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

FIGURE 6.1 Key Engagements against Taliban and al Qa’ida²⁰

In addition to Karzai’s troops, Special Operations Forces in support of Gul Agha Shirzai—nicknamed “Bulldozer” for his coercive tactics—advanced from the south. The first clashes occurred in late November at Tarin Kowt and Sayed Slim Kalay, just north of the city. There were also several skirmishes along Highway 4 south of Kandahar from December 2 to 6. On the night of December 6, Mullah Omar and the senior Taliban leadership fled the city and went into hiding, effectively ending Taliban rule in Afghanistan.²² Allied forces subsequently tracked a group of al Qa’ida survivors, thought to include Osama bin Laden, to a series of caves in the White Mountains near Tora Bora. The caves were taken in a sixteen-day battle ending on December 17, but many al Qa’ida defenders escaped and fled across the border into Pakistan.²³

As the Taliban’s power base collapsed, international and local attention turned to nation-building and reconstruction. The United Nations had helped organize a meeting of Afghan political leaders in Bonn, Germany, in late November 2001. On December 5, with Coalition troops about to overtake Kandahar, Afghan leaders signed an agreement that established a timetable for the creation of a representative and freely elected government. The following day, the UN Security Council endorsed the outcome in Resolution 1383.²⁴ Under the Bonn Agreement, the parties agreed to establish an interim authority comprising three main bodies: a thirty-member acting administration headed by Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, which took power on December 22; a supreme court; and the Special Independent Commission for the Convening of the Emergency Loya Jirga (a traditional meeting of Afghan tribal, political, and religious leaders).

The capture of Kabul and other cities by U.S. and Afghan forces pushed surviving fighters east toward the Pakistan border. In January and February 2002, the U.S. military and the CIA began to collect intelligence about a concentration of a thousand or so holdouts from al Qa’ida, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Taliban, and other groups in the Shah-i-kot Valley and surrounding mountains east of Gardez. A combined offensive by Afghan, U.S., and other Western forces, code-named Operation Anaconda, aimed to take out this threat. The operation began on March 2, 2002, and continued through March 16. The group, truly reflecting the U.S.-led Coalition, comprised U.S. forces from the 101st Airborne Division and 10th Mountain Division. Special Operations Forces from the United States, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, and Norway were also involved in the operation.²⁵

The fighting was intense. Insurgent fighters were equipped with sniper rifles, machine guns, recoilless rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and man-portable air defenses (MANPADS). The rugged, mountainous terrain offered excellent concealment for enemy fighters, who scattered in small teams and hid in caves and along steep ridgelines. It was virtually impossible for Coalition forces to surround and seal off the area, or even to target insurgents from the B-52 and AC-130 Spectre gunships circling overhead. An al Qa’ida manual recovered during the operation, titled The Black Book of Mountainous Operations and Training, outlined the utility of rugged terrain for defeating larger forces.

U.S. and allied forces eventually cleared the valley of al Qa’ida and other fighters, but not without a price. The insurgents shot down two Chinook helicopters using rocket-propelled grenades, eight U.S. soldiers were killed, and approximately eighty were wounded. Coalition forces killed a number of fighters, though few bodies were ever found. Hundreds more fled to Pakistan.

Escape to Pakistan

Pakistan’s help in overthrowing the Taliban regime had catapulted Pervez Musharraf to stardom. “Musharraf became an international hero,” remarked Ambassador Chamberlin. “Money was flowing into Pakistan. And Pakistan was no longer a pariah state. The situation was euphoric. Musharraf was on the cover of every magazine and newspaper.”²⁶ But despite these promising developments, peace and stability were fleeting. There was a worrisome exodus of fighters from Afghanistan to Pakistan, as well as disturbing new wrinkles in the complex web of alliances among the Taliban, al Qa’ida fighters, and the Pakistani military.

“The movement of Taliban and al Qa’ida fighters into Pakistan came in waves,” recalled Robert Grenier, the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad following the September 2001 attacks.²⁷ A polished operator, always impeccably dressed, Grenier was also a passionate Boston Red Sox fan who had received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Dartmouth College. He served a distinguished twenty-seven-year career in the CIA, including a stint as chief of “The Farm,” the CIA’s basic-training facility, where he was responsible for guiding and preparing all officers entering the CIA’s clandestine service. From his perch in Islamabad, he monitored the exodus of insurgents from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

In December 2001, after the fall of Kabul and Kandahar, a large contingent of Taliban leaders escaped into Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, among them Mullah Omar. According to the chief of targeting operations for U.S. Central Command at the time, “we conducted several strikes against Mullah Omar in late 2001, none of which were successful.”²⁸ In November, for example, U.S. forces targeted a qanat (underground tunnel) in Kandahar where they had intelligence that he was hiding. In Afghanistan, water is often drawn from springs and rivers and distributed through these qanats, which are excavated and maintained via a series of vertical shafts. U.S. Navy planes initially missed the target with several 2,000-pound general-purpose guided bomb unit-10s (GBU-10). But a subsequent U.S. Air Force strike hit the qanat with a guided bomb unit-28 (GBU-28), a 5,000-pound laser-guided conventional weapon often called a “bunker buster,” with a 4,400-pound penetrating warhead. The GBU-28 collapsed the tunnel, but it did not kill Mullah Omar.

Mullah Omar eventually arrived in Pakistan, and some speculated that he did so on a Honda motorcycle. As President Musharraf quipped to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, “the best advertisement for Honda would be an advertising campaign showing Mullah Omar fleeing on one of its motorcycles with his robes and beard flowing in the wind.”²⁹

Al Qa’ida fighters, including Osama bin Laden, escaped across the Pakistani border en masse. In November 2001, in one of his last public appearances, bin Laden gave a stirring homily to a gathering of local tribal leaders at the Islamic Studies Center in Jalalabad. He promised that they could teach the Americans “a lesson, the same one we taught the Russians.” He was dressed in a gray shalwar kameez, the long shirt and loose trousers worn by most Afghans, and a camouflage jacket. According to some accounts, he distributed cash to the tribal leaders to ensure their support, while many in the crowd shouted “Zindibad [Long live] Osama.”³⁰ American intelligence officials believe that over the next few weeks nearly 1,000 al Qa’ida fighters escaped through Tora Bora and other areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

“You’ve got to give him credit,” noted the CIA’s Gary Schroen. “He stayed in Tora Bora until the bitter end.”³¹

In mid-December 2001, according to some American intelligence estimates, bin Laden left Tora Bora for the last time, accompanied by a handful of bodyguards and aides. CIA forces on the ground repeatedly requested an additional battalion of U.S. Army Rangers to block bin Laden’s escape, but the U.S. military relied on local Afghan forces. Some reports indicate that bin Laden paid Afghans to let him through.³² According to one Pakistani military assessment, the fighters “hid in urban areas and mingled with the local populace by maintaining a relatively low profile.”³³ While al Qa’ida leaders dispersed via a number of different routes, bin Laden journeyed on horseback south toward Pakistan, crossing through the same mountain passes through which the CIA’s convoys passed during the mujahideen years. Along the route, in the dozens of villages and towns on both sides of the frontier, Pashtun tribes allied with the Taliban helped guide the horsemen as they trekked through the hard-packed snow and on toward the old Pakistani military outpost of Parachinar. The CIA later learned that a “group of two hundred Saudis and Yemenis…was guided by members of the Pushtun Ghilzai tribe, who were paid handsomely in money and rifles.”³⁴

Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, the paramilitary force in the border regions, picked up some of the fighters streaming across the border. Al Qa’ida and foreign fighters were turned over to the ISI, and many were handed over to the U.S. government, which housed them temporarily in secret prisons in Kandahar, Bagram, and other locations. Al Qa’ida operatives relied on links with Pakistani militant groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), in cities such as Lahore and Faisalabad, to hide from Pakistan and U.S. intelligence services. They didn’t want to remain in Pakistan, however, because the government was cooperating with the United States. According to CIA assessments, most of the al Qa’ida and foreign fighters were trying to get to Iran, where they could temporarily settle or transit to other areas, such as the Persian Gulf.

By 2002 and 2003, though, the CIA began to gather intelligence indicating that al Qa’ida operatives were