(Part 2 of 2, Jane Mayer's New Yorker article on Osama bin Laden)
Pakistan has barred the United States from playing more than a token military role in the country. Robert Oakley, a former Ambassador to Pakistan, told me that the Pakistanis have countenanced a few American military advisers, and accepted intelligence help from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. Pakistan also allows the United States to conduct overflights and provide logistical help. Small teams of special-ops forces have occasionally offered assistance. But Oakley said that Pakistan has resisted offers to send troops. After September 11th, he told me, “the U.S. military said, ‘Maybe we can help?’ But Pakistan said, ‘No, you’ll get us all killed!’”
Asad Hayauddin confirmed that a United States military presence in the tribal areas “would be very unwelcome. There is great resistance to the idea of foreign occupation of any sort.” He added, “You have to deal with this area politically, not militarily. That’s why the U.S. is having such problems. They don’t have an anthropological approach to world problems. If you take an armored personnel carrier, or a helicopter gunship, you kill innocent people. Then you’ve lost that village for a hundred years. These places run on revenge.”
The Pakistani government has tried to advance this argument in Washington, encouraging a less confrontational strategy in the tribal regions. In December, 2001, according to several knowledgeable sources, Musharraf met with Wendy Chamberlin, then the American Ambassador to Pakistan, and asked for American support in helping him extend his control over the tribal areas. He argued that, unless the borders were cauterized there, the flow of fighters from Afghanistan would be impossible to stop. Musharraf told Chamberlin that the local Pashtun people could be bought off with basic government services that their tribal leaders had never provided—such as schools, clinics, roads, and water. Large cash awards could be offered to locals who helped track down fugitive Arabs.
“How much do you need?” Chamberlin asked. Musharraf’s answer was forty million dollars.
Chamberlin told Musharraf that she would back his plan. But when her funding request reached Congress, it was derailed. Charlie Flickner, the powerful Republican clerk of the foreign-operations subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, felt that the expenditure was a waste of money. He had travelled to western Pakistan, and concluded that the tribal areas were essentially sinkholes. On his recommendation, Chamberlin’s proposal was rejected. Instead, the committee agreed to give fourteen million dollars to the tribal areas, in the form of law-enforcement assistance to the local constabularies.
“It’s not something you throw money at,” Flickner told me. “It’s the typical thing that the bureaucrats in Islamabad think of. I don’t think everything in the world is susceptible to American money.” Members of the Democratic minority on the committee refused to respond to questions on the record. One Democrat, however, told me, “We blew it. There was a window of opportunity, but we lost it by not funding them adequately.” Soon after Chamberlin’s proposal was dismissed, the North-West Frontier Province fell into the hands of Musharraf’s Islamist opponents; in the tribal areas, fundamentalists further expanded their influence.
Musharraf, during his visit to America last month, stressed that, for the first time since the nation’s founding, in 1947, Pakistan has begun deploying thousands of soldiers in the tribal areas. The United States recently donated five Huey-2 helicopters and three fixed-wing Cessna surveillance aircraft to help the Pakistani government monitor the province—officially, to further efforts to control poppy production there. Ahmed Rashid isn’t impressed. He has been to the border region in recent weeks, and was struck by the weakness of the Pakistani military effort. “The troops are just sitting there at the border—they’re not doing sweeps,” he said, adding that the security situation in the borderlands was getting worse. “The Taliban’s really reasserted itself. Hundreds of Taliban fighters have been crossing the borders and attacking American troops. Al Qaeda commanders are helping the Taliban in the background, supplying funds and logistical support. Al Qaeda’s also providing reward money for captured or killed American soldiers.” The sums offered, he said, ranged up to a hundred thousand dollars. “All the Americans are complaining about the lack of support from the Pakistani military,” Rashid said. “The soldiers on the ground think the Pakistanis are allowing the Taliban to operate.”
To the frustration of many of the people involved in the fight against Al Qaeda, the Bush Administration is said to have been distracted by competing priorities—most notably, the war in Iraq. Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan terrorism expert who has analyzed thousands of Al Qaeda documents recovered by various governments, said, “I feel that if they had not gone to Iraq they would have found Osama by now. The best people were moved away from this operation. The best minds were moved to Iraq. It’s a great shame. It’s the biggest military failure in the war on terrorism so far. The Americans need more resources, and more high-level people exclusively assigned to this task.”
Supporters of the Iraq war suggest that this view overlooks longer-term benefits that have yet to be fully appreciated. Ambassador Oakley, for example, said, “I think the war in Iraq has made governments much more cautious about allowing terrorists into their countries—Iran and Syria, for instance—because they can see the consequences to themselves from the U.S.”
Many intelligence insiders, however, shared Gunaratna’s concerns. Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. official, said that the effort to find bin Laden had “lost at least half of its original strength.” He added, “Arabic speakers are in short supply. You still have some intelligence-collection assets in Afghanistan, but mostly it’s just small teams looking for signals. That’s because of Iraq.”
Rand Beers, who until March handled terrorism issues for the National Security Council, told me he had become so concerned about the impact that the war in Iraq was having on the war on terrorism that he quit his job—at the height of the American invasion. Beers, who served on the N.S.C. under Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush, is now an adviser for the Presidential campaign of the Democratic Senator John Kerry. He told me, “I have worried for some time that it became politically inconvenient” for the Bush Administration to “complete operations sufficiently in Afghanistan.”
Last February, he said, on the eve of the bombing of Baghdad, the Bush Administration peremptorily drafted an announcement declaring that in Afghanistan the military was moving to “stability operations,” a euphemism for military deescalation. “They wanted to make it sound as if there were just a few more stitches needed in the quilt,” he said. At the time, in fact, Beers believed that the security situation in Afghanistan was so unstable that Al Qaeda might reconstitute itself there. For instance, a recent U.N. report found that the average number of attacks per month on coalition forces rose from around nine last year to more than thirty since the beginning of 2003.
The Administration, Beers said, ignored such concerns. “They didn’t want to call attention to the fact that Osama was still at large and living along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, because they wanted it to look like the only front was Iraq,” he said. “Otherwise, the question becomes: If Afghanistan is that bad, why start another war?”
Richard Clarke, the country’s first counter-terrorism czar, told me in an interview at his home in Arlington, Virginia, that he wasn’t particularly surprised that the Bush Administration’s efforts to find bin Laden had been stymied by political problems. He had seen such efforts fail before. Clarke, who retired from public service in February and is now a private consultant on security matters, has served every President since Ronald Reagan. He has won a reputation as a tireless advocate for action against Al Qaeda. Clarke emphasized that the C.I.A. director, George Tenet, President Bush, and, before him, President Clinton were all deeply committed to stopping bin Laden; nonetheless, Clarke said, their best efforts had been doomed by bureaucratic clashes, caution, and incessant problems with Pakistan.
In the course of several hours, Clarke revealed details of previous intelligence failures that had allowed bin Laden to escape, many of which the Bush Administration continues to classify as top secret. These details were withheld from the Congressional Report on September 11th; according to an official familiar with the report, they were censored from the section “Covert Action and Military Operations Against Bin Laden.”
Clarke told me that in the mid-nineties “the C.I.A. was authorized to mount operations to go into Afghanistan and apprehend bin Laden.” President Clinton, Clarke said, “was really gung-ho” about the scenario. “He had no hesitations,” he said. “But the C.I.A. had hesitations. They didn’t want their own people killed. And they didn’t want their shortcomings exposed. They really didn’t have the paramilitary capability to do it; they could not stage a snatch operation.” Instead of trying to mount the operation themselves, Clarke said, “the C.I.A. basically paid a bunch of local Afghans, who went in and did nothing.”
In 1998, Al Qaeda struck the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people. In retaliation, Clinton signed a secret Presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to kill bin Laden. It was the first directive of this kind that Clarke had seen during his thirty years in government. Soon afterward, he told me, C.I.A. officials went to the White House and said they had “specific, predictive, actionable” intelligence that bin Laden would soon be attending a particular meeting, in a particular place. “It was a rare occurrence,” Clarke said. Clinton authorized a lethal attack. The target date, however—August 20, 1998—nearly coincided with Clinton’s deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Clarke said that he and other top national-security officials at the White House went to see Clinton to warn him that he would likely be accused of “wagging the dog” in order to distract the public from his political embarrassment. Clinton was enraged. “Don’t you fucking tell me about my political problems, or my personal problems,” Clinton said, according to Clarke. “You tell me about national security. Is it the right thing to do?” Clarke thought it was. “Then fucking do it,” Clinton told him.
The attacks, which cost seventy-nine million dollars and involved some sixty satellite-guided Tomahawk cruise missiles, obliterated two targets—a terrorist training camp outside Khost, in Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical plant thought to be manufacturing chemical weapons in Khartoum, Sudan—and were notorious failures. “The best post-facto intelligence we had was that bin Laden had left the training camp within an hour of the attack,” Clarke said. What went wrong? “I have reason to believe that a retired head of the I.S.I. was able to pass information along to Al Qaeda that an attack was coming,” he said.
Clarke also blames the military for enabling the Pakistanis to compromise the mission. “The Pentagon did what we asked them not to,” he said. “We asked them not to use surface ships. We asked them to use subs, so they wouldn’t signal the attack. But not only did they use surface ships—they brought additional ones in, because every captain wants to be able to say he fired the cruise missile.”
Asad Hayauddin denies that anyone in Pakistan even had enough knowledge to compromise the mission: “The U.S. didn’t tell us about it until forty-five minutes before the missiles hit.”
After the 1998 fiasco, Clinton secretly approved additional Presidential findings, authorizing the killing not just of bin Laden but also of several of his top lieutenants, and permitting any private planes or helicopters carrying them to be shot down. These directives led to nothing. “The C.I.A. was unable to carry out the mission,” Clarke said. “They hired local Afghans to do it for them again.” The agency also tried to train and equip a Pakistani commando force and some Uzbeks, too. “The point is, they were risk-averse,” he said. Tenet was “eager to kill bin Laden,” Clarke said. “He understood the threat. But the capability of the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations was far less than advertised. The Directorate of Operations would like people to think it’s a great James Bond operation, but for years it essentially assigned officers undercover as diplomats to attend cocktail parties. They collected information. But they were not a commando unit that could go into Afghanistan and kill bin Laden.”
“That’s bullshit,” a senior intelligence official said. “Risk-taking depends on political will allowing you to take the risk. It wasn’t until after September 11th that people wanted the gloves to come off.”
But Clarke said that in October, 2000, when the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, off the coast of Yemen, Clinton demanded better military options. The Department of Defense prepared a plan for a United States military operation so big that it was dismissed as politically untenable; meanwhile, General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded that, without better intelligence, a smaller-scale attack would be too risky. (Indeed, according to the Congressional Report on September 11th, Shelton said, “You can develop military operations until hell freezes over, but they are worthless without intelligence.”) The Navy tried stationing two submarines in the Indian Ocean, in the hope of being able to shoot missiles at bin Laden, but the time lag between the sighting of the target and the arrival of the missiles made it virtually impossible to pinpoint him accurately.
The first promise of an intelligence breakthrough came in the fall of 2000, when Clarke, and a few allies in the C.I.A. and the military, recognized the potential of the Predator, a nine-hundred-and-fifty-pound unmanned propeller plane being tested by General Johnny Jumper, the Air Force’s head of air combat at the time. It could supply live video surveillance—day or night, and through cloud cover. Clarke said that the plane, which was tested in Afghanistan, supplied “spectacular” pictures of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, including one of a tall, white-robed man who closely resembled bin Laden and was surrounded by security guards as he crossed a city street to a mosque. At the C.I.A.’s Global Response Center, analysts who were used to receiving fuzzy satellite photographs and thirdhand reports were now able to watch as live video feeds captured the daily routines inside Al Qaeda training camps. They watched as men did physical exercises, fired their weapons, and practiced hand-to-hand combat. Two or three times that fall, intelligence analysts thought they might have spotted bin Laden himself. The man in question was unusually tall, like bin Laden, and drove the same model of truck that bin Laden preferred, the Toyota Land Cruiser. (The images weren’t clear enough, however, to allow analysts to discern facial features.) The C.I.A. rushed the surveillance tapes over to the White House, where the President, like everyone else, was stunned by their clarity. Later that fall, however, fierce winds in the Hindu Kush caused the Predator to crash. The accident led to recriminations inside the C.I.A. and the Air Force and quarrels about which part of the bureaucracy should pay for the damage.
By early 2001, Clarke and a handful of counter-terrorism specialists at the C.I.A. had learned of an Air Force plan to arm the Predator. The original plan called for three years of tests. Clarke and the others pushed so hard that the plane was ready in three months. In tests, the craft worked surprisingly well. In the summer of 2001, an armed Predator destroyed a model of bin Laden’s house which had been built in the Nevada desert. But Clarke said, “Every time we were ready to use it, the C.I.A. would change its mind. The real motivation within the C.I.A., I think, is that some senior people below Tenet were saying, ‘It’s fine to kill bin Laden, but we want to do it in a way that leaves no fingerprints. Otherwise, C.I.A. agents all over the world will be subject to assassination themselves.’ They also worried that something would go wrong—they’d blow up a convent and get blamed.”
On September 4, 2001, all sides agree, the issue reached a head, at a meeting of the Principal’s Committee of Bush’s national-security advisers, a Cabinet-level group that includes the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the director of the C.I.A., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Attorney General, and the national-security adviser. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also attended that day. As Clarke, who was there, recalled, “Tenet said he opposed using the armed Predator, because it wasn’t the C.I.A.’s job to fly airplanes that shot missiles. The Air Force said it wasn’t their job to fly planes to collect intelligence. No one around the table seemed to have a can-do attitude. Everyone seemed to have an excuse.”
“There was a discussion,” the senior intelligence official confirmed. “The C.I.A. said, ‘Who’s got more experience flying aircraft that shoot missiles?’ But the Air Force liked planes with pilots.”
In looking back at the deadlock, Roger Cressey, Clarke’s deputy for counter-terrorism at the N.S.C., told me, “It sounds terrible, but we used to say to each other that some people didn’t get it—it was going to take body bags.”
A week later, in the worst terrorist attacks in history, which were carried out at bin Laden’s direction, nearly three thousand Americans were killed. In November, Clarke said, the United States finally deployed the armed Predator to help destroy what video surveillance showed to be a high-level Al Qaeda meeting outside Kabul. In many respects, the trial run was a brilliant success. The strike killed Al Qaeda’s military chief, Mohammad Atef, who left behind valuable documents. But evidently bin Laden was spared. A few weeks later, his voice was reportedly detected by agents on a satellite telephone near the Tora Bora cave complex. American B-52 bombers pounded the area. Afterward, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, “We’ve destroyed Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.” But, once again, bin Laden evidently escaped.
One problem, Clarke suggested, was that the United States had waited too long before starting to bomb, and again had relied too heavily on “Afghans it had rented.” In any event, Tora Bora was the last place that bin Laden was definitively detected alive by the United States. The best estimates are that he either walked, rode a donkey, or took a bus across the border into Pakistan, sometime in the third week of December, 2001.
It has been nearly two years since the attacks on New York and Washington, and there is now a growing debate in academic circles about how crucial a target bin Laden remains—given that, if he is indeed still alive, he has been driven almost completely underground. According to Jessica Stern, of Harvard, Al Qaeda is “still the most significant threat to U.S. national security today.” But she told me that, because the organization has been decentralized by the relentless hunt for its leaders, capturing bin Laden “almost doesn’t matter.”
Gilles Kepel, a well-known French scholar of Islam, suggested that, without media exposure, bin Laden was “fading.” He added, “Terrorism requires the media, but he’s become invisible. It becomes less and less important to kill him, except as a trophy.”
Those involved in the day-to-day battle against terrorism, however, are not convinced that bin Laden has become insignificant. They note that an alleged Al Qaeda spokesman warned recently of plans for another attack the size of September 11th. The triple bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 12th, which killed thirty-four and wounded more than two hundred, have now been traced to Al Qaeda, and intelligence agencies in Europe and Africa, as well as in the United States, have detected increased recruitment by Al Qaeda in response to the war in Iraq. A recent U.N. report asserted that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have regrouped in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, and are showing “new boldness” in their attacks on international aid workers and coalition troops.
“Anyone who says that, at this point, getting bin Laden doesn’t matter is, purposefully or not, providing a completely self-serving judgment,” Rand Beers said. “It’s not true. There would be a huge favorable political fallout to finding him. It would reverberate all over the Islamic world. Maybe someday it will matter less, but right now it’s a continuing, nagging question, and a huge political embarrassment.” |
