The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Over the border in Pakistan, Grenier, who was by now back in his office at the U.S. embassy, heard that the U.S. side had caught a break. Local men Osama had employed to build up the mountain complex had been bought up by the CIA to act as guides, leading targeting and reconnaissance specialists toward a ridgeline from which they could look directly into the Melawa Valley and Al Qaeda’s forward operating base.

  Astonished, Grenier listened to field reports that described Osama’s command posts, vehicles, and stone outbuildings. Dozens of Al Qaeda fighters were spotted in machine-gun nests and antiaircraft positions that had been built into the vertiginous cliffs.

  The reconnaissance and targeting mission flashed coordinates back to CENTCOM, and the first missiles screeched in. Grenier followed cables about the buildup anxiously, and by the afternoon he could see from the reports that bombers and jets crisscrossed the cloudless sky above Tora Bora, filling the valley with vapors and smoke. Above them, inside his subterranean operations center, Osama called on his men to be patient, while he sipped tea and ate dates.83

  On the Pakistan side, six Pakistan Army battalions, freshly kitted out with U.S. matériel, were climbing into position high above Parachinar under the command of Lieutenant General Ali Jan Aurakzai, the recalcitrant commander of Pakistan’s IX Corps. A Pashtun from the Orakzai tribal agency, the general had overall responsibility for the entire northwest of Pakistan. His six thousand men ascended, hand over fist, toward Al Qaeda positions.84

  December 4, 2001, Melawa Valley, Afghanistan

  A U.S. Delta Force squadron, bolstered by Afghan irregulars, had overrun Al Qaeda’s Melawa garrison at the foot of the climb up to Tora Bora. Backed up by airpower, the squadron had overcome the base more quickly than anyone had expected. The operators radioed back details of olive groves strewn with dismembered bodies. “Even the trees have been upended.” Nothing could have survived the firestorm that hit this place. Afghan scavengers scurried about offering to sell videotapes, notebooks, and even cadavers—for $300 apiece.

  Combing for pocket litter, the Delta specialists recovered a still-working Yaesu handset. Cupping it to his ear, one Arab-speaking operative wondered if the soft male voice he could hear giving instructions was that of Osama bin Laden. “Bring the food!” he urged. “Kill the Americans!”

  Two more days of round-the-clock bombing followed as U.S. forces tried to climb higher and break open Al Qaeda’s positions with laser-guided bunker busters and earth-penetrating Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), which were bombs made smarter by being strapped into GPS cradles. Although CIA specialists and Delta operatives could see nothing, radio intercepts suggested they were having an impact up above.

  “Call the doctor!” a mujahid screamed in Arabic. “Doctor. Doctor. Call the doctor as soon as possible.”85

  “Danger. More planes!” another shouted. “Watch out! Back to the caves!”

  The bombs continued to fall. “Trapped inside,” a voice announced. “Falling rock. Beware.”

  On December 7, Northern Alliance fighters allied to the United States broke into one passage blocked by a landslide and found dozens of bodies trapped beneath huge jagged boulders—Afghanis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Jordanians, and Palestinians.

  Believing that a retreat into Pakistan was now imminent, the CIA’s Robert Grenier, who was watching events unfold from Islamabad, consulted his charts and sent a formal request for a battalion of U.S. Army Rangers to be dropped into position behind the Al Qaeda lines, just to make sure the blocking job was done right.86

  General Tommy Franks refused. They were not going to make the same mistake as the Soviets, he said, deploying huge numbers of U.S. forces that could be drawn into a mountaintop trap. The Pakistanis would do the job for them, acting as the catcher on the high slopes and a beater down in the valley of Parachinar. Lieutenant General Aurakzai had their back. His forward units had reached thirteen thousand feet. Osama was surrounded.

  Grenier doubted anyone could secure the passes out of the White Mountains and was frustrated that the U.S. military and Bush officials did not press home their distinct advantage. After he recommended that the CIA team on the ground advance, Afghan villagers were dispatched up toward Al Qaeda’s position with GPS devices concealed inside food parcels. One excited man returned, adamant that he had seen Osama bin Laden, a teenage boy who could be one of his sons, and Dr. al-Zawahiri in a cave at fourteen thousand feet. The coordinates were passed back to CENTCOM with a request to send in a BLU-82 Daisy Cutter. The fifteen-thousand-pound bomb was designed to explode with intimidating power above the ground, scything a landing strip inside a forest in a split second.

  Unused since Vietnam and Laos, the Daisy Cutter was so huge it had to be rolled out of the plane. When it detonated in the air on December 9, it shook the mountains for miles around and the radio once more provided insight: an Al Qaeda fighter hollering for assistance and for the “red truck to move wounded.” Another reported: “Cave too hot, can’t reach others.” Everything was melting and burning or crumbling.

  One plaintive voice caught a signals operator’s attention: “Father is trying to break through the siege line.” Was this code, or had one of Osama’s sons radioed through sensitive information on an open line? Working to lock down the signal, the CIA believed it had pinpointed Osama’s location to within thirty feet—the closest American forces had ever come to the Al Qaeda leader. But as Delta operatives crawled forward, a firefight exploded with Al Qaeda fighters and a Yemeni rear guard pouring in rounds. Three Delta squadron members were stuck as their Afghan support team retreated down the mountain to break their Ramadan fast.

  Even though the battle rested on a knife edge, the specialists were ordered to withdraw. Up above, Dr. Ayman Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor from the Al Wafa charity, was amputating limbs without anesthetic inside the lip of a cave as plumes of smoke drifted in. “I was out of medicine and I had a lot of casualties. I did a hand amputation by a knife, and I did a finger amputation with scissors,” he recalled. “There comes a point when you are a butcher carving meat and praying that you are doing good and not just doing something. In fact, prayer,” the doctor added, “was practically my only instrument.”87

  The only reason he had any medical supplies at all was because he had recently made a dangerous round-trip to Lahore to collect them from Dr. Amir Aziz, Osama’s personal physician. Now running out, he sought permission to quit the mountain.

  Osama demanded to speak to Dr. Batarfi personally. Appearing suddenly from behind a tree, which Batarfi presumed hid the entrance to a cave, the Al Qaeda leader warned the doctor he was making a mistake. “Where will you go?” he asked accusatorily. Tora Bora was unraveling into a free-for-all, and if the doctor left they would all die.

  Batarfi estimated that there were only two hundred mujahideen left. He overheard one of them say that they had just sixteen working Kalashnikovs among them. He walked across the mountain strewn with corpses curled like ferns. “Injured brothers cowered in trenches, praying for a swift and painless martyrdom.”88

  On the night of December 10, Osama reached for his radio set. “What should we do?” he asked the airwaves plaintively.

  On the morning of December 12, Ibn Sheikh made radio contact with a U.S.-allied Afghan warlord and offered a cease-fire so that bin Laden could negotiate his surrender. They agreed to talk again at four P.M.89

  Shortly before the cease-fire was due to expire, Ibn Sheikh called through, asking for an extension until eight A.M. the next morning, explaining: “We need to have a meeting with our guys.”

  The U.S. side was not sold on the idea but General Franks agreed, overruling the doubters, even though Delta operatives were straining to enter the Tora Bora caves to flush out Al Qaeda’s leadership.

  “Why take your foot off?” an incandescent Grenier fumed in Islamabad.

  On the morning of December 13, the eight A.M. deadline passed without any further communication. Later that afternoon in Islamabad, unscheduled troop activit
ies on the Pakistan side suddenly grabbed the CIA station chief’s attention.

  Without any explanation, Lieutenant General Aurakzai appeared to be moving his soldiers off the White Mountains.

  Grenier radioed to check. It was absolutely happening. The troops had been reassigned to Pakistan’s eastern borders, with instructions, intercepted by the CIA, to complete the maneuver “within three hours.” When he tried to get through to Aurakzai and to General Khan, there was no response.

  December 13, 2001, 11:45 A.M., New Delhi, India

  Shortly before noon India Standard Time, militants from Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Pakistani jihad outfit run by Masood Azhar and nurtured by the ISI, attacked the main parliament building in New Delhi, a brazen assault that left twelve men dead and both nations eyeballing each other.90 Almost immediately, India started deploying soldiers on its border with Pakistan, prompting Major General Musharraf to issue orders to meet them head-on, rerouting Lieutenant General Aurakzai’s forces to face them down. “Two active borders are something one would never wish,” said major General Rashid Qureshi, Musharraf’s spokesman.91

  Only a war could come between Aurakzai and the White Mountains, General Khan had warned. And now Masood Azhar’s mujahideen had launched a humiliating assault that brought India and Pakistan closer to fighting—with nuclear weapons—than at any other time since 1999.

  Could Jaish have attacked the Indian parliament without their sponsors in the ISI knowing about it? Grenier fumed. Was the timing some kind of terrible coincidence? It was difficult not to see this as a deliberate ruse to allow Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora into Pakistan.92

  When Wendy Chamberlin, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, finally got to speak to Musharraf about the issue, all he would say was that intelligence was a “dirty business.”93 The military combine in Pakistan was like magma, a molten cauldron of minerals and impurities that occasionally formed a crust and was liable to leak out of unseen vents when the pressure became irresistible.

  December 14, 2001, Tora Bora

  A radio operator caught a snatch of an all-too-familiar voice speaking Arabic. “The time is now!” Osama declared. “Arm your women and children.”

  The messages that followed threw light on the unfolding scene on the mountaintop. Al Qaeda was rallying, sending out small scouting teams to test the trails to their rear. Quickly, they returned and reported “no resistance.”

  Next came an apology “to all of his fighters,” Osama sending admiration and regrets “for getting them trapped and pounded by American airstrikes.”

  Afterward, the thrum of collective prayer filled the airwaves.

  In his mind’s eye, Grenier imagined the rugged hills above Parachinar. Now instead of a trip wire of forces paid for by the United States, the back door out of Tora Bora was flapping wide open, and through it would stride an exile.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “These Arabs … they have killed Afghans. They have trained their guns on Afghan lives … We want them out.”

  —HAMID KARZAI, NOVEMBER 20011

  December 5, 2001, Hotel Petersberg, Bonn, Germany

  The Iranian delegation’s Mohammad Javad Zarif was busy in every corner of the room, charming and scolding, cajoling and listening. Zarif was the juice that fueled the United Nations–brokered conference on Afghanistan’s future. More than anyone else present, he had helped bring together an unwieldy collection of polarized factions: warlords, chieftains, and power brokers, men who were divided by perennial ethnic and territorial rivalries. They had mistrusted each other for generations, and even those that did not fall into this category had concealed agendas.

  After days of argument that had unfolded as Tora Bora heated up and then fizzled, agreement had been reached among the four main groups present—the Northern Alliance, which now controlled Kabul; the Peshawar Group of Pashtun exiles; the Cyprus Group that was close to Iran and represented Afghan exiles and former mujahideen fighters; and the Royalists, who were calling for the reinstatement of the former king of Afghanistan, who lived in Rome. Against the odds, all four groups now supported the appointment of Northern Alliance–backed Hamid Karzai, the head of Afghanistan’s Popalzai tribe, as chairman of a new interim administration. Karzai, a controversial figure who in 1999 and 2000 had traveled to Europe and the United States to warn that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were in league and plotting atrocities, had been America’s preferred candidate from the start.

  Now that the final vote had been taken, Zarif—satisfied, exhausted, and slightly dismayed that Washington’s candidate had won the day—sought out U.S. State Department official James Dobbins to gloat about what he saw as his pivotal role. Iran, he said, had “done it all.”2 Dobbins had to agree. As a practiced diplomat who was also a realist, he admitted to being amazed at his counterpart’s proficiency. After more than twenty years of animosity, the United States and Iran had finally found something they could agree on: routing Al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan.

  Like Ryan Crocker before him, Dobbins had deduced that behind the Iranian negotiations sat a genuine desire to normalize relations with the United States. After handing over maps of Taliban and Al Qaeda military positions and chivying Washington into launching Operation Enduring Freedom, Iranian diplomats had now gifted the United States a peace plan that just might save a country that currently resembled “a shattered dinner service.” If there was another game going on in town, Dobbins could not see it. Tehran was realigning itself fortuitously and pragmatically with the United States.

  Soon there would be a U.S.-sponsored interim authority in Kabul that might create a transitory authority that could elect a government that was not antagonistic to the West—or Tehran. As things stood, an amenable Karzai would be inaugurated in ten days in Kabul.

  “Soon,” Zarif prophesized cryptically as he and Dobbins parted, “Iran will reveal that it holds other pieces of this puzzle.”3

  On the flight back to Washington, Dobbins pondered this comment and hoped that the White House would respond to this Iranian endeavor by seizing the chance to dismantle the roadblocks erected after 1979. Using diplomats like Zarif, Iran’s President Khatami was repositioning his country, and glancing toward the West—if only President Bush would take notice.

  December 7, 2001, Kandahar, Afghanistan

  Al Qaeda forces, holed up at the city’s shattered airport, were caught between eardrum-popping aerial bombing runs and the rush of mortar shells, fired by fast-advancing Northern Alliance fighters. The U.S. military was close behind, readying to roll right over the bones of the Taliban’s rule.

  After maghrib prayer, just after sunset, the Mauritanian was called away from the Al Qaeda foxholes to Mullah Omar’s office in the city, where he witnessed a decisive show of hands. Like its forces had done in Kabul, the Taliban was giving up Kandahar without seeing through the final battle, leaving Al Qaeda to fend for itself.

  The Mauritanian scurried back to the airport with the terrible news. Unable to reach Osama, the shura took a snap decision. They would never survive alone. While the Taliban could melt away into the civilian population, the predominantly Arab members of Al Qaeda, much paler and taller, and without the local languages, could not. Abu Zubaydah took volunteers to scout for buses, returning with three corroded vehicles, two of which were immediately loaded with boxes of ammunition, kit bags, wounded fighters, food, water, maps, and sacks of U.S. dollars. Next, the Mauritanian watched, astonished, as twenty-four senior Al Qaeda leaders scrambled onto the third bus, the bond of comradeship forged in the pandemonium of the carpet-bombing clouding their common sense that they should split up.

  Here they sat, row by row, as rounds pinged off the mud and brick: military commander Saif al-Adel, Planes Operation architect Mokhtar, planner Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda strategist Abu Musab al-Suri (aka the Syrian), and many more.

  “One strike and the entire world of jihad is gone,” the Mauritanian muttered. “Spread out. Spread out. Please!”

  As the leaders ca
me to their senses and were dispersed, with one unit volunteering to remain behind at the airport, the Afghan drivers asked for directions. Where were they going? The options were limited: running west to the Iranian border, heading east into Pakistan, or following Mullah Omar’s forces northeast toward Gardez. After a brief discussion, they chose the last option.

  The convoy rumbled out of the city on a track shadowing the main Kabul-bound highway. Zubaydah, who had spent the best part of a decade ferrying mujahideen into Afghanistan, worked the radio, checking that his contacts in Pakistan’s jihad fronts were ready to receive the Al Qaeda refugees.

  The journey out of Kandahar Province was perilous. Every bridge was down. American jets roared overhead. Scouts hared off to probe silent villages, knowing as they inched forward, there was no way back.

  The unit of brothers who had remained at the airport was pinned down and taking on heavy fire; the Mauritanian listened with a heavy heart as the names of the dead were read out over the radio. Who was left to offer funeral rites? he wondered.4

  At daybreak, they reached Zabul, the last bubble of Taliban control, where they decided to split. “The mere presence of Arabs means that the Americans would bomb the people’s houses, kill women and children, and say, ‘Sorry, sorry, we thought that bin Laden was there,’ ” Zubaydah raged in his diary. Desperate Afghans could no longer protect them.