In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

Now that the United States had formally denounced al Qa’ida and, by extension, the Taliban, Saudi officials felt compelled to act. Bin Laden’s involvement in the August 1998 embassy attacks, as well as his derisive statements against Saudi officials, required an urgent response. On September 19, 1998, Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal met with with Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. The meeting began with a brief discussion about the strain between the Taliban and Iran. Turki argued that the Taliban should take steps to defuse the tensions, then he turned to the main topic of the meeting: to ask the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden. Mullah Omar replied that the Taliban had no intention of surrendering bin Laden or any other Arabs to the Saudi government. Omar then questioned the legitimacy of a Saudi government that would allow U.S. troops to be stationed in the Persian Gulf. According to U.S. State Department accounts of the meeting, he then argued that “the Saudi government had no business interfering in Afghan matters since the whole Muslim ‘ummah’ (international community) was in the process of rising against [the Saudi government] because of its failed stewardship of the two holy sites.”⁷¹

Turki’s response was swift and forceful. He returned to Riyadh and cut off all Saudi ties with the Taliban. As a State Department cable explained, the Saudi government was even successful “in preventing private Saudi sources, including foundations, from dispersing money to the Taliban as they did in the past.”⁷² The Taliban- Saudi break angered a number of Taliban leaders, such as deputy leader Mullah Rabbani, who had pro-Saudi views. But neither the Saudis nor the Americans could derail al Qa’ida. In January 2001, eight months before the September 11 attacks, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke wrote a classified memo to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: “We urgently need…a Principals level review of the al Qida network.” He continued by pleading, “As we noted in our briefings for you, al Qida is not some narrow little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy.” What was required, Clarke argued, was “a comprehensive multi-regional policy on al Qida.”⁷³

Al Qa’ida had evolved from a myth to a reality. Indeed, its reputation had grown out of a fabrication that its early disciples had feverishly propagated across the Arab world. Arab jihadists, they claimed, played a critical role in defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. “The USSR, a superpower with the largest land army in the world,” Zawahiri alleged, “was destroyed and the remnants of its troops fled Afghanistan before the eyes of the Muslim youths and as a result of their actions…Osama bin Laden has apprised me of the size of the popular Arab support for the Afghan mujahideen that amounted, according to his sources, to $200 million in the form of military aid alone in 10 years.”⁷⁴

But this self-aggrandizement was unwarranted. Though it is a common theme in al Qa’ida lore, the contributions of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other Arabs were negligible to the Soviet defeat. Mohammad Yousaf, head of the ISI’s Afghanistan bureau that trained the mujahideen against the Soviets, doesn’t even discuss the Arab jihadists in his account of the Soviet defeat.⁷⁵ As Lawrence Wright explained in his book The Looming Tower, “the presence of several thousand Arabs—and rarely more than a few hundred of them actually on the field of battle—made no real difference in the tide of affairs.”⁷⁶ The Afghan mujahideen would have won with or without their help, thanks in large part to the astronomical amount of arms, money, and other assistance provided by the governments of Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia.⁷⁷

In some respects, this al Qa’ida myth was probably irrelevant. What mattered was that some people— especially its own members—believed it. By 2001, al Qa’ida had evolved into a competent international terrorist organization that had conducted bold attacks against the United States in Tanzania, Kenya, and Yemen. Its goals were compatible with the Taliban’s ideology. Richard Clarke’s January 2001 memo to Condoleezza Rice asserted that al Qa’ida’s objective was to “replace moderate, modern, Western regimes in Muslim countries with theocracies modeled along the lines of the Taliban.”⁷⁸ From its base in Afghanistan, al Qa’ida also planned the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

CHAPTER SIX Operation Enduring Freedom

THE MORNING OF September 11, 2001, began like many others for Zalmay Khalilzad, who was serving as a special assistant to President George W. Bush at the National Security Council. He was sitting in a meeting run by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in the White House Situation Room when the first hijacked plane flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center, tearing a gaping hole in the building and setting it afire. “There was a TV screen hanging in a corner of the room,” he told The New Yorker. “When the first plane hit, we had a sense that, oh, maybe it had lost its way. As soon as the second plane hit, the meeting was called to an end and she rushed away. We went outside the White House to Pennsylvania Avenue and waited awhile till we got the all-clear sign. While we were out, there had been all sorts of rumors and reports, that Capitol Hill had been hit, and the Pentagon, obviously, had been hit. Then we started to look at the intelligence. I started looking at Afghanistan, tracing al Qa’ida.”¹ The September 11 attacks opened another chapter in Afghanistan’s age of insurgency. Unbeknownst to most Americans, however, the struggle for Afghanistan had already begun. On September 9, 2001, two al Qa’ida terrorists, Dahmane Abd al-Sattar and Bouraoui el-Ouaer, had assassinated Northern Alliance military commander Ahmed Shah Massoud in Afghanistan. Posing as Belgian journalists, they had been granted an interview with Massoud in his bungalow near the Tajikistan border. After setting up their equipment, Bouraoui detonated explosives concealed in his camera, riddling Massoud with shrapnel. Massoud died shortly thereafter, along with one of his assistants, Muhammad Asim Suhail, weakening the already frail Northern Alliance.

U.S. policymakers planning the response to the September 11 attacks a few days later, which they named Operation Enduring Freedom, realized the gravity of this action: the charismatic military commander they most needed to overthrow the Taliban was dead. The situation required an unconventional approach, and the CIA and the Pentagon scrambled to make plans.²

History Begins Today

One of the first challenges, however, was securing Pakistan’s cooperation. Pakistan’s strategic location next to Afghanistan and its government’s involvement there since the Soviet invasion made it a key player. But the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, had arrived in Pakistan “expecting to spend most of [her] time dealing with a humanitarian crisis unfolding in the region.” A severe drought and famine in Afghanistan had caused refugees to flee to Pakistan, which was perhaps the most important domestic issue that summer.³ But the September 11 attacks changed everything.

A few weeks before the attacks, Chamberlin had a private dinner with President Pervez Musharraf at the house of Mahmud Ali Durrani, who would later become the Pakistani ambassador to the United States. “My vision of the country hinges on increasing foreign investment in Pakistan and economic growth,” Musharraf told Chamberlin. “But,” he continued, “the level of domestic terrorism is currently too high,” making it difficult to bring in outside capital. Musharraf also told her: “Pakistan needs strategic depth in Afghanistan to ensure that there is a friendly regime on Pakistan’s western border.”⁴ The timing was ironic. In less than a month, the United States would ask Musharraf to overthrow the very Taliban government that the ISI had painstakingly supported for nearly a decade, which meant putting his “strategic depth” in jeopardy.

On September 11, just hours after the attacks, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage met with the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Mahmoud Ahmed, who was visiting Washington. Armitage delivered a stern message: Pakistan’s leaders had to choose between the United States or the terrorists; there was no middle ground. “No American will want to have anything to do with Pakistan in our moment of peril if you’re not with us,” Armitage told him. “It’s black or white.” When Ahmed began to waver, pleading that Armitage had to understand history, Armitage cut him off. “No,” he replied, “the history begins today.”⁵ Armitage is an imposing figure. Barrel-chested, with broad shoulders and a thick neck, he had recently told President Bush he was still bench-pressing “330/6,” which meant six repetitions of 330 pounds each. It was down from a few years earlier, he remarked, when he had been bench-pressing 440 pounds.⁶

On September 12, Ambassador Chamberlin received State Department instructions to see President Musharraf in Islamabad and ask him a simple question: “Are you with us or against us?” The meeting, which took place the next day in one of Musharraf’s Islamabad offices, was tense. America was reeling from the terrorist attacks, and President Bush wanted a quick answer from Musharraf. After an hour, there had been little progress. Musharraf was waffling in his commitment to the United States, so Chamberlin resorted to a bit of drama. Sitting