Читать книгу Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World - Christina Lamb - Страница 14

A few weeks later, Hamid Karzai also visited the ruins of the Twin Towers, and laid a wreath of yellow roses. He had been invited to America to be President Bush’s special guest at the annual State of the Union speech to Congress in Washington DC. Also invited were the two American Airlines hostesses who had managed to pin down Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. It was Karzai, however, in the long striped coat that he now wore everywhere, who was the star of the occasion, nodding and smiling as he received a standing ovation from the assembled Congressmen and Senators. The man who just six months earlier couldn’t get a meeting in this city was suddenly the toast of the entire Western world. The press was effusive. Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times called him the ‘caped hero’, while in an editorial in the Washington Post, Mary McGrory described Karzai as the ‘role-model US-installed leader of Afghanistan. He is, in fact, a dream.’ He’d even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bush was also enjoying an astonishing approval rating of 80 per cent following the quick demise of the Taliban, and his speech that night was triumphant. ‘In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.’ This boast was greeted by wild clapping – his forty-eight-minute speech was interrupted by applause seventy-six times. However, there was one thing missing. What the US hadn’t done was track down Osama bin Laden, the man because of whom they had invaded Afghanistan.

Instead they had managed to lose him completely. While I had been back home in London for Christmas, bin Laden had released another video that was clearly designed to taunt the US. Dressed in a combat jacket, with a Kalashnikov propped up next to him, he described his thirty-three-minute-long message as a review of events following 9/11, which he referred to as ‘the blessed strikes against world atheism and its leader, America’.1

Later we’d find out that US forces had come within two miles of catching him less than two weeks earlier in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but he had escaped over the border. It would be some years before I properly pieced together the story of what some called the greatest military blunder in recent US history.

On paper, finding bin Laden didn’t look hard. The FBI Most Wanted page described the al Qaeda leader as between six foot four and six foot six tall, about 160 pounds, olive complexion, left-handed and walking with a cane. His bony, bearded face and lanky frame were distinctive and easily recognisable from his videos. He was also rumoured to be suffering from kidney disease and requiring dialysis, though his son Omar would later dismiss this, explaining that it was kidney stones.2 And there was a $25 million reward on his head.

‘I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured. I want them dead,’ Cofer Black, head of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center, had told his agent Gary Schroen as he set off with the first team for Afghanistan on 19 September.3 In case there were any doubt about its intent, their operation had been codenamed ‘Jawbreaker’.

Shortly after the fall of Kabul on 13 November 2001, reports started coming in that bin Laden and as many as a thousand of his followers were in hiding a few hours south of the capital, in the mountainous area of Tora Bora not far from Jalalabad.

I’d been to Tora Bora in the 1980s during the jihad against the Russians, and it was really just a series of caves made by rainwater dissolving the limestone in the Spin Ghar, the White Mountains that run between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Bin Laden and his Arab followers had realised that the forbidding terrain of narrow stony valleys and jagged peaks reaching 14,000 feet turned it into a natural fortress, and had used dynamite to extend the caves.

The mujaheddin I was travelling with at the time told me to hide my face as we came to a place called Jaji and passed the entrance to a cave cloaked with camouflage netting and guarded by fierce-looking men with dark skin, some of them apparently African. ‘Arabs,’ they whispered. ‘They are crazy dangerous.’

The Afghans did not like the Arabs, who they felt looked down on them. ‘They called us ajam – people with no tongue – because we pray in a language we can’t understand [Arabic],’ Karzai’s elder brother Mehmud told me.

I’d never heard of bin Laden then. But later, in Peshawar, I would hear stories of the young Saudi millionaire who was bringing in bulldozers and dynamite from his father’s construction company and even an engineer to blast a network of tunnels in the caves so his fighters could move unseen in the mountains. His propaganda headquarters and guesthouse in Peshawar for Arab volunteers, the ‘Services Bureau’, was actually just along the road from the American Club where we foreign journalists used to gather at night for Budweisers and Sloppy Joes.

The Bureau had been set up in 1984 by a man called Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic Palestinian cleric whose book Defense of the Muslim Lands compared Afghanistan to a drowning child that everyone on the beach had the duty to try to save. He argued that if even just one metre of Islamic land had been occupied by kuffar or infidels, then all able-bodied Muslims should strive to liberate it. The foreword was written by Saudi Arabia’s chief cleric, which seemed to give the book official sanction.

Azzam had studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo, which was the centre of Islamic scholarship in the Middle East, and he cut a distinctive figure with his black beard streaked with lightning forks of white, and round his neck the keffiyeh, the black-and-white-checked scarf favoured by Palestinian resistance fighters. In 1981 he took a job teaching Islam in the International Islamic University in Islamabad, and began spending every weekend in Peshawar where he met many Afghans fleeing the Russians or injured in bombings, and became passionate about their cause.

Among those inspired by Azzam’s writings was a twenty-four-year-old Algerian imam who went by the name of Abdullah Anas. Brought up on stories of the long war for Algeria’s independence from France in which his father and grandfather had fought, he’d joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist socio-political movement founded in Egypt, and thought his turn had come to take up his gun for a cause.

He flew to Mecca in 1984 to meet Azzam, who invited him to visit him in Islamabad. On his first night there, at dinner at Azzam’s house, Anas was so mesmerised by his host that he barely noticed another guest, recalling only that he was ‘very shy’ and had a ‘soft voice and handshake’.4 It was Osama bin Laden.

Azzam talked that night, as he often did, of his frustration at the demise of the Muslim world, expounding on how back when Europe was in its Dark Ages, the rule of the Caliphates stretched from China to Spain, and it was a time of great innovation. Islamic scientists and mathematicians produced the first studies on optics and blood circulation, devised algebra, and invented astrolabes, Al Jaziri’s elephant clock and even an early flying machine (which crashed). But seven centuries of expansion came to an abrupt end in 1492 when Granada fell with the capture of the Alhambra by Christians, an event celebrated in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral with the singing of the Te Deum, a hymn of thanks.

In the same way that Americans regarded Afghanistan as a Cold War battleground on which to fight the forces of communism, Azzam saw in Afghanistan, with its simple brave men fighting a mighty mechanised army, a way of motivating a billion Muslims across the world and the first step to recapturing past glory and all former Muslim lands.

Galvanised by Azzam’s words, Anas travelled to Peshawar and joined some mujaheddin, with whom he walked for forty days across war-torn Afghanistan. It was so hard that he lost most of his toenails, but he said afterwards: ‘I felt I was reborn when I first got there … Even though I was sick for ten days, I was so happy to be walking along with my Kalashnikov and with my brothers.’

He decided to stay in Peshawar. He married Azzam’s daughter and helped him establish the Makhtab-al-Khidamat (MK), or the Services Bureau. Bin Laden had also decided to stay, and provided much of their funding as his father owned the biggest construction company in Saudi Arabia, estimated to be worth $5 billion, and gave him a yearly stipend of at least $7 million.

Right from the start the three men realised the importance of propaganda, and from those headquarters they produced a magazine called al-Jihad. Initially a few black-and-white pages crudely stapled together, it grew into a full-colour glossy with a circulation of 70,000 throughout Muslim communities across the world. Many were distributed in the United States, where the MK established a string of offices with a headquarters in Brooklyn.

In Washington at that time a Texan Congressman, Charlie Wilson, was pounding the corridors of the Capitol extolling the bravery of Afghan ‘illiterate shepherds and tribesmen fighting with stones’ in order to persuade his colleagues to commit more funds. ‘I had everyone in Congress convinced that the mujahideen were a cause only slightly below Christianity,’ he said.5

In the same way, in Muslim communities around the world, including in America, Azzam used his magazine and speeches to create the image of an almost mythical holy warrior. Those who heard him speak say he spellbound audiences with tales of flocks of birds that flew over Afghan villages to warn of approaching Soviet helicopters; of mujaheddin almost single-handedly defeating columns of Soviet tanks; and miracles such as fighters being hit by bullets yet magically not being wounded.

Such stories, combined with the idea of recapturing a glorious past, created a powerful message to frustrated young Arabs. To further motivate them they were told that if they died in jihad they would not only be rewarded with seventy-two virgins in the afterlife, but would also enable seventy family members to go to heaven. Azzam went on recruiting tours, exhorting young Arabs to ‘join the caravan’. Agents rounded up people, picking up recruiting bonuses for doing so. The bin Laden construction company acted as a pipeline, with Osama setting up a halfway house in Jeddah and providing a stipend to the families of fighters of $300 a month. Some were just tourists going off to jihad for a week, helped by generous discounts offered by Saudi Airlines. Others became committed jihadists.

Reception committees were set up at Pakistan’s main airports. One of the greeters was Dr Umar Farooq, who at the time was a medical student at King Edward College, Lahore, and whose family was regarded as a kind of Islamist aristocracy in Pakistan. His father had set up the country’s first madrassa, and his elder brother had built the first hospital for Afghan refugees in Quetta and married the daughter of the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s largest religious party.

‘Azzam was very impressive,’ he said. ‘Whoever met him became a mujahid. I would receive the Arabs at the airport. To start with they were good people, Egyptians, Yemenis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Sudanese, Moroccans … I gave them maps with arrows pointing to show Soviet forces heading toward the Warm Water and we would send them to Peshawar and Quetta to our reception centres from where they would be sent to all the [mujaheddin] parties.’6

Not all came to fight. The Services Bureau provided schooling, clinics and refugee care as well as running an active propaganda division. But most came for jihad, and Azzam thought these Arab fighters should be scattered throughout Afghan groups to motivate them and teach them about Islam. The majority were sent to join Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, one of the seven Afghan mujaheddin leaders, who like Azzam was a graduate of al-Azhar and a Wahhabi. Sayyaf was very close to the Saudis, in particular the intelligence chief Prince Turki al Faisal. Not only did the Saudis provide the mujaheddin with $500 million every year, that went to a Swiss bank account controlled by the US and distributed to ISI, but Prince Turki’s chief of staff Adeeb (who had once been bin Laden’s biology teacher) visited Peshawar twice a month with cash for the leaders.

After a while Dr Farooq noticed a change. ‘Initially the Arabs went to different groups but then they started to be diverted all one way to promote the Saudi kind of Islam, Wahhabism, and all went to near Jalalabad. Different sorts of people started coming, criminal people who grew these long beards.’

Many were fugitives, some of whom had been involved in radical Islamic movements at home. Countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia were only too happy to get rid of such people. In Peshawar they would adopt a new identity – often being known by where they came from, such as ‘al Libbi’ – the Libyan.

Milt Bearden, who was CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time, later admitted that many were criminals. ‘Egypt and many other Islamic nations found Afghanistan a convenient dumping ground for home-grown troublemakers. Egypt quietly emptied its prisons of its political activists and psychotics and sent them off to the war in Afghanistan with fondest hopes that they might never return.’

Both ISI and the Americans thought it was a good idea to broaden the cause, and turned a blind eye to the backgrounds of these additional fighters. ‘All we cared about then was defeating the Soviets,’ admitted Richard Armitage, then the Under-Secretary of Defense. ‘We weren’t thinking about Osama bin Laden. Who cared what happened in Afghanistan? We had a much greater objective. Our Afghan policy was amoral in my view,’ he added. ‘Not immoral but amoral. We had one objective, and we didn’t care what happened after that.’7

General Hamid Gul, who headed ISI from 1987 to 1989, estimated that around 3–4,000 Arabs came to join the fight. ‘The Pakistan government never objected to them coming,’ he said. ‘Princes used to come and go inside [Afghanistan] from all over the Middle East for jihad, and this was just an extension.’

Though General Gul would send his officers to talk to bin Laden, he says he never met him when he was living in Peshawar. ‘I only met him in Sudan in ’93 and ’94 when I was invited by him. Before that I used to hear about Osama from CIA officers – they used to admire him, romanticise him, they seemed enamoured of him.’

From 1985 bin Laden started spending less time fundraising at home in Saudi Arabia and more time inside Afghanistan. When he did go home to Medina, he spent his time studying military maps. ‘I hated the Russians because they took my father away from me,’ his fourth son Omar later wrote.8 One day the five-year-old Omar tried to get his father’s attention by dancing round the maps. Bin Laden was so enraged that he summoned his older sons and caned them all for allowing Omar to disturb his work.

Inside Afghanistan, bin Laden worked closely with Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful commander based near the south-eastern city of Khost who had become something of a folk hero. But increasingly he became convinced that what was needed was his own Arab force, rather than dispersing the Arabs among the Afghans as Azzam advocated. In 1986 a mujaheddin leader called Yunus Khalis, who was also close to Haqqani, agreed to let bin Laden set up his own camp in an area under his control. Bin Laden chose Jaji in the Tora Bora mountains, and named it al Masada, ‘the Lion’s Den’, after his own name, which meant lion.

To the Afghans it seemed an odd choice. The camp was on a pine-clad mountain and very near a Soviet base – ‘almost as if they wanted to be seen’, said Khalid Khwaja, an ISI officer who went there in 1987. For four months of the year it was cut off by snow.

Accompanying bin Laden were fifty or sixty of his most fanatical followers – mostly Saudis but also Yemenis and Sudanese. In key positions he had two former Egyptian policemen: his military commander Abu Ubaidah, whose brother had been involved in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and his deputy Abu Hafs.

After some initial humiliations the first major engagement of these ‘Arab Afghans’ came in April 1987 when they were bombed by the Russians in what became known as the Battle of Jaji. Accounts vary of whether the bombing went on for one week or three, but Osama and his men stood their ground, even against the feared Spetsnaz, or special forces, and later claimed to have shot down one of their Hind helicopter gunships.

The stories of Jaji became legendary, and led to many young Arabs wanting to join bin Laden. The once shy young man became more assertive, producing his first promotional videos. These showed him on the back of a white horse, a deliberate reference to the Prophet on his white-winged horse Burak, as well as speaking on a walkie-talkie and firing off Kalashnikovs. The tall, lanky millionaire who had given up his privileged life to fight with the Afghans became a Saudi hero. ‘He’d give you the clothes off his back,’ said Anas.

Bin Laden’s first wife Najwa was horrified when her husband came back from Afghanistan to their home in Jeddah with ‘red raised scars all over his body’ and boasting he had learned to fly a helicopter. She was his cousin from Syria and they had married in 1974, when she was just fourteen and he seventeen, and she might reasonably have expected an easy life after marrying into one of the richest families in the Middle East.

Instead she found a fanatic who refused toys to his children, or to let his family have air conditioning to relieve the sweltering desert heat. Yet initially she was proud. ‘Everyone was astonished that a wealthy bin Laden son actually risked death or injury on the front lines,’ she later wrote. ‘I heard silly talk that many people wanted to inhale the very air Osama breathed.’ She was less impressed when he took their eldest son Abdullah to Jaji to experience jihad at the age of just nine.

Bin Laden became known as ‘the Sheikh’, and his growing reputation led to inevitable rivalry with his former mentor Azzam, though he continued to finance MK. Then one day, visiting some of his wounded fighters in the Kuwaiti Red Crescent hospital in Peshawar, bin Laden met an Egyptian eye doctor called Ayman al Zawahiri.

Bin Laden had long been anti-American, his wife Najwa complaining that his children were not allowed to have Western products such as Coca-Cola or television. But his focus had always been on expelling infidels from Afghanistan, and he had never talked of opposing the Saudi monarchy or other Arab regimes.

That changed after he met Zawahiri. At thirty-five, Zawahiri was seven years older than bin Laden and much more of an intellectual, and he gradually took Azzam’s place as his mentor. The two men made an unlikely pair, one tall and lean, the other portly and bespectacled, but they found much in common. The Egyptian had grown close to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but was otherwise condescending about the Afghans, who he did not think knew the first thing about Islam. To him they were simply tools. He agreed with bin Laden about the need to create an all-Arab force, and had gathered around him a small cadre of well-educated doctors and engineers from Egypt, many of whom had already been imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs. By then several of bin Laden’s key men were Egyptian radicals.

In May 1988 the Soviets began pulling out troops from Afghanistan in a phased withdrawal that would take nine months, and the two men began looking to the future and what they could do next. In August 1988 they officially formed an organisation called al Qaeda, which meant ‘the Base’, the hub for what was to be the first terrorism multinational, and whose members would pledge the bayat, an oath of allegiance to bin Laden.

After the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989, and the failure of the mujaheddin to take over Afghanistan, bin Laden left Peshawar disillusioned, and eventually set up operations in Sudan. In 1996 the government there expelled him under American pressure, and he flew back to Afghanistan. He made Tora Bora his base, moving in with his three wives and twelve of his seventeen children, and joined by many al Qaeda fighters.

His son Omar hated it there, and later described surviving on eggs, rice and potatoes, with no electricity or running water – hardly the life of a Saudi millionaire. Bin Laden got to know the mountains well, taking hikes with his sons, and learning centuries-old trails used by smugglers and traders into Pakistan.

In the following years, his men stockpiled weapons and fortified an area about six miles square between the Wazir and Agam valleys. Some of their caves were reported to be concealed 350 feet inside the granite peaks. It was, in other words, an obvious hide-out and escape route.

Gary Berntsen, a tall man with cold blue eyes, had been in the last CIA team to go into Afghanistan before 9/11 – a trip to the Northern Alliance in 2000, though they were quickly pulled out and he ended up in Latin America. After the attack he was sent back in late October 2001, his team replacing that of the other Gary, Gary Schroen, in northern Afghanistan. By mid-November the capital had fallen, and he was running CIA operations from a Kabul guesthouse when the first reports came in that bin Laden was in Tora Bora. He went straight to Major General Dell Dailey, the US special forces commander at Bagram, and asked for an SF team to go down there together with some of his agents. When I met Berntsen afterwards, he told me Dailey had said, ‘We’re not going to – it’s too disorganised, too dangerous, too this, too that.’9

Berntsen decided that if the special forces wouldn’t go, he would mount his own operation. ‘Bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans in my city New York, and I wanted him dead. Simple as that,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to ask for permission, because I knew I wouldn’t get it. I knew if I didn’t do anything bin Laden would escape the country with his entire force, so I just improvised.’

He sent a small team of eight men to Jalalabad, where they began coordinating with local commanders. In late November four of them with ten Afghan guides set off into the mountains, scaling 10,000-foot peaks. Their equipment was packed onto mules (one of which was blown up when an RPG round on its back detonated). They knew they faced an enemy who outnumbered them by perhaps hundreds to one. ‘I sent four guys into those mountains alone to look for a thousand people,’ said Berntsen. ‘It was a very, very large risk. If they’d been found they would have been tortured and killed, and I would probably have been fired.’

After two days they spotted bin Laden’s camp, complete with trucks, command posts and machine-gun nests. They estimated there were between six and seven hundred people there. ‘We got them,’ they radioed Berntsen, who punched the air in delight. ‘One word kept pounding in my head: revenge. Let’s do this right and finish them off in the mountains.’

The agents mounted their laser marking devices on tripods and began lighting up targets using lasers invisible to the naked eye. To be doubly sure, one of them punched coordinates into a device that looked like a gigantic palm pilot. For the next fifty-six hours they directed strike after strike by B1 and B2 bombers and F14 Tomcats onto the al Qaeda encampment. The battle of Tora Bora had begun. But there was a fatal flaw. They might have the world’s most overwhelming air power and sophisticated communications system on their side, but at the end of the day they were just four Americans against perhaps a thousand men.

As the bombardment went on, bin Laden and his men fled further into the mountains. A twelve-man special forces team was sent in, as well as some crack SAS operatives. The plan was to pin the al Qaeda fighters against the mountains, using Afghan forces to trap them in a ‘kill-box’ between three promontories. Three rival local commanders who between them controlled most of Jalalabad were hired – Hazrat Ali, Haji Zahir and Haji Zaman Ghamsharik – and a day rate of $100–150 per soldier agreed. ‘I raised an army with a couple of million dollars,’ says Berntsen. But he doubted that they were really committed.

Hazrat Ali – or ‘General Ali’, as he called himself – had fought the Soviets as a teenager in the 1980s, and later joined the Taliban for a time. Haji Zahir was the nephew of Abdul Haq, who had been executed by the Taliban the previous month. Haji Zaman was a wealthy drug smuggler who had also fought the Soviets, but when the Taliban came to power he went into exile in France. He had been persuaded by the United States to return to Afghanistan.

Between them they fielded a force of around 2,000 men, but there were questions from the outset about the competence and loyalties of the fighters. The warlords and their men distrusted each other, and all appeared to distrust their American allies. According to Hayatullah, head of a group called the Eastern Council whose cousin Rohatullah also had men there, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman each got $6 million, but then Haji Zahir said the Americans had so much money they hadn’t asked for enough, and should have demanded $100 million.10

Berntsen was certain bin Laden was at Tora Bora, because a second CIA team he sent in had a stroke of luck. One of the dead bodies they found was clutching a cheap Japanese walkie-talkie. Through it they could hear bin Laden exhorting his troops to keep fighting.

‘We were listening to bin Laden praying, talking and giving instructions for a couple of days,’ said Berntsen. ‘I had a guy called Jalal, the CIA’s number-one native Arabist, who’d been listening to bin Laden’s voice for five years, down here listening. Anyone who says he wasn’t there is a damn fool.’ Berntsen sent an urgent request to General Franks at Central Command in Florida for a battalion of six to eight hundred US Army Rangers to be dropped behind the al Qaeda positions to block their escape to Pakistan. ‘We need Rangers now!’ he radioed repeatedly. ‘The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!’ But the answer came back, no, it should be left to the Afghans. ‘The generals were afraid of casualties!’ said Berntsen, still incredulous. ‘Yet these guys had just killed 3,000 people in New York, and might do again. What kind of insanity is that, not sending troops?’

Only on 6 December, the eleventh day of the sixteen-day battle, did Delta Force arrive in Tora Bora and the military take control from the CIA. They set up base in an old schoolhouse, commanded by a major who uses the pseudonym ‘Dalton Fury’. Yet they numbered just forty – and to Berntsen’s wry amusement they had to pay bribes to their Afghan allies to be allowed through.

Because they were so few, the plan was to send the Afghan forces into the Tora Bora mountains to attack the al Qaeda positions from valleys on either side. The Americans would remain in observation posts, providing advice and air support, not lead the Afghans into battle or venture towards the forward lines.

For several days in early December, Fury’s troops moved up the mountains in pairs with fighters from the Afghan militias to set up observation posts. The Americans used GPS devices and laser range-finders to pinpoint caves and pockets of enemy fighters for the bombers. But the Delta Force units were unable to hold any high ground, because the Afghans insisted on retreating to their base at the bottom of the mountains each night, leaving the Americans alone inside al Qaeda territory. In a later official account the special forces said of Hazrat Ali’s forces, ‘[Their] fighting qualities proved remarkably poor.’11

Still, American aircraft were carrying out as many as a hundred airstrikes a day, and it was clear from what the US forces could see and what they were hearing in the intercepted conversations that the relentless bombing was taking its toll. A couple of times Berntsen even thought they had got bin Laden. Through the walkie-talkie they knew the al Qaeda fighters were running short of food and water, so they let them be resupplied by some local Afghans. The Afghans were paid to carry a GPS and press a button whenever they saw men or weapons. ‘We delivered food and water to them so we could get a GPS on bin Laden’s position then [on December 9] we dropped a Blu 82, the size of a car, and killed a whole lot.’

The 15,000-pound bomb, known as a daisy-cutter, was the largest bomb in the US inventory short of nuclear weapons, and was so huge it had to be rolled out the back of a C-130 cargo plane. It shook the mountains for miles. Before Afghanistan, the weapon had not been used since Vietnam, and to start with the Americans feared that it had made less impact than they expected. But then Fury heard al Qaeda fighters radioing for the ‘red truck to move wounded’, and frantic pleas from a fighter to his commander, saying, ‘Cave too hot, can’t reach others.’12 A captured al Qaeda fighter who was there later told American interrogators that men deep in caves had been vaporised in what he called ‘a hideous explosion’.

Late afternoon the following day, 10 December, Hazrat Ali told the Americans that his men had bin Laden surrounded. But as the Americans set off up the mountain in six Toyotas, they came across Ali leaving in a convoy. He promised that he and his men would turn round at the bottom and return, but they never did. Frustrated, the Americans called in seventeen hours of continuous airstrikes.

Fury was astonished when next day Haji Zaman asked for a twelve-hour ceasefire, saying that al Qaeda wanted to come down from the mountains and surrender. Bin Laden was heard on the radio telling his men that he had let them down and it was OK to surrender. Fury hoped the battle was over as Zaman claimed, but he was suspicious. They agreed an overnight pause in bombing, but by the next day not one surrendering fighter had appeared. Fury would later believe the message was a ruse to allow al Qaeda fighters to slip out of Tora Bora for Pakistan. As many as eight hundred are thought to have left that night.

Yet bin Laden was still in Tora Bora, and it seems he expected to die there. A copy of his will was later found, written on 14 December 2001. ‘Allah commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole,’ he wrote. ‘Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart … and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.’ He instructed his wives not to remarry, and apologised to his children for devoting himself to jihad.

Berntsen kept warning everyone that they were losing the chance to get bin Laden, and needed to send troops to block off exits on the Pakistan side. But Major General Dailey said General Franks had refused, explaining that Rumsfeld wanted to keep the US presence to a ‘light footprint’, and he feared alienating their allies.

‘I don’t give a damn about offending our allies!’ Berntsen shouted. ‘I only care about eliminating al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden’s head in a box!’ Dailey said the military’s position was firm, and Berntsen replied, ‘Screw that!’

Back in Washington, Berntsen’s boss Hank Crumpton, head of Afghan strategy for the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, went to see Bush at the White House and warned him, ‘We’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.’ He recommended that Marines or other US troops be rushed to Tora Bora.

‘How bad off are these Afghani forces, really?’ asked Bush. ‘Are they up to the job?’

‘Definitely not, Mr President,’ Crumpton replied. ‘Definitely not.’

Yet still no more troops were forthcoming. Fury recommended sending his men to the Pakistan side of the border, but was given the thumbs down. So desperate was he that he even suggested dropping landmines to blow up the al Qaeda fighters as they came out of the tunnels.

What none of them knew was that General Franks was already busy on Iraq plans.

On 15 December Berntsen’s men heard bin Laden on the radio again. The following day the al Qaeda leader is believed to have split his men into two and left with one group of two hundred Saudi and Yemeni bodyguards over the mountains to Parachinar in Pakistan’s tribal area, a strip of lawless land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bin Laden had been helped by Pakistanis and Afghans he had paid, some of whom were also being paid by the Americans.

Fury finally managed to persuade Hazrat Ali to keep his men in the mountains, and for the next three days they went from valley to valley, but there was no more resistance. Al Qaeda had disappeared. They found 250 dead. By 17 December Hazrat Ali declared the battle over.

That same day Berntsen left Afghanistan, frustrated beyond words. Back home with his wife and two children for Christmas, he was horrified when he switched on his television to see the bearded face of his tormentor: ‘I just kept thinking we could have had him.’

The Pakistani military were angered at the widespread perception that they had let bin Laden and his men through. General Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai, a friend of President Musharraf, had been appointed commander of the Frontier Corps shortly after 9/11. When the US started bombing Tora Bora on 8 December, he got a call from Pakistan’s Director General of Military Operations. ‘He asked me about the possibility of sending troops into the tribal agencies of Khyber and Kurram, as there was a possibility of bad guys coming over the border from Afghanistan. I didn’t think it was a good idea, as we had no government presence, no police, no intelligence in those areas …’

Coming from the tribal areas himself, he knew it would upset decades of delicate balance since the days of the Raj. The British had found the only way to deal with the Pashtun tribes along the frontier was by stick and carrot, giving subsidies to their chiefs or ‘maliks’ and putting in representatives called Political Agents who could impose collective punishment on the whole village or tribe for any misdemeanour.13 As long as the tribes stayed quiet, government would stay out of their affairs. The idea was they would serve as a buffer or ‘prickly hedge’ to guard the entrance to British India.

When Pakistan was created in 1947 this policy continued and these so-called tribal areas were left semi-autonomous, with federal control extending only a hundred yards either side of the road. The Pakistan army had never entered these areas, yet would now be doing so at the behest of kafir foreigners and against one of the key tribal principles of melmastia – providing hospitality to a guest or those who come looking for sanctuary (which of course also made it the perfect hiding place).

General Aurakzai feared this could spark a tribal uprising. ‘But the Americans said if we didn’t do it, there was the possibility of hot pursuit, which would have been humiliating for us, so I said we must act. It was also an opportunity to open up these inaccessible areas. We spoke to the local tribesmen and said either you allow in Pakistani troops or you will have US troops and aerial bombing, which they were very averse to. So they promised full support, as long as we were not a permanent presence, and told us they would not harbour foreign terrorists. Three days later, on 11 December, we dropped troops on the passes. There was no road, so the main body had to go on foot and equipment carried on mules. Within ten days we had arrested 240 al Qaeda and killed ten. We lost seven of our own men. It was all going well. But then unfortunately India mobilised its forces on our eastern border [in reaction to an attack on its parliament] and we had to decide what to do as we couldn’t be in both places.’14

Berntsen was convinced that had Bush not refused the request for more soldiers, the al Qaeda leader would have been killed at Tora Bora instead of becoming a recruiting tool for jihadis, and the world would have been a different place. ‘There isn’t a day when I don’t think “If only”,’ he told me. ‘We didn’t need much more. If we’d had six to eight hundred men we could have finished the job. Afghanistan was a flawed masterpiece.’

In 2009 a Senate report chaired by Senator John Kerry on what happened at Tora Bora would reach the same conclusion: ‘The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.’

In Jalalabad I went to see one of the three main commanders to whom the Americans had contracted out the fight, to hear his version of events.

Haji Abdul Zahir was the closest thing Afghanistan had to mujaheddin aristocracy. He was the nephew of the late Abdul Haq and the son of Haji Qadir, who had also been a commander, and was one of five Vice Presidents to Karzai and one of the few Pashtuns in the administration. In July 2002 Haji Qadir was assassinated by gunmen as he left his office in Kabul, his truck riddled with thirty-six bullets.

Haji Zahir’s house was a study in warlord chic. A golden chandelier dominated the marble entrance hall, and a sweeping staircase led up to a balcony with a billiards table. Everywhere there were blown-up photographs of himself and his late father and uncle. He was waiting for me, lounging on cushions on a raised platform beneath a gilt-framed oil painting of his father with an Afghan flag.

A servant brought us glasses of fresh pomegranate juice and small bowls of almonds and pistachios, and Zahir’s personal cameraman appeared to record the interview. But Zahir’s words were drowned out by what I thought at first was screaming, but which he explained was the sound of birds.

‘I keep hundreds of birds,’ he said. ‘I love birds.’ I presumed he meant fighting birds – a tradition in a country where just about every hobby involves fighting – but he looked pained when I asked. ‘Not fighting birds,’ he pouted. ‘I like them singing, it’s very sweet.’15

Somebody was dispatched to take out the birds, and he began to talk about Tora Bora, using floor cushions to illustrate the topography. ‘From the beginning the mission was not strong enough and the plan was weak,’ he said. ‘If you have enemies on this pillow and you don’t surround it, then they will run away. So without any plan the planes were flying and bombing, but the ways were open so of course they ran away.’

Like Berntsen, he had no doubt that bin Laden was there. ‘I myself caught twenty-one al Qaeda prisoners, some from Yemen, Kuwait, Saudi and Chechnya. One was a boy called Abu Bakr, and I asked him when he had last seen bin Laden. He said ten days earlier bin Laden had come to his checkpoint and sat with them for twenty minutes and drank tea and said, “Don’t worry, don’t lose morale, we’ll be successful and I am here.”’

Zahir went to join the fight after he switched on CNN one evening and saw an interview with his rival commanders Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman. ‘They were saying they were in Tora Bora with 3,000 soldiers. Then General Ali called me and asked, “Why aren’t you here?” I said, “We can’t just go without any plan,” but then I spoke to my father who was at the Bonn Conference [to choose the interim Afghan government] and he said, “This is our fight, so prepare your things and go.” I got 1,100–1,200 men ready, and we arrived there at night. The first shock was that Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman had boasted on CNN they had all these men, but in fact there weren’t even four or five hundred. They were just telling the Americans they had more to get more money.’

They had a meeting, and divided the area into three. Haji Zaman was to be in charge of Wazir valley, General Ali in charge of Milawa where bin Laden’s refuge was, and Zahir in charge of Tora Bora and Girikhel village. According to Zahir, Ali was being directed by the Americans while Zaman was liaising with the British. ‘There was a lot of money floating around. The US were paying $100–150 per day for each soldier, and the others claimed they had 3–5,000 men. I didn’t receive anything from them, not one gun, one bullet, one dollar. I spent $40,000 of my own money.’ (Later I would meet Hazrat Ali, who said Zahir had got the same as them.)

After a day of preparation they all set off up the mountains to their areas. By then the bombing of the encampment at Milawa had started. The plan had been to attack al Qaeda from the Wazir valley side, to trap them as the special forces wanted. Then, on 11 December, the evening the attack was due, Zaman, whose men were that side, said that al Qaeda had sent a radio message asking to be given till 8 o’clock the following morning, when they would surrender.

‘I didn’t agree,’ said Zahir. ‘I said, if they want to surrender, why not today? They’re the enemy – why are we giving them twelve hours to run away?’ But Zaman replied that they needed time to get in contact with each other, and halted the advance of his troops.

Zahir believed that Zaman had been bribed to let them disappear over the passes, and was convinced that the majority escaped. ‘Supposedly there were six to eight hundred people,’ he said. ‘I captured twenty-one. Ali and Zaman got nine. Dead bodies were not easy to count, but around 150. That means at least four to six hundred got away. For all that money spent and energy and bombing, only thirty were caught.’

To this day he remains mystified by the Americans. ‘Why weren’t there more Americans in Tora Bora?’ he asked. ‘Even after Delta Force arrived, they weren’t more than fifty or sixty. Believe me, there were more journalists than soldiers. It would have been easy to get bin Laden there. I don’t know why there was no plan to block the passes.’ He dismissed General Aurakzai’s claim that Pakistan had apprehended people on its side of the border. ‘What happened to those people? Aurakzai’s men were helping them move west to Waziristan.’

Mike Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s Osama bin Laden Unit from 1996 to 1999, and then became its special adviser from 2001 to 2004, probably knew more about bin Laden than any other Westerner alive. He was on the receiving end in Washington of many of the cables from Tora Bora. ‘It’s like many things in your life,’ he said. ‘If you don’t do something when you have the chance, sometimes that chance doesn’t come back.’16

Though he was frustrated by losing bin Laden at Tora Bora, he pointed out that the US had already squandered ten different opportunities to get their man back in 1998 and 1999. President Clinton had signed a secret presidential directive in 1998 authorising the CIA to kill bin Laden after al Qaeda bombed the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people. But when it came to it, said Scheuer, Clinton did not have the necessary resolve: ‘Clinton was worried about European opinion. He didn’t want to shoot and miss and have to explain a lot of innocent deaths. Yet the very same day [in 1999] we turned down one opportunity to kill bin Laden, our planes were dropping thousands of bombs on the Serbs from 20,000 feet. The Serbs never did anything to us.’

On one occasion that same year, the US had live video pictures of bin Laden coming in from a Predator spy plane, the only time he was actually seen. ‘But the drone wasn’t armed at that time, because the fools in Washington were arguing over which agency should fund the $2 million installation of the Hellfire missile. It’s a very upsetting business. I got into a slanging match with Clinton on TV because he claimed that he never turned down the opportunity to kill bin Laden. That’s a very clear lie, and we’re all paying the price. Similarly at Tora Bora, our generals didn’t want to lose a lot of our soldiers going after him. They had seen what had happened to the Russians, who lost 15,000 men in Afghanistan. So it was easier to subcontract to Hazrat Ali, Haji Zahir and Haji Zaman. At the time we said, “Look, these guys are going to be a day late and a dollar short.” But they wouldn’t listen.’

Although some of the CIA officers involved later blamed the fiasco on infighting between the CIA and the military, Scheuer insisted that responsibility also lay with George Tenet, the CIA Director at the time. ‘Part of it was Mr Tenet’s fault, because he told the President, Rumsfeld and Powell that all you have to do is spend a lot of money in Afghanistan. Everyone who was cognisant of how Afghan operations worked would have told Tenet that he was nuts. During our covert help to the mujaheddin in the fight against the Russians, we spent $6 billion between us and the Saudis, and I can’t remember a single time the Afghans did anything we wanted them to do. The people we bought, the people Mr Tenet said we would own, let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora into Pakistan.’

I wanted to see for myself the tunnels from which he had escaped, so I went to see the local Governor, Gul Agha Sherzai. ‘Tora Bora is already a world-famous name, but we want it to be known for tourism, not terrorism,’ he said. ‘Long before anyone had heard of Osama, Tora Bora was known as a picnic spot, and now it can be both.’ He showed me plans he’d had drawn up for a $10 million hotel development overlooking the caves. He also intended to build restaurants and to pave the road built by bin Laden leading to the mountains from Jalalabad. ‘I don’t just want one Tora Bora hotel,’ he said. ‘I want three or four!’17

The next morning, the chowkidar of the aid-agency guesthouse where I was staying hammered on my door in terror. ‘Gunmen are asking for you,’ he said. Outside were a police jeep and two pick-ups full of men with Kalashnikovs, one of whom introduced himself as Commander Lalalai, a famous old mujahid from Spin Boldak. As Tora Bora ‘wasn’t quite safe’ Governor Sherzai had sent these guards to accompany me. I climbed into the jeep and we sped off through the streets of Jalalabad, scattering donkey carts and turbaned men on bicycles. Eventually we turned off on an unmade road towards the White Mountains. ‘Tora Bora,’ said the driver, Mahmood, rolling his eyes.

On either side of the track were mud-walled compounds, one of which had an actual-size model of a car on its roof. Every so often Mahmood put on a terrifying burst of speed, throwing up so much dust that we could see nothing, and I would grip the door handle. ‘Al Qaeda, al Qaeda!’ he explained. Occasionally the truck in front would screech to a halt, and Commander Lalalai would jump out and start berating Mahmood for not going fast enough, saying we could be killed by the ‘bad guys’. I began to wonder about the Governor’s plans for tourism.

After two hours we stopped at the schoolhouse that had been used by the CIA and then Delta Force as base camp during the battle for Tora Bora, and collected two more vehicles of guards. By then we had twenty-six gunmen. So much for travelling low-profile.

The road deteriorated from dust to rocky scree, making the journey even more bone-shaking. But the scenery was spectacular, swirled-toffee mountains as far as the eye could see, rising to black rock, all under a deep-blue sky. On one side of the road lay the passes to Parachinar and the tribal areas of Pakistan. Almost twenty years before I had crossed these mountains with mujaheddin coming to fight the Russians, riding a donkey laden with rockets and grenades that left my legs purple with bruises.

Eventually our convoy pulled up under a tree and everyone piled out. ‘Now we walk ten minutes,’ said Mahmood. I had spent enough time in Afghanistan to know to multiply any times and distances by three. Foolishly, I left my food and water in the jeep, as it was Ramadan fasting month, and I didn’t want to eat in front of the others, who must let nothing pass their lips until nightfall. It was a decision I would regret.

An hour later we were still climbing the stony track along a dry riverbed and scrambling up and down scree-covered slopes, breathless from the thinning oxygen. But the guards seemed happy. They held hands, posed for photographs and kept coming to me with little offerings – some lavender they had picked, spent ammunition cartridges, and pieces of pink quartz. Every so often we passed people with donkeys or small children bearing bundles of wood – the slopes all around had been denuded of trees. The women hurriedly pulled their shawls over their faces.

Finally we stopped. The guards pointed across the gorge, shouting, ‘Osama house! Osama house!’ At first I could see nothing, but then I just made out a few holes and ruins on the terraced slopes. We clambered across past a burned-out tank and over some large bomb craters, and came to the ruins of some mud-walled houses.

I realised that the reason I had not seen it at first was that the site of the last great showdown between US forces and al Qaeda was not at all what I was expecting. At the time newspapers had run detailed graphics of James Bond-style hi-tech cave systems with internal hydro-electric power plants from mountain streams, elevators, ventilation ducts, loading bays, caverns big enough for tanks and trucks, and brick-lined walls.

Where was the vast network of tunnels that led to Pakistan? All I could see among the ruins was a circular hole, about three feet high, that seemed to be an entrance. I walked in, cursing myself for not having brought my torch. One of the guards had a cigarette lighter which he flicked on and off, but it was soon clear that the tunnel did not extend very far. Some of the gunmen were nervous, and stayed by the entrance blocking what light there was and giggling as if Osama was suddenly going to appear.

A combination of Afghan scavengers and US and British intelligence had scoured the caves, and nothing remained to suggest their past purpose. In one of them an SAS team had found plans for al Qaeda’s next attack, in Singapore. CIA agents even scraped the sides of the cave for DNA in the hope of finding that they had killed bin Laden.

The ‘light footprint’ which had been such a success in toppling the Taliban with minimum American casualties had enabled the world’s most wanted man to escape the net. Though bin Laden would periodically release videos which CIA agents and geologists would scrutinise to try to identify an area, there would be no more confirmed sightings. The CIA team would start referring to him as ‘Elvis’. President Bush was left with the consolation argument that the al Qaeda leader and his deputy were fatally weakened, detached from their followers and unable to plan any new operations.