The problem of Saddam Hussein made it difficult for the Bush administration to see other issues clearly. The influence of Iraq confrontationists, called neoconservatives or “neocons” by their critics, throughout the executive branch made it difficult for dissenting views to reach the White House. Vice President Cheney had rallied his disciples from the Nixon-Reagan years. In addition to Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cambone, whom he placed near Rumsfeld, Cheney found leverage positions for Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Kenneth Adelman, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and others. Because of her personal rapport with the president Condoleezza Rice did not slow the neocon crusade to remove Saddam Hussein as approved by Congress in the Iraqi Liberation Act (1998). Richard Clarke and CIA director George Tenant found that their warnings about al-Qaeda turned into discussions of state-sponsored terrorism, rogue nuclear programs, and Israeli security—not the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in nonstate terrorist forms. Within the Defense Department, such discussions focused on developing antiballistic missiles of great accuracy and strategic mobility that would defend the U.S. and its allies from terrorist or rogue-nation missile attacks.
In the meantime, al-Qaeda patiently planned for a sensational attack on American civilians at work in New York City and Washington. The failure of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing reached obsessive levels for Osama bin Laden and his closet operational deputy, Mohammed Atef. They turned to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Kuwaiti planner of the 1993 operation. Unlike most al-Qaeda leaders, Khalid had lived in the United States for years as an engineering student in the 1980s, spoke American English well, and came to loathe the United States. In 1987 he went to Pakistan for the final stages of the Soviet-Afghan war and became a committed jihadi. He helped fund the 1993 bombers and thus became identified by the FBI and CIA as a threat. He roamed the Middle East and Asia until he settled in Afghanistan in 1996 as a confidante to bin Ladin and Atef. For the next five years, Khalid thought about aerial attacks on the United States, and by early 1999 he had al-Qaeda’s blessing, money, and foreign contacts. His key associates were an Indonesian and a Saudi who had been involved in bombings in Yemen, Kenya, and Tanzania. By the end of the year, Khalid, bin Laden, and Atef concluded that of all the options, hijacking airliners and sending them on suicide attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House, and the Capitol building would be just the thing to panic the United States. According to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s later testimony, the only consensus target was the Capitol building.
Over the next two years, Khalid and his planning team screened and trained recruits for the suicide mission. They needed men who could fly an airliner, function in the United States without suspicion, foil the bans on weapons on aircraft, and welcome death as heroes of Islam. The first four recruits were Saudis. The next four (all former residents of Hamburg, Germany, where they learned English) came from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Yemen. Of this group, the leader became Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian with a university degree in urban planning and architectural engineering. Behind the planners stood bin Laden, who raised at least $30 million a year from Islamic donors throughout the world. (The 9/11 operation cost al-Qaeda only an estimated $500,000.) In May 2000, the “planes operation” team, nineteen members in all, began to enter the United States with legal or counterfeit visas. The operation struggled as the first team members could not speak enough English to take flying lessons. The “Hamburg Four” entered the U.S. from Europe and provided three of the four pilots. The fourth pilot was a Saudi who had lived in the United States and learned to fly because he wanted to be a commercial pilot. The four pilots, who never met as a group, wandered around the U.S. to fly at different places; some left the country and returned. They examined airline schedules, flew on recon missions, and awaited the thirteen terrorists who would seize control of the four airliners. Twelve of the hit team were Saudis; the thirteenth was a UAE citizen. They were all dependable jihadis, chosen by bin Laden and Khalid on the recommendation of mullahs and trainers. Each team would have a pilot and four crew-passenger attackers. Their weapons were box-cutters. They checked the plans with Ramzi Binalshibh, bin Laden’s personal representative and banker, who met the attackers outside the United States. He met most often with Mohammed Atta. Atta confirmed that they would hijack Boeing aircraft (easier to fly than foreign aircraft) fueled for long flights, yet close to New York and Washington. The preparations had moments of compromise. On August 16, federal agents arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, who was taking flight-training lessons in Oklahoma because one of the pilots seemed ready to back out. Unfortunately, Moussaoui knew nothing about the attack plans. At this point, the major critic of the al-Qaeda spectacular was the Taliban. Mullah Omar believed the United States would connect al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden with the attack and retaliate against al-Qaeda’s mountain fortresses in Afghanistan. He thought Israel was a better target. To placate Omar, bin Laden pledged support for a Taliban offensive against the Northern Alliance. He would assassinate Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leading Alliance general. As promised, two al-Qaeda agents, disguised as foreign journalists, killed Massoud with a camera bomb on September 9, as the four hijacking teams went to their rendezvous at Dulles, Newark, and Boston airports.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, three of the four hijacked airliners destroyed both towers of the World Trade Center and part of a wing of the Pentagon. Against a backdrop of explosions, flames, building collapses, and incredible examples of heroism and self-sacrifice, all captured on television, the American people found themselves at war. But with whom?
The Response to 9/11: Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, Afghanistan, 2001–2002
Before all the fires were extinguished and all the remains recovered, the Bush administration with public support announced its international mission: to lead all willing nations in a “war against terrorists of global reach . . . a global enterprise of uncertain duration.” Defense of the American people against violent enemies was an incontrovertible responsibility of the federal government. In his cover letter to a new study, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” written a week after 9/11, George W. Bush warned the American people that the traditional enemies of freedom, the totalitarian-militaristic states of the twentieth century, had given way to nonstate terrorists who wanted to destroy freedom everywhere and replace it with new forms of fear. Bush’s words on the nature of liberty would have pleased Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson. His broad hints on how to protect the United States might have come from Andrew Jackson or Theodore Roosevelt. The United States faced a point in history, “the crossroads of radicalism and technology,” that allowed no hesitation in the face of threats. “[T]he only path to peace and security,” said Bush, “is the path of action.” The president believed that he would have to strike al-Qaeda hard, then wage preemptive war on other terrorists. Seeking a crusader to kill, Osama bin Laden had created one in Washington and set off “the Global War on Terrorism.”
The first order of business for the administration was to reorganize the executive branch to prevent other 9/11 attacks with WMD (including fuel-loaded airliners) on targets inside the United States. The truck-bomb explosions al-Qaeda had mounted abroad now seemed mere murderous annoyances when backlighted by the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center and a blackened wing of the Pentagon. Congress passed the Patriot Act (October 26, 2001), which gave Bush wide authority to reorganize the government search for terrorists. The divide between the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and CIA had to be closed to share the records of thousands of phone calls, sightings, tips, purchases, financial transactions, and personal contacts that would eventually allow the identification of terrorists and divine their purposes. The post–9/11 inquiries revealed enough damning evidence to suggest that with more time the FBI and CIA would have discovered “the plane project.” Two of the pilots and one attacker, for example, had appeared on a special watch list, and their al-Qaeda contacts were being tracked. No one, not even the
alarmed experts of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center of the NSC’s Counterterrorism Security Group, had a clear vision of the 9/11 operation. Evidence and instinct, however, persuaded the CIA to put threats by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in forty different President’s Daily Brief intelligence analyses between January 20 and September 11, 2001. There was not enough evidence, however, to put federal agencies on high alert.
Whatever its growing pains and organizational flaws, the Office of Homeland Security (2001–2003) evolved into a full-fledged executive department and pulled together all the federal agencies that processed the flow of people and things across America’s borders. Air travelers came to know the agents of the Transportation Security Agency. The integration of FBI and CIA information with Homeland Security traveler identification and tracking closed many of the “black holes” in tracing suspected terrorists. All these changes, useful and necessary, were like civil defense for nuclear attacks. They might deter attacks, and they limited the effects of damage, but they did not eliminate the terrorists. Nothing short of elimination would now satisfy the president and his White House–Pentagon posse of neoconservatives.
President George W. Bush told the nation on the evening of September 11 that he would use all his military, intelligence, and police capabilities to run the 9/11 killers down and “bring them to justice . . . and those who harbor them.” As Clarke and Tenant suspected, their analysis and that of foreign intelligence agencies pointed to Osama bin Laden as the source of “the plane project.” He had orchestrated the attack from Afghanistan as a guest of the Taliban. NATO agreed that the United States had suffered a foreign attack under Article Five of the NATO treaty and thus deserved the help of all NATO countries; this September 12 call to arms became more focused on October 2 when NATO made al-Qaeda the official enemy. Bush also received a congressional blessing for a retaliatory war. Without knowing exactly what Bush had in mind except action now, the Senate (98–0) and the House (420–1) gave the president the authority to hunt down the 9/11 killers in unlimited language reminiscent of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964). In a televised speech to the nation on September 20, Bush identified Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda as the enemy, with the Taliban as an accomplice. He told his audience of the government’s actions to freeze terrorist funds, stop their travels, find their bases in foreign countries, and cut them off from foreign sponsors. He had also pressured Pakistan to break off relations with the Afghanistan government of Mullah Omar.
Even as the president spoke, the first wave of American forces prepared for an expedition to Afghanistan. Three carrier battle groups and two Marine amphibious battalions assembled in the Arabian Sea. On September 30 a fourth carrier sailed from Japan with U.S. Army Special Forces, Navy SEALS, Air Force special operations forces and helicopters, and part of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) helicopter force embarked. Another group of 1,000 was bound by plane for the Karshi Kandabad (K2) base in Uzbekistan. The advance party of Joint Special Operations Task Force Dagger from the 5th Special Forces Group had arrived there by aircraft by October 1. The CIA already had agents in northern Afghanistan planning operations with the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and the Northern Alliance Tajik generals to the east who had succeeded the murdered General Massoud. In their first trips into Afghanistan, the CIA operators had two weapons: A fleet of assorted drones for target acquisition and backpacks stuffed with thousands of dollars. They also knew the Northern Alliance leaders and spoke Pashto and Dari, the Afghan common languages. They arranged the first air strikes at night (October 7) and during daylight (October 15) and maintained contact with British SAS teams already in central Afghanistan. Appropriately for a “transformed” force, the first combat loss was a reconnaissance drone. Assured that K2 would be defended by a 10th Mountain Division battalion deployed from Fort Drum, New York, teams from the 5th SFG entered Afghanistan by helicopter on October 19 to start the decisive campaign.
In five months (October 2001–March 2002), Operation ENDURING FREEDOM displaced the Taliban government in Afghanistan and drove al-Qaeda to new sanctuaries in Pakistan and throughout the Middle East. The elusive but talkative Osama bin Laden remained on the run in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, chiding the Americans on Arab TV for not catching him. For a quick victory with few American deaths (twelve in combat, eighteen in accidents), Operation ENDURING FREEDOM seemed to validate the American military “transformation.” The marriage of elite, high-tech ground forces, connected by satellite communications with the Air Force JSTARS command-targeting aircraft and the Global Hawk and Predator drones, could bring devastating air strikes, pinpointed by GPS devices, upon the Afghan armies. The campaign provided an illusion of easy victory in Washington and a taste for more victories.
Source: U.S. Army Center of Military History, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The U.S. Army’s Role in Peace Enforcement Operations, 1995–2004
As TF Dagger prepared for war, the CIA sought a viable Pashtun leader to organize a coalition to lead the southern campaign against the Taliban. The first choice was Abdul Haq, a hero of the anti-Soviet resistance. When Abdul Haq entered Afghanistan with a small band of followers, someone betrayed him to the Taliban, who hanged him publicly on October 26. A last-minute CIA effort to save Haq with a Predator drone attack failed. The CIA looked in vain for a replacement until Hamid Karzai, a former diplomat in exile in Pakistan, agreed to start a Southern Alliance. Assessing the future, Karzai mused that Afghanistan was a luckless country.
Source: U.S. Army Center of Military History, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The U.S. Army’s Role in Peace Enforcement Operations, 1995–2004
As extemporized by COMCENTCOM, General Tommy Franks, U.S. Army, an acerbic Texan artilleryman who pandered to superiors and terrified subordinates, ENDURING FREEDOM went through two phases. From mid-October until early December, TF Dagger, commanded by Colonel John Mulholland, joined Northern Alliance forces armed with Soviet weapons and mounted on horses and any truck that could run. Together they captured a northern tier of key cities (Mazar-e-Sharif, Taloqan, and Konduz) in a series of long marches and brief battles. The basic operational approach was to use Northern Alliance irregulars (Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Tajiks) to force Taliban units to concentrate, only to be savaged by American air strikes. By the end of November high-altitude B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s had dropped 80 percent of the bomb tonnage, unseen and unheard by their victims. The Special Forces advance teams and Air Force strike controllers pressed the attacks by their Afghan allies. In one battle General Dostum ordered his SF team out of the front lines. He feared, he said, that if one of them should die, all of the Americans would go home. In the meantime, the air strikes encouraged major Taliban defections in the north.
The first territorial objective of ENDURING FREEDOM, the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, demonstrated, in Pentagon-speak, the efficacy of the new operational paradigm, proved by the metrics. Translation: It worked. As it closed on Mazar-e-Sharif with Dostum’s Northern Alliance army, TF Dagger sent another group for Bagram air base, eighty miles north of Kabul, while a third group marched east toward the Taliban stronghold at Konduz. The simultaneous sieges of Mazar-e-Sharif and Bagram produced dramatic results. Despite an infusion of al-Qaeda regulars and the Taliban’s use of Soviet rockets and artillery, air strikes destroyed hundreds of entrenched Taliban until the survivors surrendered or fled. On November 10 Dostum’s army entered a jubilant Mazar-e-Sharif; two days later an Uzbek-Tajik army and their bearded SF advisers entered Kabul. While Bagram rapidly transformed into a forward base, a battalion of the 75th Infantry (the Ranger Regiment) and a detachment of Task Force Delta raided Taliban headquarters south of Kandahar, searching in vain for Mullah Omar and al-Qaeda leaders. There was one score. On November 16 an armed Predator drone killed Mohammed Atef with a missile fired into a fleeing truck. The Northern Alliance offensives stalled when the prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif rebelled and set off a five-day battle (November 24–29) that ended in the aerial slaughter of the rebels. Nevertheless, the
Northern Alliance army had already captured Konduz on November 21 despite some heavy fighting with al-Qaeda regulars.
Operation ENDURING FREEDOM had endured and freed about half of Afghanistan and the city of Kabul. It had broken part of the Taliban army and outfought the al-Qaeda mujahideen, but the Pashtun provinces of the south and the regional stronghold of Kandahar remained unoccupied. CIA agents had helped organize two small (less than 200) anti-Taliban Pashtun forces called the Southern Alliance, but Taliban units had attacked and isolated them. The best of al-Qaeda’s fighters, protecting Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, faded back into the eastern mountain ranges on the Pakistani border, where they could occupy caves, tunnels, bunkers, weapons pits, and concrete-reinforced shelters that had foiled Soviet air and ground attacks. TF Dagger and the Afghans bypassed the al-Qaeda sanctuaries (about which they knew much) in order to rescue the Southern Alliance guerrillas and capture Kandahar. One key mission was to save a small band of Southern Alliance fighters led by Hamid Karzai, whose major appeal was his status as an authentic anti-Taliban Pashtun and fluent English speaker. The best news was that a brigade of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) would soon arrive, and more Special Forces had already reached Bagram, but the urgency of operations into Pashtunland meant that TF Dagger and its shrinking Afghan force would have to take Kandahar. Meanwhile, Task Force 58 created a base, Camp Rhino, southwest of Khandahar on November 24, where it was joined by more Navy SEALS, Navy Seabees, and Army and Australian Special Forces. The Marine mission was to pressure the Taliban and to prevent them from freely moving about the country.
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