had driven through on my way to Khost six months before.

The British troops had set up a forward base to allow helicopters to refuel close to the combat zone and to provide a staging post for troops on their way to the fighting. There was, Major Green told us, a significant risk of a mortar or rocket attack. But it was nothing like the fighting in the autumn or indeed any other conflict that I had ever covered. There was no thump of artillery, no rattling small arms fire, no smoke, no flames and no streams of scared refugees. We watched the distant hills. Even through binoculars they revealed no more than fissured gulleys, scrubby forest and interminable scree slopes.

A Royal Marines mortar and heavy machine-gun troop was sitting on the ground waiting for their transport. Their rucksacks were vast, swollen with ammunition, rations and huge metal bits of weapon. They weighed, the men proudly said, as much as 140 lbs. Their desert battle fatigues had been softened by dust and sweat and hung heavily from their bodies. The men smoked and watched the hills and spoke in quiet voices.

More helicopters rotored in and out. The soldiers guarding the base scanned the middle distance through their gun sights. The brand new, heavily armed, desert jeeps were lined up beside the camouflage nets. There were dark rain clouds in the south and shafts of light flickered through them and played over the plain.

For several weeks the Royal Marines scoured sections of Afghan hillside, finding very little except old arms caches and truculent shepherds. Elsewhere in the country thousands of American troops were engaged on similar missions, dubbed ‘clean and sweep’ to avoid the Vietnam-era connotations of ‘search and destroy’. I spent several weeks at Bagram as a guest of the 10th Mountain Division. Every evening I went for a run. I would jog out of the journalists’ tent in the 101st Airborne’s encampment, past the Spanish medical teams, past the Royal Marines and their six 105mm guns, and out onto the old Soviet-built airstrip where long lines of helicopters, Apaches, Blackhawks, Chinooks, and A10 Tankbuster jets gleamed in the low evening light. During the
night, we slept fitfully, woken by the aircraft ferrying special forces troops out into the hills.

Allied troops had moved into Bagram within days of the fall of Kabul. During the spring of 2002, as the structures of the camp gradually grew more permanent, the aims of the military operations subtly changed too. At Tora Bora the objectives had been explicit: find, capture or kill bin Laden and as many of his men and his Taliban allies as possible. By May, American and British military planners were talking about ‘denying’ territory to the militants instead. Their job, they said, was to keep Afghanistan ‘al-Qaeda-free’. It was a tacit admission that most of the people they had wanted to catch had escaped. It was clear that hunting them was a job for which the hardware that had been assembled at Bagram was ill-suited.

The failure of the Marines to get a single confirmed ‘kill’ in their short campaign was understandable. The task they had been expected to complete was unrealistic. The professionalism of the soldiers themselves, and the early achievements of the relatively competent and popular United Nations peacekeeping mission in Kabul, were forgotten. This was a pity because the war of 2001, though it cost the lives of many civilians in Afghanistan, gave the country the best opportunity for several decades to build a peaceful and secure future.
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The foreign militants who were causing so much trouble and were so loathed by most Afghans had been expelled, the Taliban, whose increasing radicalism far outweighed the enhanced security they brought, had been removed from power, and the interference of regional powers, notably Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, in the country’s internal politics had been, at least temporarily, largely curtailed. Millions of refugees, exiled from their homes for up to twenty-five years, were returning. In the autumn of 2001 I had been deeply uneasy about the prospect of a ground war in Afghanistan, worried about the country being plunged into another nightmarish cycle of occupation, resistance and anarchy. When, a year to the day after the start of the hostilities, I visited a girls’ school in Jalalabad and saw hundreds of neatly uniformed pupils being taught under the trees in the playground because the classrooms were all full, I felt my concern had been misplaced.

And, another year on, my optimism remained intact. In November
2003, two years after the US-led invasion, I flew direct from Delhi to Kabul instead of doing the back-breaking drive from Jalalabad. I could have flown from Istanbul, Dubai or even Hamburg. The airport in the capital, where once two or three Taliban guards had rifled halfheartedly through the baggage of the few passengers on aid flights, was packed. Though acute inequality and profound poverty existed, large portions of the city were being transformed by economic development. Kabul’s population had grown to an estimated 2.8 million, a million more than five years previously and much ‘invisible’ work had been done rebuilding financial and administrative structures to allow banking and the payment of civil servants. The streets were full of traffic. I flew down to Kandahar on the first Ariana flight for twenty years to travel between the two cities.

Kandahar was as changed as Kabul. I broke the Ramadan fast with Yusuf Pashtun, the governor imposed on the city and province by President Hamid Karzai, in the same complex where I had once interviewed his one-legged Taliban predecessor. The streets outside were newly surfaced and construction was underway everywhere. There was even an internet café and a functioning mobile phone network.
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And, though the Taliban had certainly regrouped for the moment, they were still contained high in the hills in the north of Kandahar province, in the central Oruzgan, in Zabul and, significantly, along the border. I interviewed a number of Taliban captives in the prison of Kandahar. Most were young Afghans. Many had been inducted into the Taliban by clerics in the medressas in and around Quetta after travelling to the city merely to complete their education. Some had set out specifically to join the Taliban, but often because they needed the money that was being offered. Some, of course, had joined because they felt a strong desire to fight the Americans and their alleged ‘stooges’. Many fought for a mixture of different reasons. But, though described as ‘resurgent’ by many, in fact the few thousand fighters that at that time composed the Taliban – even when swollen when the leaders called in all their tribal allies and former comrades – were enough to destabilize the regime in Kabul but not overthrow it. The movement had none of the sympathy it had once commanded across so much of south and eastern Afghanistan. Instead, the driving force
behind the regrouping were the Deobandi clerical and political networks in Pakistan. Events after December 2001 made it very obvious that the Taliban were, as they always had been, a cross-border phenomenon. The population of the southeast were divided, confused and increasingly bitter but were yet to back the men who had ruled them in the mid and late 1990s.

But even at that stage it was clear that the Taliban or, more accurately the neo-Taliban, were not without potential. One afternoon I drove out to Sangesar village, a dirt-poor cluster of mud buildings where Mullah Omar had been a preacher before forming the Taliban in 1994. Locals there told me they did not want the Taliban back. They just wanted someone who would build them a school, a clinic, roads and a water pump. They said they would support anyone who provided them.
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And this was clearly the problem. The amount of money contributed by Western powers, given the sums spent on fighting in Afghanistan in the last twenty years, had been miserly. The way it was being spent was also badly co-ordinated and inefficient. In Kandahar, I visited several filthy wards in the dilapidated hospital that were full of malnourished children. Many were close to starvation. Out in the more rural areas, where no help at all was available, children were dying. That such hardship could persist two years after Afghanistan was invaded by the richest country the world has ever seen appalled me. Even if shame did not force action, I wrote in the
Observer
, then self-interest should. It was clear that many Afghans, particularly in the south east, were becoming angry at the slow pace of change. This general disillusionment had obviously been exacerbated in some areas by the insensitive behaviour of American ground troops and the seeming inability of the US air force to distinguish civilians from combatants.
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As long as this downward trend continued, I wrote, there would be a significant risk that extremists would garner sufficient support to become a serious threat.
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Of course, it was wrong to expect too much, too soon. As one Western diplomat wryly told me in Kabul in the summer of 2002, ‘Afghanistan is not Sweden’. Indeed, in many ways an old pattern had reasserted itself in the country with a Durrani Pashtun head of state in
Kabul whose power depended on patronage and works funded by foreign powers; strong particularist powers in the provinces with an uneasy relationship, rooted in mutual benefit and mutual competition, with the metropolis; a wide gulf between the cities, especially Kabul, and the countryside; a strong degree of ethnic tension, and continuing bloodletting as rival warlords jockey for position. None of these things were new in Afghanistan. Most were 200 or more years old, even if many had been exacerbated by decades of war. And though the situation was very delicate the simple fact remained that, as a result of the forcible deposition of the Taliban, Afghanistan’s 25 million people had a greater chance of a better future than they had had for a long time. Whether they would take it, or be allowed to take it, remained to be seen.

The Afghan campaign of 2001 and the effort to stabilize the country afterwards, however, was only one component of a wider ‘War on Terror’. Even as plans for the war in Afghanistan were being drawn up, American intelligence and military experts were launching wideranging operations designed to preempt potential threats from existing plots, disrupt ‘terrorist’ networks, attack extremists’ financial structures, dissuade states from offering support to militants and, of course, track down those who were believed to be the heart of ‘Al-Qaeda’ and responsible for the 11 September attacks. The way the ‘war’ was being envisaged was made evident by the fact, revealed by American reporter Bob Woodward, that President George Bush kept a list of around two dozen senior ‘al-Qaeda figures’ – the hardest of the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ – in his desk in the Oval office and crossed their names off as they were killed or captured.
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One of the first names to be struck through was that of Mohammed Atef, bin Laden’s veteran military commander, who was killed by a missile strike on the outskirts of Kabul in November 2001. Anas al Liby, another senior figure linked to the 1998 embassy bombings and other attacks, was almost certainly killed on the Shomali plains around the same time. The deaths of other less well-known, more junior figures followed; including Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a Yemeni linked to the strike on the USS
Cole
, who was killed by a Hellfire missile fired
from a pilotless drone over his homeland in November 2002. And, though they may have escaped death, many other senior men were captured. In March 2002 Abu Zubaydah, the master logistician in charge of the administration of the training camps, was seized in a safehouse in the eastern Pakistani city of Faisalabad. In September 2002 Ramzi bin al-Shibh, his location possibly betrayed by a boastful interview with al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arabic-language satellite channel, was captured after a gun battle in Karachi.
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In March 2003 came the biggest catch yet. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s fifteen-year career ended when Pakistani and American secret servicemen burst into the house in Rawalpindi where he was sleeping. Over the next few months, his statements to interrogators would make it clear that he was the real operational mastermind of the 11 September attacks. Five months after Shaikh Mohammed’s capture, Riduan Isamuddin, aka Hambali, the main link man between the al-Qaeda hardcore and militants in the Far East, was arrested near Bangkok. American officials were soon able to claim, with some justification, that two thirds of the ‘al-Qaeda’ leadership had been eliminated one way or another. By any standards, this was a major achievement.

There was also the physical damage to al-Qaeda. The war of 2001 meant that the system of camps in Afghanistan, built up over nearly two decades, was entirely lost to the Islamic radical movement. The meagre hardware that al-Qaeda and others had managed to amass was also lost – as was much of their research and such archives as they had been keeping. Afghanistan had provided a unique haven from which to plan and organize and there was nowhere, despite the occasional and unconfirmed reports of small-scale training operations in east and west Africa, in remote parts of Bangladesh, in Saudi Arabia or on isolated islands in the Far East, that could replace it. In addition, the years after 11 September had seen the US or its allies (and its surveillance satellites) establish a presence in (or over) the Yemen, Somalia and the central Asian republics. American special forces boots even trod the desert sands of northern Mali. The consequences of this denial of ‘operational space’ were rapidly obvious. By January 2004, Saif al-Adel, the Egyptian former special operations colonel who had run much of the training in the Afghan camps, was reduced to posting tips
about the teaching of terrorist skills on the internet. With no physical locations available for the instruction sessions that he had been running for over a decade, the only place left to him was cyberspace.
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And with intelligence services across the planet now alive to the threat they posed, senior Islamic activists had to work under much greater pressure than ever before. All this made coordinating and planning attacks much, much harder.