The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  The Pakistani press was jubilant. “Good Riddance, Killer Baitullah” was the lead headline in the quality Dawn newspaper. Much of the previous coverage in Pakistan of U.S. drone strikes in the tribal region had ranged from critical to downright hostile. But in the case of Mehsud, U.S. strategic interests and Pakistani interests were closely aligned because the Pakistani Taliban’s victims had included not only Bhutto, the country’s most popular politician, but also hundreds of Pakistani policemen, soldiers, and civilians. Now the Pakistani military and government—cognizant that American drones were often targeting militants who were attacking the Pakistani state—offered less pushback on this issue than they had in the past.

  As a result of the unprecedented number of drone strikes authorized by the Obama administration aimed at Taliban and al-Qaeda networks, in 2009 about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations were killed, including the head of an Uzbek terrorist group allied with al-Qaeda, as were hundreds of lower-level militants and civilians.

  Despite the exponential rise in U.S. drone strikes, Afghanistan and Pakistan still faced high levels of violence, much of it traceable to militants based in the tribal regions. In 2009, there were a record eighty-seven suicide attacks in Pakistan, which killed around 1,300 people, while in Afghanistan nearly 6,000 Afghan civilians were killed or injured, the highest number of casualties recorded since the fall of the Taliban. While the drones were killing significant numbers of militant leaders and foot soldiers, these losses were clearly being absorbed. Nor had the expanded drone program stopped al-Qaeda and its allies from continuing to train Western recruits. Around 100 to 150 Westerners in total were believed to have traveled to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in 2009 alone, including Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber.

  Of course, the drones program did create some real problems for the Taliban and its allies in the tribal regions. David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who was held by the Haqqani Taliban network for months in 2009, called the drones a “terrifying presence” in South Waziristan. And the Taliban regularly executed suspected “spies” in Waziristan accused of providing information to the United States, suggesting they feared betrayal from within. But the U.S. drone strikes didn’t seem to have had any great effect on the Taliban’s ability to mount operations in Pakistan or Afghanistan or deter potential Western recruits, and they no longer had the element of surprise. By early 2010, after around eighteen months of sustained drone strikes, many of Pakistan’s militants had likely moved out of their once-safe haven in the tribal regions and into other parts of the country.

  A December 2009 briefing prepared by the top U.S. intelligence official in Afghanistan mapped out the strategy and strength of the Taliban, concluding that the insurgency was increasingly effective. The briefing warned that the Taliban’s “organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding” and predicted that “security incidents [are] projected to be higher in 2010.”

  It was in this context that President Obama announced his new Afghan strategy. On December 1, 2009, Obama traveled to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, to deliver the key speech of his presidency about the war. Obama recalled, “That was probably the most emotional speech that I’ve made in terms of how I felt about it, because I was looking out over a group of cadets, some of whom were gonna be deployed to Afghanistan. And potentially some might not come back.”

  Obama explained the reasoning behind the new strategy: “I make this decision because our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is from here where we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.” Obama announced the thirty thousand new troops of the Afghan surge, but most news accounts of the speech seized on the fact that the president also said that some of those troops would be coming home in July 2011 as they transferred responsibility for a number of Afghanistan’s provinces to Afghan security forces. However, there was a large and little-noticed caveat inserted in the speech: that this drawdown would be based on conditions on the ground. And at the time only one of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces was under the control of the Afghan army and police, and that was Kabul itself.

  In late June 2010, after accepting General McChrystal’s resignation in the wake of the controversial Rolling Stone article, Obama appointed General David Petraeus as commander of the Afghan war; the second American president to pick the cerebral strategist to turn around a war that the United Sates wasn’t winning.

  What you don’t often see in the news from Afghanistan is how lovely a place it can be. The city of Kabul sits six thousand feet above sea level and is rimmed by snow-tipped mountains. In spring the warming sun sends soft winds during the day and at night a pleasant chill begins to descend with dusk and the muezzin’s call to prayer. And as night falls it’s possible to remember that in the 1970s, before the series of wars that wrecked Afghanistan, Kabul was a major pit stop on the hippie trail to India and something of a tourist destination.

  One day the tourists may come back, but for the moment, that all seems a long, long way off.

  Chapter 20

  The Long Hunt

  So my Lord, if my demise has come, then let it not be

  Upon a bier draped with green mantles.

  But let my grave be an eagle’s belly, its resting place

  In the sky’s atmosphere amongst perched eagles.

  —poem by Osama bin Laden released in the weeks

  before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003

  I have an excellent idea of where [bin Laden] is.

  —CIA director Porter J. Goss on June 22, 2005

  When you fly over the icy peaks of the Hindu Kush, which march in serried ranks toward the Himalayas, dividing Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent, you get a sense of the scale of the problem: Osama bin Laden is hiding somewhere out there. And despite the most extensive manhunt in history, he has eluded capture now for about a decade.

  The conventional wisdom after the fall of the Taliban was that tracking bin Laden down wouldn’t make much of a difference to the larger war on terrorism. At a March 2002 press conference, President Bush referred to bin Laden as “a person who’s now been marginalized.” Three years later the CIA even closed “Alec Station,” its dedicated bin Laden unit, which had been tasked with the mission of hunting al-Qaeda’s top leaders, and reassigned its analysts and officers. Senior CIA officials decided to close Alec Station because they believed that al-Qaeda was no longer the hierarchical organization it once was. However, although it was certainly the case that the global jihadist movement would carry on, whatever bin Laden’s fate, it was quite wrong to assume that it didn’t really matter whether he was apprehended.

  Finding bin Laden remained of utmost importance for three reasons. First, there was the matter of justice for the roughly three thousand people who died on 9/11, and for the thousands of other victims of al-Qaeda’s attacks around the world. Second, every day that bin Laden remained at liberty was a propaganda victory for al-Qaeda. Third, although bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri didn’t exert day-to-day control over al-Qaeda, statements from bin Laden and, to some degree, Zawahiri have always been the most reliable guide to the future actions of jihadist movements around the world and this remained the case even while both men were on the run.

  Since 9/11, bin Laden has issued more than thirty video and audio tapes. Those messages have reached untold millions worldwide via television, the Internet, and newspapers. The tapes have not only instructed al-Qaeda’s followers to continue to kill Westerners and Jews; some have also carried specific instructions that militant cells then acted on. In 2003, bin Laden called for attacks against members of the coalition in Iraq; subsequently terrorists bombed a British consulate in Turkey, and commuters on their way to work in Madrid. In December 2004, bin Laden called for attacks on Saudi oil facilities, and in February 2006,
al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Saudi Arabia attacked the Abqaiq facility, arguably the most important oil production facility in the world. Luckily that attack was a failure. Bin Laden also called for attacks on the Pakistani state in 2007, which is one of the reasons that Pakistan had more than fifty suicide attacks that year.

  Bin Laden also continued to be the key inspiration for many jihadist terrorists. The Saudi government commissioned a private study of the mind-set of some of the militants in its custody, interviewing one group of 639 extremists arrested before 2004 and another sample of fifty-three arrested between 2004 and 2006. In both studies participants cited bin Laden as their most important role model.

  Bin Laden’s continued influence on militant foot soldiers could be seen in their public statements. In the United Kingdom, for instance, some of the key terrorist plotters have made emblematic remarks about al-Qaeda’s leader on videos or in suicide notes, believing that these would be their final statements on earth before going on to Paradise. Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the July 7, 2005, suicide attacks in London, described bin Laden and Zawahiri as “heroes” on his “martyrdom” video. Similarly, Abdullah Ahmed Ali, the ringleader of the plot to bring down seven passenger jets over the Atlantic in the summer of 2006, made a suicide video in which he declared, “Sheikh Osama warned you many times to leave our lands or you will be destroyed. Now the time has come for you to be destroyed.” And on May 22, 2008, Nicky Reilly, an autistic twenty-two-year-old British convert to Islam who would set off a homemade bomb in a restaurant in the southwestern city of Exeter, wrote in a suicide note, “Sheikh Usama has told you how to end this war between us and many others but you ignore us. Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood. Leave our lands and stop your support for Israel.” This was an efficient summary of bin Laden’s basic religio-political message, demonstrating that even someone like Reilly could grasp the essentials of bin Laden’s description of the supposed war between “true” Islam and the West.

  Given bin Laden’s continued importance to jihadists around the world, what was the American-led hunt for bin Laden turning up during the Obama administration? The short answer was nothing. The U.S. government hadn’t had a solid lead on al-Qaeda’s leader since the battle of Tora Bora in the winter of 2001. While there were informed hypotheses that he was in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province on the Afghan border, perhaps in one of the more northerly areas such as Bajaur, Dir, or Chitral, these were simply hypotheses, not actionable intelligence. A longtime American counterterrorism analyst explained: “There is very limited collection on him personally.” That’s intelligence community shorthand for the fact that the usual avenues of “collection” on a target such as bin Laden were yielding little or no information about him. Those avenues typically include signals intercepts of phone calls and emails, as well as human intelligence from spies. Given the hundreds of billions of dollars that the “war on terror” had consumed, the inability of the intelligence and military communities to capture or kill al-Qaeda’s leader was one of the war’s signal failures.

  The general incompetence that characterized the hunt for bin Laden was well illustrated sometime after 9/11 when American planes dropped thousands of matchboxes across southern Afghanistan offering cash rewards for information about al-Qaeda’s leader. The reward offer was made in Dari, not Pashtu, the quite different language of southern Afghanistan, and it suggested that those with relevant information should call a number in the United States or email in pertinent information. Ninety-eight percent of Afghans don’t have access to the Internet and very few of them can afford to call America.

  Some reading this may think, But what’s the proof that the al-Qaeda leader is still alive? Plenty. Since 9/11, bin Laden has released a slew of video and audiotapes, many of which discuss current events. On one such tape he said the suffering of the Palestinians was amplified when Arab leaders supported an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference that the U.S. government had hosted in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2007. After a nine-month silence bin Laden released an audiotape on March 14, 2009, sharply condemning the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza. In late January 2010, bin Laden released a tape praising the Nigerian who had recently tried to blow up the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, saying, “The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of the Sept. 11.”

  Could these tapes be fakes? Not one of the dozens of tapes released by bin Laden after 9/11 was a fake; the U.S. government authenticated many of them using bin Laden’s distinctive voiceprint. And what about the reports he was ill? In 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said bin Laden had kidney disease, for which he required a dialysis machine, and was therefore likely dead. But the persistent stories of bin Laden’s life-threatening kidney problems were false, judging by his appearance in videotapes that he released in 2004 and again in 2007, where he showed no signs of illness. His son Omar has said his father did suffer from painful kidney stones, which is perhaps where the idea that he had kidney disease got started. On the 2007 tape the al-Qaeda leader had even dyed his white-flecked beard black, suggesting that as the Saudi militant entered his fifth decade he was not immune to a measure of vanity about his personal appearance. In fact, bin Laden looked much better in those videos than in the tape he released in December 2001 following the battle of Tora Bora, where he had narrowly escaped being killed in the massive American bombing raids.

  Why was it so hard to find bin Laden? First, there was his obsession with security, which began in earnest long ago. In 1994, while bin Laden was living in Sudan, he was the target of a serious assassination attempt, when gunmen raked his Khartoum residence with machine-gun fire. After that attack bin Laden took much greater care of his security, an effort that was coordinated by Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian-American former U.S. Army sergeant who had once worked as an instructor at Special Forces headquarters, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And bin Laden and Zawahiri have spent their entire adult lives in organizations that prize discipline and secrecy. Zawahiri joined a jihadist cell in Egypt when he was only fifteen; bin Laden became involved in clandestine efforts against the Soviets in Afghanistan when he was in his early twenties.

  In 1997, when I was a producer for CNN, I met with bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan to film his first television interview and witnessed the extraordinary lengths to which members of al-Qaeda went to protect their leader. My colleagues and I were taken to bin Laden’s hideout in the middle of the night; we were made to change vehicles while blindfolded; and we had to pass through three successive groups of guards armed with submachine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

  The hunt for al-Qaeda’s leaders was further complicated because after the fall of the Taliban, bin Laden and Zawahiri were almost certainly hiding out in the tribal areas of Pakistan on the Afghan border. The Pakistan-Afghan border stretches some fifteen hundred miles—roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver. It is lightly guarded and undefined; clandestine travel in the region is therefore relatively easy. The two Pakistani provinces that abut Afghanistan are Baluchistan, a vast, inhospitable expanse of broiling deserts, and the North West Frontier Province, a flinty, mountainous region punctuated by the fortresses of tribal chiefs. Pashtun tribes, who constitute one of the largest tribal groups in the world without a state, are a major presence in both provinces. They subscribe to Pashtunwali, the law of the Pashtuns, which places an enormous premium on hospitality and on the giving of refuge to anybody who seeks it, an obvious boon to fugitive members of al-Qaeda.

  Arthur Keller, a CIA officer who ran a spy network in Pakistan’s tribal areas in 2006, explained the problems of working in the region: “It’s an incredibly remote area. They’re hiding in a sea of people that are very xenophobic to outsiders, so it’s a very, very tough nut to crack.” That assessment was shared by Admiral William J. Fallon who, until he retired in March 2008, ran Central Command, which is responsible
for all U.S. military activities in the Middle East and Central Asia. Fallon explained that “even Pakistani forces are treated as antibodies in the tribal areas.”

  This situation was compounded by the fact that for years after 9/11, few American spies were operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Keller said that when he was posted there in early 2006 he was one of only a “handful” of CIA officers working in the seven tribal regions where al-Qaeda and Taliban militants were concentrated. “A great deal of the resources has gone to Iraq,” he explained. “I don’t think it’s appreciated that the CIA is not really a very large organization in terms of field personnel.” Keller said that in the summer of 2006 the Agency did start putting more resources into the tribal region.

  Bin Laden has long been something of a hero in Pakistan, a standing that has helped him while he has been in hiding. In 2004 a Pew poll found al-Qaeda’s leader had a 65 percent favorability rating among Pakistanis, the highest rating in any of the four Muslim countries that Pew had polled that year. And while bin Laden’s popularity had eroded over the years it still stood at 18 percent in Pakistan in 2010.

  Bin Laden also has been preparing for life on the run for decades, adopting a lifestyle of monklike detachment from material comforts. Bin Laden would regularly take his sons out on desert trips designed to toughen them up. His son Omar recalled his father telling him and his brothers, “We must be prepared to face desert warfare when the infidel West attacks the Muslim world.” Bin Laden’s first wife, his Syrian cousin Najwa, also remembered desert expeditions in the mid-1990s when they were based in Sudan in which her husband made all of his wives and kids sleep at night in trenches dug in the desert while limiting their intake of liquids and food and telling them, “There will come a day when you will not have a shelter over your head.”