Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (6 page)

It was from Afghanistan that he issued his declaration of war against the West in February 1998, signed by himself,
his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri, and three other Islamist leaders and faxed to the newspaper
Al-Quds Al-Arabi
in London. It purportedly came from the World Islamic Front for Combat Against the Jews and Crusaders, and took the form of a fatwa—although none of the signatories possessed the qualifications required to issue such a religious decree binding on all Muslims:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.”
⁷

This bizarre concern among men about to commit mass murder with obtaining a religious authorization for their intended actions, even if they had to manufacture it themselves, is actually quite understandable in view of Islam’s strong emphasis on the legality (under Shari’ah law) of one’s actions. They genuinely felt that they had to produce a legal justification for mass-casualty attacks on American
civilians and others before they launched the first of those atrocities, the truck-bomb attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in August of 1998.

The attacks certainly did produce mass casualties (more than two hundred killed and an estimated four thousand wounded), but only twelve of the fatal casualties were Americans, and the Clinton administration’s response was correspondingly modest: merely some cruise missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan. To elicit the huge American response that al Qaeda wanted would require a much bigger death toll, and probably a shift of venue to the United States homeland as well, but was that a conclusion that bin Laden reached only after the East African attacks? It’s quite likely, as he would have been feeling his way forward in relatively unknown territory. The two years that separate those East African attacks from the vastly more ambitious operation in September 2001 are just about right, in terms of the time he would have needed to draw his conclusions and plan the 9/11 attacks.

One other intriguing question arises about this period, in view of the fact that bin Laden spent the whole time in the camp in southern Afghanistan that his old friend Mullah Mohammed Omar Mansoor (“Mullah Omar”), then the leader of the Taliban, had made available to him. Did he keep Omar informed of his plans? He could have kept him in the dark if he had wished, as the actual preparations for the attacks were all done by bin Laden’s al Qaeda colleagues in Europe and the United States, and he controlled his own
communications. We will probably never know the answer for certain, but a consideration of the two men’s relative positions suggests that bin Laden would have been unwise to tell Omar what he was planning to do.

From bin Laden’s point of view, the 9/11 attacks made good sense. He was a homeless revolutionary with big ideas but little in the way of accomplishments, and the revolution he sought might never get off the ground if he could not somehow provoke the United States into invading a Muslim country. The country in question would certainly be Afghanistan, since the U.S. would quickly work out who had ordered the attack and Afghanistan was his base. Bin Laden had nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, if the United States invaded Afghanistan.

Now consider the position of Mullah Omar in 2001. He no longer sought a revolution; he was already in power, and he was engaged in putting the full Islamist programme into effect in Afghanistan. An American invasion might be advantageous for bin Laden’s comparable project, but it would drive the Taliban from power, destroy all their achievements, and send them back to the hills as mere guerrillas for another decade or more, even if they won in the end. The two men may have been as close as brothers, but in the circumstances it would have required a great leap of faith for bin Laden to have confided his specific plans to Omar beforehand. He probably didn’t do so.

So the attacks went ahead as planned on September 11, 2001, and some three thousand people, the great majority
of them Americans, died on live television before the horrified eyes of their fellow citizens. It all seems inevitable in retrospect, and in this case it probably was, once bin Laden got his Big Idea. A great deal of what followed did not conform to his expectations, but in the broadest sense he got what he bargained for.

CHAPTER 3

JIHAD: THE AFGHAN PHASE, 2001–2003

T
here was a popular conversation game in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks called “What would Al Gore have done?” Would things have turned out better had the Florida vote recounts gone in Gore’s favour in the 2000 election, so that Gore would have been in the White House in September 2001? They would probably have gone better in the long run, but nobody could have handled the immediate American response to the attack better than George W. Bush and his senior colleagues.

We will probably never know the name of the evil genius who came up with the idea of attacking the Twin Towers in New York City with aircraft, but it certainly met bin Laden’s requirement for a terrorist extravaganza so spectacular that the American government would be compelled to respond in the way that al Qaeda wanted. After the damp squib of President Clinton’s response to the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998, it was clear to the plotters that the majority of the victims in this case had to be Americans, and that there had to be a lot of them. But it was not enough that many Americans be killed in a terrorist attack; they had to be
killed in a dramatic and visually unforgettable way, and on home soil.

This is actually quite hard to arrange. You can bomb some huge political rally or sporting event and cause mass casualties, but you will probably not get the toll up into the thousands, and the nature of the pictures—shots of people fleeing, shots of people down, perhaps a shaky video clip of the flash of the explosion—will not adequately convey the scale of the event anyway. Attacks on mass transport offer crowds of potential victims and the possibility of dramatic collisions, crashes or sinkings, but you can’t count on anybody getting good footage of it at the right moment (unless you shoot your own), and the pictures shot later by the networks will be identical to the sort of stuff they churn out after any other train or plane crash. How are you going to trademark this as a
terrorist
attack, so huge and uniquely horrible that something very big must be done about it?

Numbers of dead alone may not do it. The 9/11 attacks killed about three thousand people, but another three thousand Americans died in road accidents in the same month (and another three thousand died of gunshot wounds). What counted most were the images, and the al Qaeda planner chose well: civilian airliners sailing serenely across a clear blue sky and smashing into arrogantly tall buildings; those same buildings in flames in the very heartland of global finance; hundred-storey towers collapsing on their trapped occupants in a way
that nobody had ever seen before. It created exactly the sense of utter shock that al Qaeda needed, and made it inevitable that the U.S. government would have to invade Afghanistan in order to root out the authors of the atrocity. But it did not actually mandate how Washington had to do the job.

The people around President Bush happened to know the Middle East well. Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had all served in senior posts under his father, President George H.W. Bush, during the first Gulf War a decade before: they had met all the Arab leaders many times, they knew the terrain, and they even knew a fair amount about Arab politics. It’s unlikely that they knew a lot about the theory and practice of terrorism (except Powell, who would undoubtedly have been taught it as a young officer), but they were all people whose experience would lead them to ask the right question: What did al Qaeda’s planners want America to do next? And the answer was obvious: invade Afghanistan.

They would certainly have known from history that invading Afghanistan is generally a bad idea. It’s quite easy to conquer the provinces and take control of Kabul; pretty well every invading army has got that far. But it’s very hard for a foreign army to stay in Afghanistan with any comfort for more than a year or two, because the Afghans hate being invaded (it has happened too often in their history), and almost every male Afghan, at least
in rural areas, has access to firearms. On the other hand, American public opinion would accept nothing less than an invasion. The American media, of course, were demanding decisive military action by lunchtime tomorrow at the very latest, but the White House held its fire and made its plans.

The most important element in the plan came from George Tenet, a Democratic appointee whom Bush had the sense to leave in place as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Only two days after the New York and Washington attacks, Tenet proposed that there should be no conventional invasion of Afghanistan at all. Instead, CIA paramilitary teams would enter the country secretly and buy up allies among the various tribal forces in the north of the country that were still resisting the authority of Mullah Omar’s Taliban regime in Kabul. They would bring in communications equipment to keep those tribal forces in constant contact with their new American allies, and later they would be joined by U.S. Special Forces teams whose main task was target designation for American aircraft. Then, when everything was ready, U.S. Air Force and Navy planes would bomb the bejesus out of the Taliban forces in the trenches facing the various ethnic groups that made up the Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen and Hazaras), the northern militias would advance, and the fighting should be practically over before American ground forces arrived in the country.

It worked exactly according to plan. The so-called
Northern Alliance was barely a real alliance at all: outnumbered two-to-one by Taliban troops, the various ethnic militias often fought each other, and the one widely respected leader of the alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had been killed by an al Qaeda suicide team posing as television journalists two days before 9/11. But the first ten-man CIA team arrived in northern Afghanistan on September 26 bearing $3 million in cash and promising American air support to General Mohammed Fahim, Massoud’s successor. American aircraft began bombing al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan on October 7, although they did not spend much time on the Taliban troops facing the Northern Alliance until the other CIA teams and U.S. Special Forces troops were in position all along the 550-mile (800-kilometre) front line that stretched across northern Afghanistan.

That took a further month, and the Bush administration, despite its unilateralist instincts, spent the time gaining a form of legal authority for the attack from the U.N. Security Council and building a coalition of allies for the job of peacekeeping in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Even the bombing was done with extra care, avoiding civilian casualties as much as possible. One estimate is that the United States dropped eighteen thousand bombs on Afghanistan during the five weeks of the war but killed only five thousand civilians. Any ratio lower than one bomb to one dead civilian is evidence of a policy of strict restraint in the choice of targets.

Finally, in early November, six CIA political teams and a larger number of Special Forces target designation teams were in place on the front line, and massive U.S. air power was unleashed on the Taliban troops facing the Northern Alliance. The bombing was so accurate and so relentless that the Taliban troops broke and abandoned their positions in many places along the front. Some Taliban commanders had already been bribed to switch sides when the offensive began, and when they kept their promises the Taliban retreat swiftly turned into a rout. Mazar-i-Sharif, the largest city in the north, fell on November 9, and Kabul itself was evacuated by the Taliban regime on November 12. When the Northern Alliance’s troops entered the capital on the following day, there were still only 110 CIA officers and 316 U.S. Special Forces personnel in the whole country.

By December 7, with the fall of Mullah Omar’s headquarters in the southwestern city of Kandahar, the Taliban regime was history. There were a few disappointments: Omar got away on his motorcycle, and there were strong suspicions that Osama bin Laden and many of his senior colleagues survived the huge air strikes during the December battle of Tora Bora, a cave complex in the mountains along the Pakistani border, and escaped into Pakistan. But as a whole the operation was a remarkable success.