Known and Unknown (49 page)

M
ost Taliban and al-Qaida forces had been neutralized, at least for the moment, with one important exception: the holdouts in the mountainous area along the border with Pakistan known as Tora Bora, meaning “black dust.” The peaks of the White Mountains are among the highest in the world with altitudes of fifteen thousand feet. The eastern reaches of the mountain range include the legendary Khyber Pass, the notch through which armies had made their way onto the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years.

Tora Bora and its surrounding valleys were so treacherous to armies—any army—that much of the territory was out of the control of both the Afghan and the Pakistan governments. Local Pashtun tribal chiefs had been the only authorities there for centuries. They recognized no national boundaries and no earthly laws but their own. During their fight against the Soviet Union, many of the Afghan mujahideen found refuge in Tora Bora's intricate labyrinth of caves. Now an unknown number of al-Qaida fighters sought shelter there. Among them, some speculated, was Osama bin Laden.

When Franks and CENTCOM were contemplating military options in the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the peaks were already covered in snow and ice. Freezing rain and bitter winds buffeted the lower elevations. CENTCOM had bombed Tora Bora since the start of the war, aware that bin Laden might flee there. “Tora Bora is a busy chunk of earth,” said a U.S. military pilot, referring to the bombing campaign. “The mountains are lit up like the Fourth of July.”
¹³

I was prepared to authorize the deployment of more American troops into the region if the commanders requested them. Franks decided that mounting an offensive of conventional ground forces was not a good idea. The tribes along the border were hostile to outsiders, and they knew the territory. Others did not. Regular Pakistani military forces penetrated the territory only with difficulty, and generally suffered substantial losses. The insertion of large numbers of our conventional forces would have taken time, Franks reasoned, providing a window for terrorists to escape. The marshalling of American troops also could have led to fierce engagements against local Pashtuns, causing casualties on both sides. Further, an intrusion into the Pashtun heartland with thousands of American conventional ground forces, who were unfamiliar with the language, the cultures, and the territory, might have reversed the hard work that had convinced a large number of the Pashtuns to cooperate with us.

I believed a decision of this nature, which hinged on numerous operational details, was best made by the military commander in charge. Franks had to determine whether attempting to apprehend one man on the run, whose whereabouts were not known with certainty, was worth the risks inherent in such a venture. It was not an easy call. Though a number of people, including some at the CIA, suspected that bin Laden might have taken refuge in the Tora Bora area, no one knew that for certain. Earlier in the war we had received several reports of supposed sightings of both Mullah Omar and bin Laden, which all proved to be false.
^*

When the President said he was going to get bin Laden “dead or alive,” I noted that I had my preference.
¹⁴
Still, the emphasis on bin Laden concerned me. To my mind, the justification for our military operations in Afghanistan was not the capture or killing of one person. Our country's primary purpose was to try to prevent terrorists from attacking us again. There was far more to the threat posed by Islamist extremism than one man. I also suspect that if we had added a large conventional force and U.S. casualties rose in Tora Bora, the same people who faulted the decision to keep the troop presence small would have blamed us for causing needless American deaths.

Instead of a large American invasion of Tora Bora, the CIA and special forces recruited a Pashtun coalition, known as the Eastern Alliance and led by General Hazrat Ali, to provide the bulk of the manpower. Though not publicized, U.S. special operators joined the Eastern Alliance's advance, traveling from ridgeline to ridgeline and taking fire from al-Qaida positions. While Eastern Alliance forces were gaining control of more of the ridges around Tora Bora each day, each evening at sundown they would leave their positions and return to their villages in the valleys to break their fasts for Ramadan. Learning of this, I began to rethink the question of whether we needed to insert more U.S. forces.

On December 20, I sent a memo to CIA Director George Tenet saying that we might be missing an opportunity in Tora Bora, and perhaps we should reconsider the earlier decision against bringing in more U.S. forces. “How do we get Ali to get his forces to move?” I asked Tenet. “It seems to me we have to get a full court press on it, or else we are going to have to use some of our own.”
¹⁵
I made it clear to Franks that if he believed he needed more troops, he would get them as quickly as possible. As I told him, I wanted to know “whether or not we should have had more people on the ground to avoid having so many people get away.”
¹⁶

Much later, I learned that a CIA operative on the ground had requested some Rangers to help with Tora Bora.
¹⁷
He even wrote a book on the subject.
¹⁸
I never received such a request from either Franks or Tenet and cannot imagine denying it if I had. If someone thought bin Laden was cornered, as later claimed, I found it surprising that Tenet had never called me to urge Franks to support their operation. I can only presume that either their chain of command was not engaged or that they failed to convince Tenet of the quality of their information. Another explanation is that their recollections may be imperfect.

 

T
hroughout the campaign in Afghanistan, officials at the State Department and the CIA deliberated over who they thought might best run the eventual post-Taliban government. I had doubts about the ability of Americans to make that kind of a decision. We did not want to repeat the Soviet mistake of installing a government that would be widely seen as a puppet regime. I favored putting in motion a process that would allow Afghans to select their own leadership.

I was pleased when our administration worked with the United Nations to help enable Afghanistan's various ethnic and political groups to deliberate on their path ahead. Over eight days of negotiations in Bonn, Germany, assisted by Zalmay Khalilzad (a future U.S. ambassador to the country), the Afghans came to agreement.
¹⁹
They named Hamid Karzai as the head of an interim administration. Karzai had been seen as a likely candidate in part because he did not have a large military force and seemed willing to work across tribal and ethnic lines. The interim administration would oversee the convening of something that I, and I suspect most Americans, had never heard of: a loya jirga, or a traditional Afghan tribal council. The first loya jirga would establish a transitional governing authority. A second loya jirga would lead to the drafting of a constitution. The Afghans followed through with these agreements and implemented a form of representative rule in a part of the world that had little tradition of democracy.

 

O
n December 16, 2001, I made my first visit of many to a liberated Afghanistan. It was also the first visit to the country by a senior American official in a quarter of a century. We landed at Bagram Airfield, a decaying facility built by the Soviet Union. Our plane was parked on a runway surrounded by land mines. MiG fighter jets, battered and unusable, lay scattered across the tarmac, vestiges of the Soviet occupation. Parked alongside them were American C-130 transport planes, AC-130 gunships, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, and rows and rows of supplies. I was struck at seeing symbols of these two different eras side-by-side—one of failed conquest, the other of a successful liberation, at least thus far.

As I stepped off the military aircraft, I was greeted by an Afghan honor guard of Northern Alliance fighters standing along the side of the taxiway. American special operators stood with them, sun-drenched and bearded. One of the Americans came forward to greet me, with pride in his voice. “Welcome to Afghanistan, sir,” he said.

“No air of triumphalism marked [Rumsfeld's] visit,” the
New York Times
noted.
²⁰
That was deliberate on my part. I made a conscious decision to arrive in the country in a manner that acknowledged a coalition victory but also that our work was far from done. It was certainly true that al-Qaida terrorists no longer enjoyed the support of a host government in the country, but they still posed a lethal threat. The Taliban had been driven from power, but they were not likely to give up altogether. “It's going to take time and energy and effort and people will be killed in the process of trying to find them and capture them,” I cautioned.
²¹

I met with the incoming leaders of Afghanistan, including Karzai and General Fahim Khan, in a battle-scarred hangar at Bagram. The windows had been blown out. Camouflage netting adorned the walls while Afghan carpets covered the floor—a juxtaposition with which I suspected these hardened leaders of the resistance against the Taliban were familiar.

Karzai wore the lambskin hat that would become a trademark for him. As we sat on folding chairs drinking tea, we began a conversation that would continue for years. From the outset Karzai demonstrated political savvy. One of his first comments referred to the slain Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Massoud, as “our very fine commander” and a “martyred man.”
²²
It suggested that Karzai wanted to be seen as an Afghan, not a Pashtun, and he wanted us to know that. He praised the United States military. “You liberated Afghanistan,” he declared warmly, calling this an opportunity Afghans had long awaited.
²³

One of my final meetings that day—one that was particularly memorable—was with a group of war-worn Americans. The men were part of the special forces teams that had been among the first troops to arrive on the ground in Afghanistan. The commanding officer of ODA 555, “Triple Nickel,” presented me with a faded and tattered Taliban flag that had been flying over Kabul when they arrived. Their A-Team had linked up with Northern Alliance commander Fahim Khan and was the first U.S. Special Forces team to enter the Afghan capital.
²⁴

The approach that Franks, Myers, Wolfowitz, Tenet, and I had favored, putting special operations teams in the thick of the fighting with the Northern Alliance, had worked well. I listened as the team recounted their operations—the stuff of heroic literature but told in a plainspoken manner. Some had taken part in raids against senior al-Qaida and Taliban personnel. It was as admirable a group of young men as any I had ever met.

Their work was a demonstration of the kind of defense transformation that the President envisioned—a mentality of eyes-wide-open situational awareness, can-do determination, and creative adaptability. The U.S. military had not undertaken cavalry charges on horses for many decades, but during the campaign fifty-year-old B-52 bombers were dropping bombs guided by GPS and lasers directed by a small team of Americans on horseback. Some had helped guide one-ton bombs to hit targets a long touchdown's throw from their positions. They were working alongside Afghans who they had never met before, let alone trained with, but along with our Naval and Air Force precision bombing, they had toppled the Taliban in a matter of weeks. Through trial and error, these men tailored tactics, techniques, and procedures to fit the unusual circumstance they faced—bringing devastating force to bear with relatively little American manpower on the ground.

As we talked about their cavalry charge, I asked how many had ever ridden a horse before they arrived in Afghanistan. Only a few hands went up. The rest had had to learn in the most dangerous circumstances imaginable—and, at first, on uncomfortable wooden saddles.
^*

“Tell me what else you need,” I asked them. They had all they needed, they responded. It was the make do with what you have attitude that permeated their ranks.

I appreciated their toughness, but I pressed them. “Tell me what we could do better in the future,” I asked.

Looking ahead, they said they needed to be on the ground sooner, before combat operations began. They needed more time to get into towns and villages and get to know the local populations. They were convinced of the value of enlisting local populations in the fight.

 

F
or his first several months as chairman of Afghanistan's interim government, Karzai was widely viewed as exercising little real authority, and only within a severely restricted sphere. He was deprecated by some as the “mayor of Kabul.”
²⁵
Early on, Pacha Khan Zadran, a Pashtun warlord from the eastern city of Gardez, decided to test the new Afghan leader's mettle. Demanding recognition as a provincial governor, Pacha Khan threatened to ignite a civil war against Karzai's fledgling government with his militia forces. It was a crucial moment for Karzai, and a test of his ability to lead.