The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  Nine days after bin Laden’s videotaped appearance, the first U.S. Special Forces team arrived near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif and linked up with one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, the Uzbek general Abdul Rashid Dostum. After spending their first night in a cattle stable, the Special Forces group teamed up with Dostum’s heavily bearded, RPG-wielding Uzbek horsemen. Within twenty-four hours of their arrival the Americans started calling in airstrikes on the Taliban front lines, using their laser designators. Those strikes were so precise that Northern Alliance commanders came to believe that the U.S. forces possessed some kind of “death ray.” The Americans did not disabuse them of this notion; once the Taliban got wind of the U.S. death ray, units would often surrender.

  But the American press was already growing restive about the seeming lack of progress against the Taliban. On October 31, R.W. “Johnny” Apple wrote an indicative front-page story in the New York Times headlined “A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam.” The fall of Kabul was less than two weeks away.

  The CIA’s top official on the ground in Afghanistan was Gary Berntsen. If some men can be described as laid-back, Berntsen is laid-forward, a bear-sized, gung-ho CIA officer with a pronounced Long Island accent who speaks Dari, one of the local Afghan languages. In early November Berntsen was liasing with the leaders of the Northern Alliance and helping to call in the airstrikes on the Taliban front lines on the Shomali Plains, north of Kabul. He remembers that at first the Taliban morale was very high: “They’d beaten the Soviets and figured they were going to beat us.”

  Berntsen recalls that there were several thousand Taliban soldiers on the front lines near Kabul who were being joined by many more Pakistani recruits. “The roads from Pakistan into Afghanistan were clogged with people all trying to get in.” Berntsen’s boss at the CIA, Hank Crumpton, said, “We’re gonna let ’em all in so we kill ’em on the front lines. The more the merrier.” AC-130 gunships and B-52 bombers made short work of the Taliban foot soldiers on the Kabul front lines.

  In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden avoided all but his closest supporters. Only a handful of people outside al-Qaeda or the Taliban are known to have spent any time with him. A couple of weeks after the first American bombing raids had begun, the al-Qaeda leader met with Taysir Allouni of Al Jazeera, who interviewed the Saudi exile at length on October 21. During that interview bin Laden appeared relaxed and poised, explicitly linking himself to the 9/11 attacks for the first time publicly. The Al Jazeera correspondent asked him, “America claims that it has proof that you are behind what happened in New York and Washington. What’s your answer?” Bin Laden came close to admitting his role, answering: “If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who are killing our sons is terrorism, then let history be our judge that we are terrorists.” At one point bin Laden made the interesting observation, “We practice the good terrorism.”

  Allouni followed up with the most important question that can be posed to al-Qaeda’s leader: “How about the killing of innocent civilians?” Bin Laden replied, “The men that God helped [on September 11] did not intend to kill babies; they intended to destroy the strongest military power in the world, to attack the Pentagon,” adding that “the [World Trade Center] Towers are an economic power and not a children’s school.”

  Dr. Amer Aziz, a prominent Pakistani surgeon and Taliban sympathizer who had treated bin Laden two years earlier for a back injury, also met with him a few weeks after 9/11. Aziz was summoned to Kabul in the first week of November 2001 to treat Mohammed Atef, the military commander of al-Qaeda. While examining Atef, Aziz again encountered bin Laden. This meeting was significant because there had been widespread reports that the al-Qaeda leader suffered from potentially deadly kidney disease. Aziz said those reports were false: “When I saw him last he was in excellent health. He was walking. He was healthy. I didn’t see any evidence of kidney disease. I didn’t see any evidence of dialysis.” (Similarly, Ahmed Zaidan of Al Jazeera television, who had interviewed bin Laden for two or three hours eight months before 9/11, says, “I didn’t see anything abnormal.” That was also the take of Bakr Atyani of the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation, who met him five months later. Atyani thought that bin Laden had put on weight and was in “good health.”)

  On November 9, Mazar-e-Sharif, the largely Uzbek city in the north of Afghanistan that had been the scene of some of the Taliban’s nastiest massacres, fell to the Northern Alliance and the small team of U.S. Special Forces supporting the local warlord General Dostum. One of the American soldiers remembered the roads “were just lined with people cheering and clapping their hands and just celebrations everywhere. It was just unlike anything we’d ever seen, other than maybe on a movie screen.” Three days later, Kabul also fell to the Northern Alliance. Peter Jouvenal, a British cameraman who had covered Afghanistan extensively since 1980, was the first Westerner to set foot in Kabul as it fell. He recalled, “The people were overjoyed to be relieved of such a suppressive regime.”

  The Taliban and members of al-Qaeda made a hasty retreat from Kabul following its liberation by the Northern Alliance. A few days later, Atef was killed in a U.S. Predator drone air strike. Atef, a former Egyptian policeman, was one of the most hard-line members of al-Qaeda. To cement their relationship in January 2001, bin Laden had married his son Muhammad to Atef’s daughter. The loss of al-Qaeda’s military commander was a blow to the organization, since it was Atef who had performed as bin Laden’s chief executive officer, and had worked around the clock to manage al-Qaeda’s personnel, operations, and cash flow.

  Hundreds of miles to the south of Kabul, the CIA was working to try to open up a rift between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In late September, Robert Grenier, the dapper, smooth-talking CIA station chief in Islamabad, traveled to Baluchistan, a Pakistani province of vast, broiling deserts less than a hundred miles from the Taliban headquarters of Kandahar, for a clandestine meeting with Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, the number-two official in the Taliban. Meeting in the five-star Serena hotel in the Baluch capital of Quetta, Grenier offered Mullah Osmani a deal whereby the Taliban would let American forces covertly snatch bin Laden while they could plausibly maintain that they had no idea of the plan. Mullah Osmani took careful notes and said he would discuss the idea with Mullah Omar. Grenier figured that even if Mullah Omar rejected this plan other Taliban leaders might embrace it, and so “we could at least sow some dissension within the ranks.”

  The proposal to snatch bin Laden came to nothing, but in their next meeting, on October 2, Grenier offered Mullah Osmani another deal: overthrow Mullah Omar, seize power, and then turn over al-Qaeda’s leader. Grenier recalls telling Osmani, “You need to save your movement. So he said, ‘How do I do that?’ So I gave him a sort of textbook plan as to how you launch a coup d’état: Put Mullah Omar under house arrest. Don’t let him communicate with anybody.” Nothing came of this plan either.

  More successful was the CIA effort to support the rise of an obscure Afghan dissident by the name of Hamid Karzai. Karzai, a Pashtun in his early forties then living in Pakistan, was from a distinguished tribe that had supplied a number of Afghanistan’s monarchs. He had become a bitter enemy of the Taliban following his father’s assassination in Quetta in 1999, a hit almost certainly ordered by Taliban leaders, who eliminated Pashtuns who threatened their monopoly on power.

  Grenier explained the American thinking behind backing Karzai: “Those people who we encouraged to go inside Afghanistan essentially were going to be going on their own. They would need to demonstrate that they in fact had tribal support, and then we would attempt to reinforce them. That was the strategy.”

  On October 8, a day after the first American bombing raids in Afghanistan, Karzai and three comrades, wrapped under heavy turbans to disguise themselves, rode on motorbikes over the border into Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan, a sparsely populated region of deserts punctuated by rocky hills. Karzai had been pl
otting against the Taliban for years, and although he knew that riding into their home turf was quite risky, he was also confident he could recruit to his cause Pashtuns who were fed up with the incompetence and strictures of the religious warriors.

  Once inside southern Afghanistan, Karzai led some fifty supporters on foot to an area where they could link up with an airdrop of American supplies, which he had requested in an earlier satellite phone call to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. A CIA officer there told Karzai, “Tell your people to light fires; that’s the only way we can find [you] out in the mountains.” The supplies dropped into the mountains on October 30 included food and weapons, which Karzai used to sustain his growing band—now 150 men—who were already fighting off Taliban attacks. Under increasing pressure from the Taliban, Karzai urgently requested the Agency that he be airlifted to Pakistan. A CIA officer named “Greg” arranged for a helicopter to extract Karzai out of Afghanistan on November 5.

  Eleven days later Karzai returned to Afghanistan, to Uruzgan province some eighty miles to the north of Kandahar. This time Karzai was also accompanied by a twelve-man Special Forces team and half a dozen CIA officers.

  Tarin Kowt, the provincial capital of Uruzgan, is a dusty one-horse town around which would swirl one of the most crucial battles of the war against the Taliban. Captain Jason Amerine, the leader of the U.S. Special Forces team embedded with Karzai, explains the American mission in Tarin Kowt: “We were going to build a Pashtun guerrilla army effectively from scratch under Karzai’s command, seize the town of Tarin Kowt in order to gain control of Uruzgan, and then we would build a larger Pashtun army and seize Kandahar as a final coup-de-grace against the Taliban. It all really hinged on Karzai’s belief that the Pashtun were ready to rise up against the Taliban leadership.”

  On November 16, the people of Tarin Kowt did rise up against the Taliban and chased them out. A day later Karzai headed into the town in a twenty-vehicle convoy and set up shop in the governor’s mansion, a modest two-story building surrounded by well-irrigated fields. Arriving around midnight, he met with local Pashtun tribal leaders, who welcomed him and told him with some trepidation that there was a column of some one hundred vehicles approaching from Kandahar containing up to five hundred Taliban, who would reach the town by the next day intent on taking it back.

  Hearing this news, Captain Amerine excused himself from Karzai and his group of supporters, who were breaking their fast as Ramadan had just begun. Amerine started to plan how to repel the much larger Taliban force, while his combat controller sent out an urgent warning to Navy and Air Force aircraft in the area that they would be needed shortly. Amerine gathered as many of Karzai’s guerrillas as he could. His plan was to stake out some higher ground with those guerrillas outside of Tarin Kowt and call in airstrikes from there onto the fast-approaching Taliban convoy.

  The hundred-vehicle convoy sent to retake Tarin Kowt for the Taliban was Mullah Omar’s last real shot at hanging on to power. Vahid Mojdeh, a Taliban foreign ministry official, recalled that Mullah Omar was now constantly on the move around Kandahar because of the American bombing campaign. “The intense bombardment made the situation very difficult for Mullah Omar. He was forced to spend his nights in open spaces or places where he had not been seen before.”

  Around two hours after Amerine was first alerted to the approaching Taliban column, Navy F-18 fighters spotted a group of around ten four-wheel drives and started bombing them. Three hours later, at 5 A.M., the larger convoy of dozens of Taliban vehicles came into view. Heavily outnumbered, Karzai’s group of Afghan guerrillas took flight and sped back to Tarin Kowt, followed by Captain Amerine and his Special Forces team. Back in Tarin Kowt, Amerine told Karzai, “The Taliban are coming, there are a lot of them. These [Afghan] fighters we are with don’t understand our capabilities; they kind of ran. I need to take these vehicles and get out there and keep doing what I’m doing.” Amerine drove back outside the town at around 7 A.M. to direct deadly accurate bombing runs on the approaching Taliban convoy. Three hours later the battle was over and what remained of the convoy was in full retreat.

  Hank Crumpton, who was running the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan, recalls that this was a decisive battle because Karzai was the only man who could unify the country’s fractious ethnic factions: “Karzai was the linchpin between north and south. The Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Hazara, they all respected Karzai. They knew that he understood the concept of a nation-state.” But the importance of the Tarin Kowt battle was not well understood at the time because the vast majority of the international media covering the war were concentrated in the north of the country and focusing on the fall of Kabul five days earlier.

  Following the news of the debacle at Tarin Kowt, Mullah Omar finally abandoned Kandahar, the city he had controlled absolutely for the past seven years. Overtures to Karzai about surrendering started coming in from Taliban commanders. But taking no chances over the next two weeks, Karzai started gathering the large force necessary for what seemed likely to be a major battle for Kandahar.

  Half a world away, in Washington, D.C., Ambassador James Dobbins, a veteran diplomat on the verge of retirement whose Waspy manner belied that he had successfully taken on some of America’s most difficult peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo, had recently been tapped by the Bush administration to be its new envoy to Afghanistan. Less than a week after Kabul fell, Dobbins flew into Afghanistan with Dr. Abdullah, a leader of the Northern Alliance, on a white cargo plane with no markings, chartered by the CIA.

  As they were flying to Kabul, Dr. Abdullah told Dobbins that Karzai would be an acceptable choice to lead Afghanistan for the largely Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups that made up the Northern Alliance. A few days earlier, Ehsan ul-Haq, the new head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, which had played a critical role in the rise of the largely Pashtun Taliban, had also told Dobbins that Karzai would be acceptable to his government. If Pakistan and the Northern Alliance, long bitter enemies, could agree on Karzai as the next leader of Afghanistan, Dobbins knew that brokering a deal for him to run the new Afghan government would have a good chance of succeeding.

  On November 27, in the former West German capital of Bonn, the various Afghan factions gathered for the opening of a United Nations conference to choose an interim government and its new leader. Dobbins headed the American delegation, which met frequently with Iranian officials, who were the first to push for democratic elections in Afghanistan. One day a senior Iranian diplomat was chatting with Dobbins over a breakfast of coffee and croissants and mentioned to him that there was a serious gap in the draft of the document that would later become the Bonn declaration: “It really doesn’t make any mention of elections or democracy. Don’t you think the Afghans should be pledging themselves to hold elections and build a democracy?” Dobbins recalls that “this was before the Bush administration had discovered democratization as its panacea for the region, so I didn’t have any instructions on this subject, but it seemed a harmless suggestion, so I said, ‘Yeah, that seems like a good idea.’”

  Fasting for Ramadan and freezing in the bitter Afghan winter, Karzai addressed the delegates in Bonn by satellite phone from Tarin Kowt. Karzai remembers: “I was sitting with some of the poorest members of the Afghan community at that time when I was making the speech. I wasn’t aware of the significance of it, nor were the people sitting around me.” Karzai’s dramatic call from the battlefields of southern Afghanistan to the delegates at the Bonn conference helped to seal his nomination to be the leader of the interim administration, which would run the country until nationwide elections could be held.

  Early in the morning of November 28, Lieutenant Colonel David Fox, the highest-ranking American officer on the ground in southern Afghanistan, arrived in Tarin Kowt and met with Karzai to urge him to start moving on Kandahar to increase the pressure on the Taliban leadership to surrender. Two days later Karzai assembled a large convoy of vehicles and headed south toward Kandahar.

 
Karzai arrived just outside Kandahar on December 5 to begin the discussions of the terms of the Taliban surrender agreement. The following day, around 9 A.M., Karzai was talking with a local tribal chief when suddenly there was an enormous bang and the doors and windows of the building he was in blew out. “Greg,” the CIA officer who had earlier arranged for Karzai to be pulled out to Pakistan, threw himself over the Afghan leader. It seemed likely the attack had been launched by the Taliban or al-Qaeda. A U.S. investigation later determined that the cause of the explosion was a two-thousand-pound American bomb that had fallen two kilometers short of its intended target, instead landing on Karzai and his security detail. Captain Amerine, who had grown close to Karzai in the weeks that he had protected him, was wounded in the leg and evacuated. Three other American Special Forces soldiers were killed.

  Karzai was rushed away from the scene of the bombing and a nurse attended to minor wounds on his face. After having his wounds dressed, Karzai received an excited call from Lyse Doucet, a BBC correspondent and old friend, who told him that the delegates at the Bonn conference had chosen him to become the new leader of Afghanistan. Doucet told Karzai, “Hamid, we just got the news that you are being chosen as the chairman of the interim administration.” Karzai recalls saying, “OK,” but not being able to concentrate on much besides the evacuation of the dead and wounded lying around the site of the bomb’s impact. A few minutes later he received another call, informing him that the Taliban ministers of defense and interior were on their way to see him to deliver their surrender.