The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor who was treating the al-Qaeda wounded, paints a scene of desperation. “I was out of medicine and I had a lot of casualties,” Batarfi later recalled. “I did a hand amputation by a knife, and I did a finger amputation with scissors.” Batarfi said he personally told bin Laden that, if they did not leave Tora Bora soon, “no one would stay alive” under the American bombardment. But the al-Qaeda leader seemed mainly preoccupied with his own escape. “He did not prepare himself for Tora Bora,” Batarfi said, “and to be frank he didn’t care about anyone but himself.”

  Bin Laden recalled that “day and night, American forces were bombing us by smart bombs that weigh thousands of pounds and bombs that penetrate caves.” On December 9, a U.S. bomber dropped an immense BLU-82 bomb on al-Qaeda’s positions. Known as a daisy cutter, the fifteen-thousand-pound bomb was used in the Gulf War to clear minefields. Berntsen remembers that the daisy cutter was followed by a wave of additional American airstrikes. “We came right in behind it with B-52s,” he says. “Each of them has twenty-five-hundred-pounders, so everything goes in there. Killed a lot of people.”

  That night, al-Qaeda member Abu Jaafar al-Kuwaiti and others “were awakened to the sound of massive and terrorizing explosions very near to us.” The following day, Abu Jaafar “received the horrifying news” that the “trench of Sheikh Osama had been destroyed.” But bin Laden was not dead. An al-Qaeda website offered the following description of what had happened: bin Laden had dreamed about a scorpion descending into one of the trenches that his men had dug, so he evacuated his trench, moving two hundred meters away.

  On December 10, the U.S. National Security Agency, which sucks up signals intelligence around the world, picked up an important intercept from Tora Bora: “Father (bin Laden) is trying to break through the siege line.” This was then communicated to the Delta operators on the ground. Around 4 P.M. the same day, Afghan soldiers said that they had spotted bin Laden and had him surrounded. Later that evening another intercept was picked up of bin Laden talking on the radio with some of his lieutenants, according to the Delta commander Dalton Fury. The information was so accurate that it appeared to pinpoint bin Laden’s location down to within ten meters. Another intercept that same night placed him two kilometers further away, suggesting that the al-Qaeda leader was on the move.

  For Fury this posed something of a quandary. This was the closest to bin Laden’s position that any American forces had ever been, but at the same time three of Fury’s men were now pinned down in a ferocious firefight with some al-Qaeda fighters. And as dusk fell, Fury’s key Afghan ally, Hazarat Ali, had retreated from the battlefield back to Jalalabad for some dinner to break his Ramadan fast, as is the Afghan way. Fury was under explicit orders not to take the lead in the battle and only to act in a supporting role for the hundreds of Afghans in Hazarat Ali’s ragtag army. Now he had no Afghan allies to guide him at night into the craggy moonscape of upper Tora Bora. Fury reluctantly made the decision to bail on that night’s mission. “My decision to abort that effort to kill or capture bin Laden when we might have been within 2,000 meters of him, about 2,000 yards, still bothers me. It leaves me with a feeling of somehow letting down our nation at a critical time,” Fury says.

  On December 12, a defining moment came in the Tora Bora battle, and al-Qaeda would swiftly exploit it. Haji Zaman Gamsharik, one of the Afghan warlords leading the attack against al-Qaeda, had opened negotiations with members of the group for a surrender agreement. “They talked on the radio with Haji Zaman,” an Afghan front-line commander explained, “saying they were ready to surrender at 4 P.M. Commander Zaman told the other commanders and the Americans about this. Then al-Qaeda said, ‘We need to have a meeting with our guys. Will you wait until 8 A.M. tomorrow?’ So we agreed to this. Those al-Qaeda who were not ready to be killed escaped that night. At 8 A.M. the following day no one surrendered, so we started attacking again.”

  News of the cease-fire with al-Qaeda did not sit well with the group of twenty Delta operators who by December 12 had made their way deeper into Tora Bora, into an area near bin Laden’s now-destroyed two-room house. Strung out on a ridge above the Americans were about two hundred of Haji Zaman’s men, who were looking down on what remained of bin Laden’s bombed-out house. Haji Zaman’s commanders told the Delta operators that al-Qaeda members would gather in the field in front of bin Laden’s wrecked house to surrender the following morning. Instead, during that night, many of the militants who were supposed to surrender likely instead fled the Tora Bora mountains.

  Back in Kabul, the CIA ground commander, Gary Berntsen, was screaming profanities into the phone when he was told about the surrender agreement. Berntsen remembers, “Essentially I used the f-word … I was screaming at them on the phone. And telling them, ‘No cease-fire. No negotiation. We continue airstrikes.’” But there wasn’t much the small number of Delta operators on the ground at Tora Bora could do once their Afghan allies had dug their heels in about the cease-fire. As Fury remembers it, U.S. forces only observed the cease-fire for about two hours on December 12—resuming bombing around 5 P.M. that day.

  The next afternoon, American signals operators who had spent the past four days on the ground at Tora Bora intercepting radio transmissions heard that “Father” (bin Laden) was again on the move. Bin Laden himself then spoke to his followers: “The time is now. Arm your women and children against the infidel!” Following several hours of high-intensity bombing, the al-Qaeda leader broke radio silence again, saying, “I am sorry for getting you involved in this battle; if you can no longer resist, you may surrender with my blessing.” One member of Berntsen’s team, an Arabic-speaking CIA officer who had been listening to bin Laden’s voice for several years, was in Tora Bora monitoring the al-Qaeda leader talking to his followers over an open radio channel: “Listening to bin Laden pray with these guys. Apologizing to them, for what’s occurred. Asking them to fight on.”

  Khalid al-Hubayshi, one of the Saudis holed up in Tora Bora, says that bin Laden’s aides instructed the hundreds of mostly Arab fighters who were still alive in the mountainous complex to retreat to Pakistan and surrender to their embassies there. Hubayshi remains bitter about the behavior of his leader: “We had been ready to lay down our lives for him, and he couldn’t make the effort to speak to us personally.”

  On December 14, bin Laden’s voice was again picked up by American signals operators, but, according to an interpreter translating for the Delta team, it sounded more like a prerecorded sermon than a live transmission, indicating that bin Laden had already left the battlefield area. He had likely used the cover of al-Qaeda’s “surrender” to begin his retreat during the early morning of December 13, which is confirmed by the various American radio intercepts later that day in which bin Laden made his final good-byes to his troops.

  December 13 was the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, an especially sacred day in the Muslim calendar, when the Prophet Mohammed had received the first verses of the Koran. On the same holy day in 1987, not far from Tora Bora and surrounded by up to two hundred Soviet soldiers, bin Laden had witnessed a “miracle,” which he later recounted to a journalist: “A Soviet airplane, a MiG I believe, passed by in front of us, when a group of our Afghan Mujahideen brothers grouped together [and attacked]. The plane then broke to pieces as it fell right in front of our eyes.” Now bin Laden was once again delivered from the clutches of a superpower around the time of this most sacred day.

  The top leaders of al-Qaeda separated as they made good their escape from Tora Bora; Ayman al-Zawahiri left the mountainous redoubt with Uthman, one of bin Laden’s sons. Osama himself fled with another of his sons, seventeen-year-old Muhammad, accompanied by his guards. Meanwhile, Abdallah Tabarak, bin Laden’s chief bodyguard, escaped Tora Bora with a group made up mainly of Yemenis and Saudis. He went in the direction of Pakistan, taking bin Laden’s satellite phone with him on the assumption that U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring satellite calls in
the region. Tabarak continued to use the satphone as his boss made his own escape, to divert attention away from the leader of al-Qaeda.

  Ghanim al-Harbi, a Saudi in his twenties, had gone to Afghanistan a year before 9/11 and trained at an al-Qaeda camp. As the Taliban fell, Harbi ended up with a group of around sixty-five Arabs in Tora Bora. Sometime around December 15, his group recruited two local guides for the arduous trek to the Pakistani border. As this large group passed through one of the local villages, a massive American airstrike killed forty of the Arabs and Harbi suffered serious injuries. He was subsequently captured with a group of others from Yemen, Kuwait, Egypt, and Tunisia.

  By December 17, the battle of Tora Bora was over. Dalton Fury, the Delta commander on the ground, estimated that at battle’s end there were some 220 dead militants and fifty-two captured fighters, who were mostly Arabs, with a dozen Afghans and a sprinkling of Chechens and Pakistanis. Around twenty of the captured prisoners were paraded for the cameras of the international press. They were a bedraggled, scrawny lot who did not look much like the fearsome warriors everyone presumed them to be.

  Across the border from Tora Bora, in Pakistan, thousands of the paramilitary constabulary of the Pakistani Frontier Corps were posted in the general vicinity. But Pakistan’s military leaders were distracted in the critical time period when al-Qaeda members started slipping out of Tora Bora, because of the attack by a group of Pakistani militants on the Indian Parliament on December 13. That attack led both countries to mobilize their soldiers on the India-Pakistan border and events in Afghanistan were quickly superseded by the possibility of war between the two nuclear-armed rival states. The Pakistani minister of the interior, Moinuddin Haider, recalled that India moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers to Pakistan’s border: “We had to respond. All our armed forces went to combat that situation and we also moved to the borders. All of our second-line forces which guard our borders, especially with Afghanistan, they were deployed.”

  Despite the mobilization for a possible war with India, Pakistan’s military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, later claimed that Pakistani forces managed to arrest up to 240 militants retreating from Tora Bora, but clearly many others also escaped, including much of the leadership of al-Qaeda. And so was lost the last, best chance to capture bin Laden and his top deputies, at a time when they were confined to an area of several dozen square miles. Al-Qaeda’s leaders fled into the tribal areas of western Pakistan, where they began the long process of rebuilding their devastated organization.

  Why did the United States military—the most powerful armed force in history—not seal off the Tora Bora region, instead relying only on a small contingent of American Special Forces on the ground? Part of the answer is that the U.S. military was a victim of its own earlier successes. In Afghanistan the Pentagon and CIA had just secured one of the most stunning unconventional military victories in modern history, overthrowing the Taliban in a matter of weeks with only some four hundred American soldiers and intelligence officers on the ground, working with the tens of thousands of men in the Northern Alliance and the targeted wrath of the U.S. Air Force.

  However, substantial numbers of Americans on the ground were needed to throw up an effective cordon around al-Qaeda’s hard core. Michael De-long, a three-star Marine general and the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which had overall responsibility for the Tora Bora battle, recalled that the Pentagon did not want to put many American soldiers on the ground because of a concern that they would be treated like antibodies by the locals. “The mountains of Tora Bora are situated deep in territory controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and any outsiders. The reality is if we put our troops in there we would inevitably end up fighting Afghan villagers—creating bad will at a sensitive time.”

  There may also have been reluctance at the Pentagon to send soldiers into harm’s way. The Pentagon’s risk aversion is now hard to recall, following the years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the thousands of American soldiers who have since died—but it was quite real at the time. Recall that in the most recent U.S. war—the 1999 conflict in Kosovo—not a single American had died in combat. And, at that point in the Afghan War, more journalists had died than U.S. soldiers. Fury says that the fourteen U.S. Green Beret soldiers from the “white” Special Forces who were on the ground at Tora Bora were told to “stay in the foothills” at least four kilometers from any action—“pretty much out of harm’s way.” The Green Berets did call in airstrikes but were not allowed to engage in firefights with al-Qaeda because of concerns that the battle would turn into a “meat grinder.”

  Finally, there was Iraq. In late November, as the battle of Tora Bora was gearing up in earnest, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told General Franks that President Bush “wants us to look for options in Iraq.” Franks told Rumsfeld that there was a planning document, known as OPLAN 1003, which was a detailed blueprint for an invasion of Iraq that ran to eight hundred pages, but whose assumptions were now “out of date.” Rumsfeld instructed the general to “dust it off” and brief him in a week’s time. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Richard Myers, recalls, “I realized that one week was not giving Tom and his staff much time to sharpen” the plan. Franks points out in his autobiography that his staff was already working seven days a week, sixteen-plus hours a day as the Tora Bora battle was reaching its climax. Although Franks doesn’t say so, it is impossible not to wonder if the labor-intensive planning ordered by his boss for another major war was a distraction from the one he was already fighting.

  The Pentagon’s reluctance to send more soldiers to Tora Bora arose out of a combination of factors: fear of offending the Afghan warlords in eastern Afghanistan; worries about replicating the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan; concerns about the difficult terrain; and an unwillingness to take casualties. However, given that only three months earlier some three thousand Americans had died on 9/11 and that al-Qaeda’s leaders and hundreds of the group’s foot soldiers were now all concentrated at Tora Bora, the Pentagon’s reluctance to commit more American boots on the ground is a decision that historians are not likely to judge kindly.

  In the end, there were probably more journalists at Tora Bora than there were Western soldiers, who totaled around seventy or so Delta operators, Green Berets, and British Special Boat Service troops. CNN’s veteran war correspondent Nic Robertson remembered that in the vicinity of Tora Bora there were “close to 100 journalists in tents, buses and mud houses.” Since news organizations from around the world could arrange for their journalists and crews to cover Tora Bora, it is puzzling why the U.S. military could not have put more soldiers on the ground to entrap the hard core of al-Qaeda.

  Could the Pentagon have deployed a substantial number of additional soldiers to Tora Bora during the battle? Yes: there were around two thousand American troops already in or around the Afghan theater. Stationed at the U.S. air base known as K2 in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor to the north, were some one thousand soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division, which specializes in high-altitude warfare. Hundreds of those soldiers had already deployed forward to Bagram Air Base, an hour drive north of Kabul, as the Tora Bora battle heated up. In addition, 1,200 Marines from the highly mobile 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units were stationed at Forward Operating Base Rhino in the deserts near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan from November 25. Brigadier General James N. Mattis, the commander of the Marines in the Afghan theater, is reported to have asked to send his men into Tora Bora, but his request was turned down.

  Dalton Fury, the on-scene Delta commander, estimates that three hundred U.S. soldiers could have secured the main passes out of Tora Bora. Was such an operation feasible? Perhaps. On the night of October 19, weeks before the Tora Bora battle, 199 Army Rangers had parachuted in total blackout conditions onto a Taliban-held desert landing strip near Kandahar, which they then secured. (To be fair, that operation was conducted without the expectation of Taliban resistance, and there was none.
) And at the same time a further ninety-one U.S. Special Forces soldiers were dropped into Mullah Omar’s own Kandahar compound, where they gathered intelligence and arrested members of the Taliban before pulling out after an hour. Those operations demonstrated that elite American units could be dropped anywhere into Afghanistan, a month and a half before the Tora Bora battle began in earnest.

  Of course such a force would have had to deal with the treacherous weather conditions and high altitudes of Tora Bora as well as fierce resistance from al-Qaeda. An official U.S. military history of the Afghan War later stated that the mountainous terrain and lack of helicopter assets in the theater meant that it was “unrealistic” to think that more U.S. forces could have been inserted to “seal the passes into Pakistan.” Maybe so, but what is not in doubt is that no effort was ever made by the Pentagon to test this proposition.

  In the end there would be no American blocking forces securing the passes of Tora Bora, despite the fact that the New York Times story on November 25, quoting a local Afghan warlord, had explicitly made the point that bin Laden would likely “slip into Pakistan” when Tora Bora came under attack. And, as we have seen, Hank Crumpton, the CIA officer running the overall Afghan operation, had also briefed the White House and CENTCOM that this was a strong possibility.

  What is most infuriating about all this is that bin Laden’s presence at Tora Bora was well-known not just to those U.S. forces on the ground at the battle, but also to officials higher up the American chain of command, something that they publicly acknowledged at the time. According to a background briefing reported by CNN, Pentagon officials in mid-December 2001 told reporters that there was “reasonable certainty” that bin Laden was at Tora Bora, a judgment that they based on intercepted radio transmissions. Similarly, the New York Times reported on December 12, 2001, that a “senior military officer” in Washington placed bin Laden at Tora Bora, based on “intercepted radio communications.” And in late November, as the battle raged on in Tora Bora, when asked on ABC News if bin Laden was there, Vice President Dick Cheney said, “I think he’s probably in that general area.” Two weeks later, Cheney was on NBC’s Meet the Press also explaining that “the preponderance of reporting at this point” was that bin Laden was in Tora Bora. The next day, Paul Wolfowitz, the number-two official at the Pentagon, when asked if bin Laden was in Tora Bora, told reporters, “We don’t have any credible evidence of him being in other parts of Afghanistan or outside of Afghanistan.” Even General Franks himself recounted in his autobiography that in December 2001 he briefed President Bush, saying, “Unconfirmed reports that Osama has been seen in the White Mountains, Sir. The Tora Bora area.” And shortly after the battle, on January 7, 2002, Franks told the Associated Press that bin Laden had indeed been at Tora Bora, “at one point or another.”