Lost at Tora Bora -page 2
September 11, 2005
(Page 2 of 6)
Bin Laden, along with his four wives and 20-some children, moved into the well-fortified Khalis family compound nine years ago and then to a farm on the outskirts of Jalalabad. But shortly thereafter, Engineer Mahmoud was assassinated, and there were two assassination attempts against bin Laden, too. "They were both very crude," Scheuer said, "and they smacked of the Saudis" - who had earlier tried to assassinate bin Laden in Khartoum. "As a result, bin Laden wanted to move away from the main road. So Khalis gave him two of his fighting positions in the mountains - Tora Bora and Milawa. Bin Laden immediately began to customize and rebuild the two: Tora Bora for his family and his key aides; Milawa for his fighters and as a command center and logistics hub. By the time bin Laden moved to Kandahar" - then a Taliban stronghold - "in May of 1997, the two mountain redoubts had been completely refurbished and modernized: they were there, just waiting for him in 2001."
Some six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks and nearly two weeks after the bombing of Afghanistan began on Oct. 7, American military leaders - who had no off-the-shelf invasion plans, not even an outline, for Afghanistan - finally succeeded in getting the first forces in: a 12-man Special Forces A-team helicoptered in from Uzbekistan to the Panjshir Valley. There they joined forces with the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban militia that controlled only 10 percent of Afghanistan but to whom Washington delegated the ground war. The view prevailing among senior American military leaders was that overwhelming air power, suitcases full of cash and surrogate militias could win the war. The intricacies of Afghan tribal life appeared to elude everyone.
In late October or early November, according to Scheuer, American operatives went to see Khalis to seek his support. "Khalis said that he was retired and doing nothing now," Scheuer told me. "It was the last time" American intelligence officials saw him. "It was so bizarre! Didn't anybody know about Khalis's friendship with bin Laden? Or that Khalis was the only one of the seven mujahedeen leaders who remained neutral about, and sometimes even supported, the Taliban?" He shook his head and then went on: "And even after Sept. 11, indeed in spite of it, as soon as our bombing of Afghanistan began, Khalis issued a well-publicized call for jihad against U.S. forces in Afghanistan."
When Khalis turned the Americans down, Special Forces troops recruited two of his former commanders. They made an unlikely couple: Hazarat Ali and Hajji Zaman. The former, with just a fourth-grade education, was barely literate, a bully and unrefined; the other was a wealthy drug smuggler, fluent in English and French, and a polished raconteur who was lured back to Afghanistan from his exile in France by the United States. Both were schemers who had come of age on the battlefields of the anti-Soviet war, Ali as a teenager in Tora Bora and Zaman in Jalalabad. Ali had joined the Taliban for a time, then moved north and embraced the Northern Alliance; Zaman had supported neither, and when the Taliban came to power, he chose exile. Ali owed his rise largely to the Pentagon, which ultimately enlisted him to lead the ground battle in the Tora Bora caves; Zaman, a Pashtun leader and member of the Khugyani Tribe, had his own base of support, something that Ali, a member of a minor, non-Pashtun tribal grouping, lacked.
A third militia leader - less experienced but of more distinguished pedigree - who would bring his forces to Tora Bora was Hajji Zahir, the 27-year-old somewhat skittish son of Hajji Abdul Qadir, Yunis Khalis's former military commander and one of the three men who had welcomed bin Laden when he returned to Afghanistan. Indeed, as the Americans were recruiting his son, Hajji Abdul Qadir was about to reclaim the governorship of Nangarhar Province, a post he had relinquished when the Taliban arrived, in a power transfer Khalis and bin Laden would help to consummate.
Bin Laden had returned to Jalalabad on or about Nov. 10, a U.S. intelligence official told me recently, and that same afternoon, according to a March 4, 2002, report in The Christian Science Monitor, he gave a fiery speech at the Jalalabad Islamic studies center - as American bombs exploded nearby - to a thousand or so regional tribal leaders, vowing that if united they could teach the Americans "a lesson, the same one we taught the Russians" when many of the chieftains had fought in America's first Afghan war.
Dressed in a gray shalwar kameez, the long shirt and bloused trousers favored in Afghanistan, and his camouflage jacket, bin Laden held a small Kalakov, a shorter version of the Kalashnikov, in his hand.
As the crowd began to shout "Zindibad [Long live] Osama," the leader of Al Qaeda moved through the banquet hall dispensing white envelopes, some bulky, some thin, the thickness proportionate to the number of extended families under each leader's command. Lesser chieftains, according to those present, received the equivalent of $300 in Pakistani rupees; leaders of larger clans, up to $10,000.
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