K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
The Ongoing Hunt for Osama bin Laden
He's still out there. The hunt for bin Laden.
By Evan Thomas
Newsweek
Sept. 3, 2007 issue - The Americans were getting close. It was early
in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were
holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol
of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden's
redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among
the Qaeda leader's 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove "the Sheik,"
as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As
Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story,
the anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using
the code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide. According to Said,
bin Laden had decreed that he would never be captured. "If there's a
99 percent risk of the Sheik's being captured, he told his men that
they should all die and martyr him as well," Said told Omar Farooqi, a
Taliban liaison officer to Al Qaeda who spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter
in Afghanistan.
The secret word was never given. As the Qaeda sentry watched the U.S.
troops, the patrol started moving in a different direction. Bin
Laden's men later concluded that the soldiers had nearly stumbled on
their hideout by accident. (One former U.S. intelligence officer told
NEWSWEEK that he was aware of official reporting on this incident.)
And so it has gone for six years. American intelligence officials
interviewed by NEWSWEEK ruefully agree that the hunt to find bin Laden
has been more a game of chance than good or "actionable" intelligence.
Since bin Laden slipped away from Tora Bora in December 2001, U.S.
intelligence has never had better than a 50-50 certainty about his
whereabouts. "There hasn't been a serious lead on Osama bin Laden
since early 2002," says Bruce Riedel, who recently retired as a South
Asia expert at the CIA. "What we're doing now is shooting in the dark
in outer space. The chances of hitting anything are zero."
How can that be? With all its spy satellites and aerial drones, killer
commandos and millions in reward money, why can't the world's greatest
superpower find a middle-aged, possibly ill, religious fanatic with a
medieval mind-set? The short answer, sometimes overlooked, is that
good, real-time intelligence about the enemy is hard to come by in any
war, and manhunts are almost always difficult, especially if the
fugitive can vanish into a remote region with a sympathetic
population. (Think how long-five years-it took the FBI to track down
Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic bomber, in the wilds of North
Carolina.) That said, the U.S. government has made the job harder than
necessary. The Iraq War drained resources from the hunt, and some old
bureaucratic bugaboos-turf battles and fear of risk-undermined the
effort. The United States can't just barge into Pakistan without
upsetting, and possible dooming, President Pervez Musharraf, who seems
to lurch between trying to appease his enemies and riling them with
heavy-handed repression.
The story of the search for the men known to American spies and
soldiers as high-value targets one and two (HVT 1 and HVT 2)-Osama bin
Laden and his possibly more dangerous No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri-is a
frustrating, at times agonizing, tale of missed opportunities, damned-
if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't choices, and outright blunders. It has
been related to NEWSWEEK by dozens of American, Pakistani and Afghan
military and intelligence officials, as well as a few Qaeda
sympathizers like Omar Farooqi. Capturing bin Laden "continues to be a
huge priority," says Frances Fragos Townsend, President George W.
Bush's chief counterterror adviser. It may be true, as Townsend points
out, that Qaeda leaders do not have anything like the safe haven they
enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11. But it is also true that Al Qaeda
has been reconstituting itself in the mountains of Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and that the terrorist organization is determined to
stage more 9/11s, and maybe soon. "We have very strong indicators that
Al Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to attack, and
we are pretty sure about that," says retired Vice Adm. John Redd,
chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, which coordinates all
U.S. intelligence in the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT). Hank
Crumpton, who ran the CIA's early hunt for bin Laden in 2001-02 as
deputy chief of the agency's counterterrorism center and recently
retired as the State Department's coordinator of counterterrorism,
says, "It's bad; it's going to come."
Before 9/11, the hunt for bin Laden was marked by a certain
tentativeness, an official reluctance to suck America into the dirty
business of political assassination or to get U.S. troops killed.
Within days after 9/11, President Bush was vowing to capture bin Laden
"dead or alive," and Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterror chief at the
time, was ordering his troops to bring back bin Laden's head "in a
box." (In fact, CIA operatives in Afghanistan requested a box and dry
ice, just in case.) With old-fashioned derring-do, CIA case officers,
carrying millions of dollars, choppered into Afghanistan to work with
tribesmen to drive out Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. The CIA's
alacrity caused some heartburn at the Pentagon. According to Bob
Woodward's "Bush at War," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld steamed
impatiently while the military seemed to dither, stymied by weather
and fussing with complex backup and rescue arrangements before the
brass would commit any troops.
Rumsfeld's foot-stamping was rewarded. By mid-October, CIA case
officers and Army, Navy, and Air Force Special Operations units were
working together in unusual harmony, using high-tech air support and,
at one point, mounting what Rumsfeld gleefully called "the first
cavalry charge of the 21st century" to kill, capture or chase away
thousands of jihadists. The Taliban fled for the hills. Bin Laden, it
seemed, would be cornered. Indeed, on Dec. 15, CIA operatives
listening on a captured jihadist radio could hear bin Laden himself
say "Forgive me" to his followers, pinned down in their mountain caves
near Tora Bora.
As it happened, however, the hunt for bin Laden was unraveling on the
very same day. As recalled by Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge
of the covert team working with the Northern Alliance, code-named
Jawbreaker, the military refused his pleas for 800 Army Rangers to cut
off bin Laden's escape. Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the Special Ops
commander sent out by Central Command, told Berntsen he was doing an
"excellent job," but that putting in ground troops might offend
America's Afghan allies. "I don't give a damn about offending our
allies!" Berntsen yelled, according to his 2005 book, "Jawbreaker." "I
only care about eliminating Al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden's head
in a box!" (Dailey, now the State Department's counterterror chief,
told NEWSWEEK that he did not want to discuss the incident, except to
say that Berntsen's story is "unsubstantiated.")
Berntsen went to Crumpton, his boss at the CIA, who described to
NEWSWEEK his frantic efforts to appeal to higher authority. Crumpton
called CENTCOM's commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. It would take "weeks"
to mobilize a force, Franks responded, and the harsh, snowy terrain
was too difficult and the odds of getting bin Laden not worth the
risk. Frustrated, Crumpton went to the White House and rolled out maps
of the Pakistani-Afghan border on a small conference table. President
Bush wanted to know if the Pakistanis could sweep up Al Qaeda on the
other side. "No, sir," Crumpton responded. (Vice President Dick Cheney
did not say a word, Crumpton recalled.) The meeting was inconclusive.
Franks, who declined to comment, has written in his memoirs that he
decided, along with Rumsfeld, that to send troops into the mountains
would risk repeating the mistake of the Soviets, who were trapped and
routed by jihadist guerrilla fighters in the 1980s (helped out, it
should be recalled, with Stinger missiles provided by the CIA).
To catch bin Laden, the CIA was left to lean on local tribesmen, a
slender reed. NEWSWEEK recently interviewed two of the three tribal
chiefs involved in the operation, Hajji Zahir and Hajji Zaman. They
claimed that the CIA overly relied on the third chieftain, Hazrat Ali-
and that Ali was paid off (to the tune of $6 million) by Al Qaeda to
let bin Laden slip away. Ali could not be reached for comment. But
Crumpton, who admits that he has no hard evidence, told NEWSWEEK he is
"confident" that a payoff allowed Al Qaeda to escape. Unsure which
side would win, some tribesmen apparently hedged by taking money from
both sides.
Bin Laden was not so much seeking refuge as coming home when he
disappeared into the jagged peaks along the frontier of northwest
Pakistan. He had always liked hunting and horseback riding in the
mountains, and had even built himself a crude swimming pool with a
spectacular view near Tora Bora. Though a wealthy Saudi, bin Laden had
long since learned to live close to the ground, abjuring his followers
to learn to survive without modern comforts like plumbing or air
conditioning.
Local Pashtun tribesmen were not about to turn bin Laden in for a
reward, even a $25 million one. The strictly observed custom of
defending guests, part of an ancient honor code called Pashtunwali,
insulated Al Qaeda. The Pakistan central government could do little to
crack this social system. The wilds of the Federally Administered
Tribal Area (FATA) have been virtually ungovernable for centuries. The
British Raj failed, and the Pakistan government never tried very hard,
leaving administration up to federally appointed tribal agents and law
enforcement in the hands of a local constabulary of dubious loyalty.
In the 1980s, during the insurrection against Soviet rule in
Afghanistan, the tribal agencies were a kind of staging area for
jihadists like bin Laden. Saudi money built hundreds of madrassas-
fundamentalist schools that radicalized local youth-and Pakistani
intelligence (the ISI) formed alliances with the jihadists to subvert
the Soviet-backed Afghan regime.
The American effort to chase bin Laden into this forbidding realm was
hobbled and clumsy from the start. While the terrain required deep
local knowledge and small units, career officers in the U.S. military
have long been wary of the Special Operations Forces best suited to
the task. In the view of the regular military, such "snake eaters"
have tended to be troublesome, resistant to spit-and-polish discipline
and rulebooks. Rather than send the snake eaters to poke around
mountain caves and mud-walled compounds, the U.S. military wanted to
fight on a grander stage, where it could show off its mobility and
firepower. To the civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the eager-to-
please top brass, Iraq was a much better target. By invading Iraq, the
United States would give the Islamists-and the wider world-an
unforgettable lesson in American power. Former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich was on Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and, at the time, a
close confidant of the SecDef. In November 2001, Gingrich told a
NEWSWEEK reporter, "There's a feeling we've got to do something that
counts-and bombing caves is not something that counts."
When Franks refused to send Army Rangers into the mountains at Tora
Bora, he was already in the early stages of planning for the next war.
By early 2002, new Predators-aerial drones that might have helped the
search for bin Laden-were instead being diverted off the assembly line
for possible use in Iraq. The military's most elite commando unit,
Delta Force, was transferred from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion
of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces Group, including the best Arabic
speakers, was sent home to retool for Iraq, replaced by the Seventh
Special Forces Group-Spanish speakers with mostly Latin American
experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers, the ones with
tribal contacts, were rotated out. Replacing a fluent Arabic speaker
and intellectual, the new CIA station chief in Kabul was a stickler
for starting meetings on time (his own watch was always seven minutes
fast) but allowed that he had read only one book on Afghanistan. One
slightly bitter spook, speaking anonymously to NEWSWEEK to protect his
identity, likened the station chief to Captain Queeg in "The Caine
Mutiny." (CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano insists "station chiefs go
through a rigorous, multistep selection process, designed to get
leaders with the right skills in the right places.")
The frustrations of the snake eaters are well illustrated by the
recollections of Adam Rice, the operations sergeant of a Special
Forces A-Team working out of a safe house near Kandahar in 2002. With
his close-cropped orange hair and beard, wearing a yellow Hawaiian
shirt around the safe house, Rice was not the sort to shine at
inspections at boot camp. But he had lived in Kabul as a child (his
father had been a USAID worker) and he had been a Special Forces
operator for more than two decades. In July 2002, a CIA case officer
told Rice that a figure believed to be Mullah Omar, the one-eyed chief
of the Taliban, had been tracked by aerial drone to a location in the
Shahikot Valley, a short flight to the north. The Taliban chief and
his entourage would be vulnerable to a helicopter assault, but the
Americans had to move quickly.
Rice was not optimistic about getting timely permission. Whenever he
and his men moved within five kilometers of the safe house, he says,
they had to file a request form known as a 5-W, spelling out the who,
what, when, where and why of the mission. Permission from headquarters
took hours, and if shooting might be involved, it was often denied. To
go beyond five kilometers required a CONOP (for "concept of
operations") that was much more elaborate and required approval from
two layers in the field, and finally the Joint Special Operations Task
Force at Baghram air base near Kabul. To get into a fire fight, the
permission of a three-star general was necessary. "That process could
take days," Rice recalled to NEWSWEEK. He often typed forms while
sitting on a 55-gallon drum his men had cut in half to make a toilet
seat. "We'd be typing in 130-degree heat while we're crapping away
with bacillary dysentery and sometimes the brass at Kandahar or
Baghram would kick back and tell you the spelling was incorrect, that
you weren't using the tab to delimit the form correctly."
But Rice made his request anyway. Days passed with no word. The window
closed; the target-whether Mullah Omar or not-moved on. Rice blames
risk aversion in career officers, whose promotions require spotless
("zero defect") records-no mistakes, no bad luck, no "flaps." The
cautious mind-set changed for a time after 9/11, but quickly settled
back in. High-tech communication serves to clog, rather than speed the
process. With worldwide satellite communications, high-level
commanders back at the base or in Washington can second-guess even
minor decisions.
In Pakistan, President Musharraf was wary of his American allies in
the War on Terror. In 2002, he told a high-ranking British official:
"My great concern is that one day the United States is going to desert
me. They always desert their friends." According to this official, who
declined to be identified sharing a confidence, Musharraf cited the
U.S. pullouts from Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s and
Somalia in the 1990s. Still, he quickly gave the Americans
considerable leeway to operate inside Pakistan. He did not demand
prior approval of Predator attacks, and he allowed "hot pursuit" for
American forces five kilometers or more inside the border. (With a
grim laugh, one U.S. officer interviewed by NEWSWEEK recalled watching
on Predator video as insurgents fled across the border and stopped on
what they thought was safe terrain-until a U.S. Special Ops helo
reared up and blasted them.) Musharraf told the Americans he
understood that they would do what they had to do to attack high-value
targets, although he indicated the Pakistanis might have to issue pro
forma denunciations. His one request, said a U.S. official who dealt
directly with the Pakistani leader, was that bin Laden not be captured
alive and be brought to trial in Pakistan.
The cooperation has resulted in some high-profile successes. Working
with the Pakistani police, the CIA and FBI helped to capture "KSM"-
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's operations chief and mastermind of
the 9/11 attacks-at a house in Quetta, a city near the Afghan border,
on March 1, 2003. Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a Qaeda communications
expert, was picked up in Karachi in 2004 (and released, to the immense
frustration of American officials, last week by the Pakistan
government without ever having been formally charged with a crime).
KSM's successor as chief of operations, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, was seized
in May 2005. Qaeda officials who came down out of the mountains to
make contact with jihadists risked exposure, especially if they were
at all careless about using cell phones that could be tracked.
But the mountains themselves have remained virtually impenetrable.
After Al Qaeda twice tried to assassinate Musharraf in 2003, the
Pakistani leader decided he had no choice but to go after the
jihadists in their lair. Generals blustered about trapping bin Laden
between a "hammer" (American forces operating out of Afghanistan) and
an "anvil" (the Pakistani military). Pakistani tanks and helicopter
gunships began to rumble and roar into the northwestern territories.
But despite periodic claims of success, the fighting on the ground
went badly. The Pakistani forces had been trained to fight on the
plains of Punjab against the Indian Army. They were not well suited
for guerrilla war and sustained heavy casualties. More broadly,
questions remain about the loyalties of the Frontier Constabulary, the
militia responsible for security in the tribal areas. A Western
military officer with experience on both sides of the Pakistan-
Afghanistan border says that FC troops often fail to warn U.S. units
of militants crossing over into Afghanistan; in May 2006 one FC
soldier even shot and killed an American officer in Pakistan.
Musharraf can rightly claim to have purged the ISI of agents with
lingering Taliban and Qaeda sympathies, but the Western officer claims
that several of those former agents are now unofficially aiding their
former charges.
The Iraq War, meanwhile, has proved to be a black hole for the
Americans, devouring men and mat
He's still out there. The hunt for bin Laden.
By Evan Thomas
Newsweek
Sept. 3, 2007 issue - The Americans were getting close. It was early
in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were
holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol
of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden's
redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among
the Qaeda leader's 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove "the Sheik,"
as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As
Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story,
the anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using
the code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide. According to Said,
bin Laden had decreed that he would never be captured. "If there's a
99 percent risk of the Sheik's being captured, he told his men that
they should all die and martyr him as well," Said told Omar Farooqi, a
Taliban liaison officer to Al Qaeda who spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter
in Afghanistan.
The secret word was never given. As the Qaeda sentry watched the U.S.
troops, the patrol started moving in a different direction. Bin
Laden's men later concluded that the soldiers had nearly stumbled on
their hideout by accident. (One former U.S. intelligence officer told
NEWSWEEK that he was aware of official reporting on this incident.)
And so it has gone for six years. American intelligence officials
interviewed by NEWSWEEK ruefully agree that the hunt to find bin Laden
has been more a game of chance than good or "actionable" intelligence.
Since bin Laden slipped away from Tora Bora in December 2001, U.S.
intelligence has never had better than a 50-50 certainty about his
whereabouts. "There hasn't been a serious lead on Osama bin Laden
since early 2002," says Bruce Riedel, who recently retired as a South
Asia expert at the CIA. "What we're doing now is shooting in the dark
in outer space. The chances of hitting anything are zero."
How can that be? With all its spy satellites and aerial drones, killer
commandos and millions in reward money, why can't the world's greatest
superpower find a middle-aged, possibly ill, religious fanatic with a
medieval mind-set? The short answer, sometimes overlooked, is that
good, real-time intelligence about the enemy is hard to come by in any
war, and manhunts are almost always difficult, especially if the
fugitive can vanish into a remote region with a sympathetic
population. (Think how long-five years-it took the FBI to track down
Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic bomber, in the wilds of North
Carolina.) That said, the U.S. government has made the job harder than
necessary. The Iraq War drained resources from the hunt, and some old
bureaucratic bugaboos-turf battles and fear of risk-undermined the
effort. The United States can't just barge into Pakistan without
upsetting, and possible dooming, President Pervez Musharraf, who seems
to lurch between trying to appease his enemies and riling them with
heavy-handed repression.
The story of the search for the men known to American spies and
soldiers as high-value targets one and two (HVT 1 and HVT 2)-Osama bin
Laden and his possibly more dangerous No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri-is a
frustrating, at times agonizing, tale of missed opportunities, damned-
if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't choices, and outright blunders. It has
been related to NEWSWEEK by dozens of American, Pakistani and Afghan
military and intelligence officials, as well as a few Qaeda
sympathizers like Omar Farooqi. Capturing bin Laden "continues to be a
huge priority," says Frances Fragos Townsend, President George W.
Bush's chief counterterror adviser. It may be true, as Townsend points
out, that Qaeda leaders do not have anything like the safe haven they
enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11. But it is also true that Al Qaeda
has been reconstituting itself in the mountains of Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and that the terrorist organization is determined to
stage more 9/11s, and maybe soon. "We have very strong indicators that
Al Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to attack, and
we are pretty sure about that," says retired Vice Adm. John Redd,
chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, which coordinates all
U.S. intelligence in the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT). Hank
Crumpton, who ran the CIA's early hunt for bin Laden in 2001-02 as
deputy chief of the agency's counterterrorism center and recently
retired as the State Department's coordinator of counterterrorism,
says, "It's bad; it's going to come."
Before 9/11, the hunt for bin Laden was marked by a certain
tentativeness, an official reluctance to suck America into the dirty
business of political assassination or to get U.S. troops killed.
Within days after 9/11, President Bush was vowing to capture bin Laden
"dead or alive," and Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterror chief at the
time, was ordering his troops to bring back bin Laden's head "in a
box." (In fact, CIA operatives in Afghanistan requested a box and dry
ice, just in case.) With old-fashioned derring-do, CIA case officers,
carrying millions of dollars, choppered into Afghanistan to work with
tribesmen to drive out Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. The CIA's
alacrity caused some heartburn at the Pentagon. According to Bob
Woodward's "Bush at War," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld steamed
impatiently while the military seemed to dither, stymied by weather
and fussing with complex backup and rescue arrangements before the
brass would commit any troops.
Rumsfeld's foot-stamping was rewarded. By mid-October, CIA case
officers and Army, Navy, and Air Force Special Operations units were
working together in unusual harmony, using high-tech air support and,
at one point, mounting what Rumsfeld gleefully called "the first
cavalry charge of the 21st century" to kill, capture or chase away
thousands of jihadists. The Taliban fled for the hills. Bin Laden, it
seemed, would be cornered. Indeed, on Dec. 15, CIA operatives
listening on a captured jihadist radio could hear bin Laden himself
say "Forgive me" to his followers, pinned down in their mountain caves
near Tora Bora.
As it happened, however, the hunt for bin Laden was unraveling on the
very same day. As recalled by Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge
of the covert team working with the Northern Alliance, code-named
Jawbreaker, the military refused his pleas for 800 Army Rangers to cut
off bin Laden's escape. Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the Special Ops
commander sent out by Central Command, told Berntsen he was doing an
"excellent job," but that putting in ground troops might offend
America's Afghan allies. "I don't give a damn about offending our
allies!" Berntsen yelled, according to his 2005 book, "Jawbreaker." "I
only care about eliminating Al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden's head
in a box!" (Dailey, now the State Department's counterterror chief,
told NEWSWEEK that he did not want to discuss the incident, except to
say that Berntsen's story is "unsubstantiated.")
Berntsen went to Crumpton, his boss at the CIA, who described to
NEWSWEEK his frantic efforts to appeal to higher authority. Crumpton
called CENTCOM's commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. It would take "weeks"
to mobilize a force, Franks responded, and the harsh, snowy terrain
was too difficult and the odds of getting bin Laden not worth the
risk. Frustrated, Crumpton went to the White House and rolled out maps
of the Pakistani-Afghan border on a small conference table. President
Bush wanted to know if the Pakistanis could sweep up Al Qaeda on the
other side. "No, sir," Crumpton responded. (Vice President Dick Cheney
did not say a word, Crumpton recalled.) The meeting was inconclusive.
Franks, who declined to comment, has written in his memoirs that he
decided, along with Rumsfeld, that to send troops into the mountains
would risk repeating the mistake of the Soviets, who were trapped and
routed by jihadist guerrilla fighters in the 1980s (helped out, it
should be recalled, with Stinger missiles provided by the CIA).
To catch bin Laden, the CIA was left to lean on local tribesmen, a
slender reed. NEWSWEEK recently interviewed two of the three tribal
chiefs involved in the operation, Hajji Zahir and Hajji Zaman. They
claimed that the CIA overly relied on the third chieftain, Hazrat Ali-
and that Ali was paid off (to the tune of $6 million) by Al Qaeda to
let bin Laden slip away. Ali could not be reached for comment. But
Crumpton, who admits that he has no hard evidence, told NEWSWEEK he is
"confident" that a payoff allowed Al Qaeda to escape. Unsure which
side would win, some tribesmen apparently hedged by taking money from
both sides.
Bin Laden was not so much seeking refuge as coming home when he
disappeared into the jagged peaks along the frontier of northwest
Pakistan. He had always liked hunting and horseback riding in the
mountains, and had even built himself a crude swimming pool with a
spectacular view near Tora Bora. Though a wealthy Saudi, bin Laden had
long since learned to live close to the ground, abjuring his followers
to learn to survive without modern comforts like plumbing or air
conditioning.
Local Pashtun tribesmen were not about to turn bin Laden in for a
reward, even a $25 million one. The strictly observed custom of
defending guests, part of an ancient honor code called Pashtunwali,
insulated Al Qaeda. The Pakistan central government could do little to
crack this social system. The wilds of the Federally Administered
Tribal Area (FATA) have been virtually ungovernable for centuries. The
British Raj failed, and the Pakistan government never tried very hard,
leaving administration up to federally appointed tribal agents and law
enforcement in the hands of a local constabulary of dubious loyalty.
In the 1980s, during the insurrection against Soviet rule in
Afghanistan, the tribal agencies were a kind of staging area for
jihadists like bin Laden. Saudi money built hundreds of madrassas-
fundamentalist schools that radicalized local youth-and Pakistani
intelligence (the ISI) formed alliances with the jihadists to subvert
the Soviet-backed Afghan regime.
The American effort to chase bin Laden into this forbidding realm was
hobbled and clumsy from the start. While the terrain required deep
local knowledge and small units, career officers in the U.S. military
have long been wary of the Special Operations Forces best suited to
the task. In the view of the regular military, such "snake eaters"
have tended to be troublesome, resistant to spit-and-polish discipline
and rulebooks. Rather than send the snake eaters to poke around
mountain caves and mud-walled compounds, the U.S. military wanted to
fight on a grander stage, where it could show off its mobility and
firepower. To the civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the eager-to-
please top brass, Iraq was a much better target. By invading Iraq, the
United States would give the Islamists-and the wider world-an
unforgettable lesson in American power. Former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich was on Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and, at the time, a
close confidant of the SecDef. In November 2001, Gingrich told a
NEWSWEEK reporter, "There's a feeling we've got to do something that
counts-and bombing caves is not something that counts."
When Franks refused to send Army Rangers into the mountains at Tora
Bora, he was already in the early stages of planning for the next war.
By early 2002, new Predators-aerial drones that might have helped the
search for bin Laden-were instead being diverted off the assembly line
for possible use in Iraq. The military's most elite commando unit,
Delta Force, was transferred from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion
of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces Group, including the best Arabic
speakers, was sent home to retool for Iraq, replaced by the Seventh
Special Forces Group-Spanish speakers with mostly Latin American
experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers, the ones with
tribal contacts, were rotated out. Replacing a fluent Arabic speaker
and intellectual, the new CIA station chief in Kabul was a stickler
for starting meetings on time (his own watch was always seven minutes
fast) but allowed that he had read only one book on Afghanistan. One
slightly bitter spook, speaking anonymously to NEWSWEEK to protect his
identity, likened the station chief to Captain Queeg in "The Caine
Mutiny." (CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano insists "station chiefs go
through a rigorous, multistep selection process, designed to get
leaders with the right skills in the right places.")
The frustrations of the snake eaters are well illustrated by the
recollections of Adam Rice, the operations sergeant of a Special
Forces A-Team working out of a safe house near Kandahar in 2002. With
his close-cropped orange hair and beard, wearing a yellow Hawaiian
shirt around the safe house, Rice was not the sort to shine at
inspections at boot camp. But he had lived in Kabul as a child (his
father had been a USAID worker) and he had been a Special Forces
operator for more than two decades. In July 2002, a CIA case officer
told Rice that a figure believed to be Mullah Omar, the one-eyed chief
of the Taliban, had been tracked by aerial drone to a location in the
Shahikot Valley, a short flight to the north. The Taliban chief and
his entourage would be vulnerable to a helicopter assault, but the
Americans had to move quickly.
Rice was not optimistic about getting timely permission. Whenever he
and his men moved within five kilometers of the safe house, he says,
they had to file a request form known as a 5-W, spelling out the who,
what, when, where and why of the mission. Permission from headquarters
took hours, and if shooting might be involved, it was often denied. To
go beyond five kilometers required a CONOP (for "concept of
operations") that was much more elaborate and required approval from
two layers in the field, and finally the Joint Special Operations Task
Force at Baghram air base near Kabul. To get into a fire fight, the
permission of a three-star general was necessary. "That process could
take days," Rice recalled to NEWSWEEK. He often typed forms while
sitting on a 55-gallon drum his men had cut in half to make a toilet
seat. "We'd be typing in 130-degree heat while we're crapping away
with bacillary dysentery and sometimes the brass at Kandahar or
Baghram would kick back and tell you the spelling was incorrect, that
you weren't using the tab to delimit the form correctly."
But Rice made his request anyway. Days passed with no word. The window
closed; the target-whether Mullah Omar or not-moved on. Rice blames
risk aversion in career officers, whose promotions require spotless
("zero defect") records-no mistakes, no bad luck, no "flaps." The
cautious mind-set changed for a time after 9/11, but quickly settled
back in. High-tech communication serves to clog, rather than speed the
process. With worldwide satellite communications, high-level
commanders back at the base or in Washington can second-guess even
minor decisions.
In Pakistan, President Musharraf was wary of his American allies in
the War on Terror. In 2002, he told a high-ranking British official:
"My great concern is that one day the United States is going to desert
me. They always desert their friends." According to this official, who
declined to be identified sharing a confidence, Musharraf cited the
U.S. pullouts from Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s and
Somalia in the 1990s. Still, he quickly gave the Americans
considerable leeway to operate inside Pakistan. He did not demand
prior approval of Predator attacks, and he allowed "hot pursuit" for
American forces five kilometers or more inside the border. (With a
grim laugh, one U.S. officer interviewed by NEWSWEEK recalled watching
on Predator video as insurgents fled across the border and stopped on
what they thought was safe terrain-until a U.S. Special Ops helo
reared up and blasted them.) Musharraf told the Americans he
understood that they would do what they had to do to attack high-value
targets, although he indicated the Pakistanis might have to issue pro
forma denunciations. His one request, said a U.S. official who dealt
directly with the Pakistani leader, was that bin Laden not be captured
alive and be brought to trial in Pakistan.
The cooperation has resulted in some high-profile successes. Working
with the Pakistani police, the CIA and FBI helped to capture "KSM"-
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's operations chief and mastermind of
the 9/11 attacks-at a house in Quetta, a city near the Afghan border,
on March 1, 2003. Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a Qaeda communications
expert, was picked up in Karachi in 2004 (and released, to the immense
frustration of American officials, last week by the Pakistan
government without ever having been formally charged with a crime).
KSM's successor as chief of operations, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, was seized
in May 2005. Qaeda officials who came down out of the mountains to
make contact with jihadists risked exposure, especially if they were
at all careless about using cell phones that could be tracked.
But the mountains themselves have remained virtually impenetrable.
After Al Qaeda twice tried to assassinate Musharraf in 2003, the
Pakistani leader decided he had no choice but to go after the
jihadists in their lair. Generals blustered about trapping bin Laden
between a "hammer" (American forces operating out of Afghanistan) and
an "anvil" (the Pakistani military). Pakistani tanks and helicopter
gunships began to rumble and roar into the northwestern territories.
But despite periodic claims of success, the fighting on the ground
went badly. The Pakistani forces had been trained to fight on the
plains of Punjab against the Indian Army. They were not well suited
for guerrilla war and sustained heavy casualties. More broadly,
questions remain about the loyalties of the Frontier Constabulary, the
militia responsible for security in the tribal areas. A Western
military officer with experience on both sides of the Pakistan-
Afghanistan border says that FC troops often fail to warn U.S. units
of militants crossing over into Afghanistan; in May 2006 one FC
soldier even shot and killed an American officer in Pakistan.
Musharraf can rightly claim to have purged the ISI of agents with
lingering Taliban and Qaeda sympathies, but the Western officer claims
that several of those former agents are now unofficially aiding their
former charges.
The Iraq War, meanwhile, has proved to be a black hole for the
Americans, devouring men and mat
