by Steve Coll
No Taliban or other Afghans participated in the September 11 attacks. The hijackers were Saudis and other Arabs. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the plot’s mastermind, was a Pakistani who had lived for many years in Kuwait and attended college in North Carolina. It is not clear whether Mullah Mohammad Omar knew of the conspiracy in advance. Two European scholars who interviewed Taliban leaders extensively judged it “doubtful” that he did, but could not reach a firm conclusion. Hank Crumpton at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center had come to believe that “Al Qaeda, if anything, had co-opted the Taliban leadership and had taken advantage of their stunning ignorance of world affairs.” Still, under the emerging Bush Doctrine, Omar’s refusal to cooperate in Bin Laden’s arrest condemned the Taliban to mass slaughter and indefinite imprisonment as enemy combatants. And the Taliban leader declined to yield. An edict issued in Mullah Mohammad Omar’s name eight days after the attacks on Washington and New York required all offices of the Islamic Emirate, “in addition to being ready for sacrifices,” to begin holding “Koran reading sessions in their mosques and ask great God for humiliation, embarrassment and defeat of the infidel powers.”5
Mullah Zaeef had served Mullah Omar loyally as a minister and then as ambassador to Pakistan, the Taliban’s most important diplomatic post. After the September 11 attacks, he traveled to Kandahar. Omar told him that he had summoned Bin Laden and asked him about the attacks on New York and Washington.
“He swore that he didn’t do it,” Omar explained. “I couldn’t pressure him beyond that. If you have proof of his involvement, then show it to me. But I haven’t seen any proof. . . .” In Omar’s mind, “There was less than a 10 percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats,” Zaeef concluded.
The Taliban leader clung to his position that Bin Laden had not been proven guilty: “Where is the evidence?” And, “If there was a crime, we are not supporting the criminal,” so there was no reason for the United States to target the Taliban.
Zaeef predicted, “America would definitely attack.”
Other Taliban leaders advised that even if Mullah Mohammad Omar produced Bin Laden, the Americans would still strike. The demand for Bin Laden, they argued, was “just an excuse” to overthrow the Taliban’s Islamic State. A Taliban editorial published on September 23 posited that “Osama is a good pretext” for the United States, which had “colonizing objectives” and was “interested in establishing a military base in Pakistan at any cost in order to control this region.”
In Mullah Mohammad Omar’s advisory circle, “They believed that power had been given to them by Allah and that at any time Allah could take it away,” said a former Taliban Foreign Ministry official then in Kabul. “They were thinking, ‘If Allah is not with us, then we will lose power.’ Conversely, ‘If He is with us, we can defy the world.’”6
—
The air war opened on the night of October 7 in Afghanistan, the afternoon in Washington. At the C.I.A., the center of action was the Global Response Center, the Counterterrorist Center’s twenty-four-hour operations room on the sixth floor of Old Headquarters. Video screens hung on the center’s walls. Officers and analysts—many from the agency, but some on assignment from the military—sat before classified computers and secure telephones. The atmosphere was alert but quiet; the operators mainly communicated by typing messages in a secure chat system.
George Tenet arrived at the center for the war’s opening. Charles Allen, the C.I.A.’s assistant director for collection, who had helped develop the Predator drone program, turned up as well. As C.T.C. director, Cofer Black was the commanding officer in charge of the C.I.A.’s drone operations, which had recently acquired lethal capability. Predators and similar drones had been providing low-altitude aerial surveillance for the C.I.A. and the military for a number of years. The C.I.A. had been operating Predators on surveillance missions over Afghanistan out of an air base in Uzbekistan since the summer of 2000. The classified program was experimental. The ability of drones to hover over terrorist camps in otherwise remote and inaccessible territory gave rise to the idea that they might be equipped with weapons. A C.I.A.–Air Force team known most recently as the Summer Project had modified the drone’s capabilities rapidly. The latest innovation, perfected over the summer, had been to equip Predators with Hellfire air-to-ground missiles that could strike buildings or vehicles. On September 17, President Bush had signed a Memorandum of Notification authorizing C.I.A. covert action against Al Qaeda and its allies, including targeted killing. Bush delegated the trigger-pulling decision to Tenet, who delegated it to the C.I.A. directorate of operations, which delegated it to Black. Under the Counterterrorist Center’s command, pilots had been flying Predators armed with Hellfires over Afghanistan for several weeks, but the C.I.A. had refrained from shooting at any targets because doing so might risk exposing Uzbekistan’s secret cooperation. Now, under the cover of a wider air war carried out by conventional American bombers, starting this night, the agency could fire when ready. Yet Black did not have authority to order Air Force or Navy bombers into action. That decision belonged ultimately to General Tommy Franks, the four-star general and career artillery officer who ran Central Command.
That afternoon in Langley, the Global Response Center screens showed infrared imagery of Mullah Mohammad Omar’s home on Kandahar’s outskirts. A C.I.A.-controlled drone transmitted the live video feed. It was a dark night in Kandahar. The drone sending the pictures was one of a small number the C.I.A. had put in the air over Afghanistan after September 11. The pilot and sensor operator controlling the flight sat in a metal container elsewhere on the C.I.A. campus, near a parking lot. Scott Swanson, a former Special Operations helicopter pilot, had the stick. The sensor operator was Jeff A. “Gunny” Guay, an Air Force imagery analyst.7
Omar’s Kandahar compound was a well-known surveillance target. C.I.A.-directed pilots had been flying over the home regularly since 2000. The house was one of the few “obvious targets” known in Afghanistan, as a senior officer involved put it. The C.I.A. had placed the emir’s compound on a list of targets for Central Command to bomb after September 11, but it was up to Tommy Franks to decide what to strike first this night. Osama Bin Laden and many of his Al Qaeda lieutenants had already fled to the White Mountains, along the border with Pakistan, according to the C.I.A.’s reporting. Yet Mullah Mohammad Omar had stayed put at his comfortable home in Kandahar, which had been built and decorated by Bin Laden, as a gift.
Some officers in the C.I.A.’s leadership hoped Central Command would bomb the compound in the very first strikes of the war, to eliminate Omar and his lieutenants. Instead, following more conventional doctrine, Franks approved initial bombing on October 7 of an airfield in Kandahar. Air Force doctrine typically sought to eliminate the enemy’s air defenses in the initial strikes so that U.S. and allied planes could fly and bomb at will after that. The Taliban’s air defenses were rudimentary, but Franks took the standard approach.8
The problem was, the initial bombing of the Kandahar Airfield effectively announced that the American air war had begun. As the C.I.A. Predator watched overhead, several turbaned men soon emerged from Mullah Mohammad Omar’s house. The Taliban climbed into a pair of vehicles and drove away. The C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center’s analysts judged that Mullah Omar was in the group. The intelligence case was “multiple stream, authoritative, comprehensive,” in the assessment of a senior officer involved. The C.I.A.-directed Predator followed the small convoy. The vehicles drove initially to a home in downtown Kandahar that the C.I.A. had previously identified as the residence of Omar’s mother. The men entered, stayed a brief time, and then left. This time, they departed Kandahar and drove about forty kilometers to the west of the city. They arrived at a compound that contained two one-story flat-roofed buildings separated by a rectangular open area about one hundred yards long and fifty yards across. One building appeared to be a madrassa, or Islamic school. The smaller building acro
ss the yard appeared to be a mosque.9
The presumed Taliban, possibly including Mullah Omar, went inside the school. There were other armed men and vehicles present. Later, participants would retain diverse memories of the number of presumed Taliban gathered, from a relatively small number to several hundred.
During the next several hours, the decision making about whether to attempt to kill Mullah Omar or, more precisely, the group of men that had emerged from his house and was judged to include him, became badly confused. The Predator’s infrared cameras showed glowing images of distinct individuals but could not provide photographic clarity. This was a novel interagency operation in which a top secret C.I.A. drone program was attempting to coordinate its action with Air Force decision makers who sometimes didn’t even know that the C.I.A. had a live camera on the target. Air Force imagery analysis was at its best when tasked with identifying enemy tanks in open areas on a conventional battlefield. Collaborative analysis with the C.I.A. about men out of uniform hanging around on the outskirts of Kandahar challenged the Air Force’s standards of risk management.
The twenty-pound Hellfire missile the C.I.A. Predator carried had been developed for Apache attack helicopters, to penetrate tanks and kill their occupants. Its relatively light explosive payload would be ineffective against a large roofed building like the school the presumed Taliban had just entered. The alternative was to drop conventional bombs—each with massive, destructive explosive force, compared with a Hellfire missile. Air Force and Navy fighter-bombers were now circling outside Kandahar on standby. They carried such ordnance.
The C.I.A.’s Global Response Center had an open line to Central Command’s joint intelligence operations center in Florida. C.I.A. officers talked with Brigadier General Jeff Kimmons, the director of intelligence or J-2 at Central Command. Kimmons was sitting inches from General Franks in a small secure room on the second floor, watching the same infrared Predator footage as the C.I.A.’s leaders. There were eight to ten intelligence officers, operations officers, and analysts in the Central Command operations room, as well as a Navy captain who was a military lawyer or judge advocate general. She was there to advise Franks about targeting rules. In larger adjoining rooms sat dozens of other Central Command officers and targeting analysts.
The C.I.A. requested a conventional bombing of the madrassa where it appeared Mullah Mohammad Omar had entered. A Central Command intelligence officer present said years later that he did not recall that request, but even if the C.I.A. had asked for such a strike, he would have advised Franks against dropping bombs on the target. The reason: “When someone enters a building you don’t just strike and kill everybody under the assumption that they’re all Taliban.” Bombing the presumed school with so many unidentified people inside would have been irresponsible. Also, Central Command’s on-site lawyer, the J.A.G., concluded that the nearby mosque would be damaged unacceptably. The scene required “tactical patience,” as the military intelligence officer put it. “We were not eager to do something foolish and kill lots of innocent people. That mattered a lot to Franks. . . . The military was not out to kill [Mullah Mohammad Omar] at all costs. We were intent on killing him at a time and place where we could do so surgically.”10
Moreover, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks had orders from President Bush to minimize collateral damage and civilian deaths during the air war, to avoid inflaming Afghan and international opinion. In his final conversation with President Bush, Bush had told Franks that the war was “not about religion. If you see Bin Laden go into a mosque, wait until he comes out to kill him.”
Now, as he watched the compound, Franks thought, “Wait till they come out.”11
Franks relayed to the C.I.A. that he had decided not to bomb the school. An Air Force officer monitoring the events made notes of his reaction to this decision: “CINC [commander in chief of CENTCOM, i.e., Franks] not hitting building because of collateral damage. Amazing. We could get Omar but the CINC’s worried about collateral damage.”12 The C.I.A. initiated an appeal, according to several officers involved, to ask Rumsfeld and ultimately President Bush to overrule Franks. But it would take an hour or so for that request to play out.
Black and the C.I.A. team running the Predator operation inside the Global Response Center still had an opportunity to fire a Hellfire missile, even if the missile was not potent enough to take out the school and kill all the men inside. Nobody had ever fired a missile from a remotely operated drone on a battlefield. They would make military and intelligence history if they did. An officer watching the Predator feed at Langley figured there “would be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking” about whatever the C.I.A. did now. The feeling in the Global Response Center was “Have to be correct. . . . Don’t mess it up.”13
Cofer Black could have fired legally on his own authority. Yet Central Command’s senior intelligence officer had just announced that there was an unacceptable risk of collateral damage. Officers watching the C.I.A. feed recalled that the Global Response Center asked for permission to shoot at a pickup truck parked outside the assembly building. “The purpose was psychological,” according to an officer involved. They would stun the Taliban.14
In Florida, Franks thought that maybe a Hellfire shot “will persuade the people to leave the mosque and give us a shot at the principals.” The Air Force officer keeping notes recorded Franks’s logic: “Perhaps use Hellfires to scare them out to go to another hold site and then hit them.”
Black gave the order. In the container on the C.I.A. campus, Swanson now counted down. “Weapon away,” he said. The Hellfire missile fired off its rail. A truck exploded in a flash of light.
The Taliban in the flat-roofed building did indeed rush out. They took up positions in a standard 360-degree infantry defense. The glowing infrared figures “were all adult males, some carrying weapons. There wasn’t another target like that for the rest of the war,” in the judgment of an officer watching.15
The men drove off. They did not all go in the same direction, however. Swanson and Guay directed their Predator above one vehicle that they believed held Omar. There are two credible accounts of what happened next, drawn from the memories of participants. In one account, Central Command ordered the C.I.A. to return to watching the original school compound. In the other, the Predator followed the vehicles to a new compound with a mosque.
It is clear that at some point Franks spoke with Rumsfeld about whether to risk collateral damage by striking a mosque, given the possibility that they would kill Omar. According to a memo Rumsfeld composed two weeks later, the secretary of defense instructed Franks to wait a few minutes. Then Rumsfeld called President Bush to inform him. Bush concurred that the risk of innocent deaths or destroyed mosques was worth bearing if Mullah Mohammad Omar was in their sights. Rumsfeld relayed his own approval to Franks, without telling him that he had spoken to the president.16
Finally, on Franks’s order, American fighter-bombers deposited two bombs on the mosque under C.I.A. surveillance. In any event, Mullah Omar was not there. The C.I.A. later assessed that after he departed the school west of Kandahar, he made his way to Gardez, in eastern Afghanistan. So far as is known, no other significant Taliban leaders died in the bombing on the first night of the war, either.17
Mullah Mohammad Omar’s death on October 7 might have influenced the Taliban’s evolution, given the divided opinions within the movement’s leadership about how to manage their relationship with Al Qaeda after the shock of September 11. That alternative history might have turned out no better than what actually unfolded, but as the coming decade’s failures and suffering unfolded, the lost opportunity of October 7 gnawed at several of the military and intelligence officers involved that night. They wondered from time to time what might have been.
—
The hunt for Mullah Omar went on, but it seemed to be cursed. In one instance, recalled Robert Grenier, then the C.I.A. station chief in
Islamabad, “our best human source in Kandahar” provided a precise account of Omar’s movement in a small convoy, but when Islamabad Station “put the target information out within minutes of our receiving it,” the station “got no response” from headquarters.
The C.I.A. and I.S.I. also apparently tried to track Mullah Zaeef in the hope the Taliban ambassador would lead them to Omar. As the air war intensified, Zaeef traveled to Kandahar in a Land Cruiser to discuss with Omar an offer Qatar had made to mediate an end of the fighting. He was “followed all the way by Pakistani intelligence.” He made his way to a makeshift Taliban headquarters in Kandahar and asked for Mullah Omar, but he was not there. Zaeef left. One hour later, a U.S. Air Force strike destroyed the building.18
