dwelling high in a mountain pass
among a band of knights who,
united in devotion to God,
descend to face armies.
—Osama bin Laden
Indeed, I’m more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices.
—Pericles
In the months after 9/11 the best chance the United States had to kill bin Laden was in the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, where he and the core of al-Qaeda had retreated during mid-November. He had been hiding there through most of the holy month of Ramadan.
Some fourteen centuries earlier, during the sacred weeks of Ramadan, the Prophet Mohammed had defeated a force of “infidels” that dwarfed his own at the battle of Badr in 624. Also during Ramadan, at the battle of Jaji in 1987—about fifteen miles from Tora Bora as the crow flies—bin Laden had won what he believed was a great victory when his small group of Arabs had held off a much larger Soviet force. It was from the crucible of the Jaji battle that al-Qaeda had been forged.
At Tora Bora, bin Laden wanted to relive the great Ramadan victories of Badr and Jaji by fighting the Americans. And where better to do it? Bin Laden had built crude roads through the Tora Bora mountains after the battle of Jaji so that his forces could fight in the battle of Jalalabad two years later. It was also where he had built his cave-house in 1996 and had enjoyed breathing the clean, alpine air of the Tora Bora mountains and mapping their terrain. Bin Laden knew the region intimately; he had regularly taken his older sons on twelve-hour hikes through the mountains to toughen them up for just this kind of moment.
Bin Laden also knew that during the anti-Soviet jihad a relatively small group of Afghan holy warriors in Tora Bora had held off significant offensives involving thousands of Russian troops because its mountains and caves were easily defended. And he also understood that Tora Bora backed onto Pakistan’s wild, ungoverned tribal regions, which was a perfect place for his followers to escape if this became necessary.
By the time bin Laden arrived in Tora Bora, Abu Hafs, al-Qaeda’s cofounder and military commander, had been killed in a U.S. air strike. Bin Laden’s other key military commander, Saif al-Adel, who had opposed the 9/11 attacks because he feared the scale of the likely American response, hadn’t followed his boss to Tora Bora. So bin Laden turned to Ayman al-Zawahiri to be his deputy at the battle.
In late October bin Laden had sent a group of al-Qaeda members to Tora Bora to begin planning for the battle and to pre-position weapons and ammunition in caves. Their preparations were not extensive. Even Zawahiri, who was always publicly an admirer of bin Laden’s acumen, admitted that al-Qaeda had very little ammunition and only one mortar.
Some Western news reports painted the Tora Bora caves as if they were the sophisticated lair of a James Bond villain, with their own hydroelectric power, ventilation system, and living quarters for a thousand men. In fact, the Tora Bora caves were simply caves, just large enough that a group of men could stand up in them.
Ayman Batarfi, an orthopedic surgeon from Yemen, attended the wounded members of al-Qaeda in Tora Bora. He had no medicine and had to perform a hand amputation using a knife, and a finger amputation using scissors. Batarfi thought that bin Laden had made scant plans for the battle and was mostly preoccupied with making his own escape.
In Tora Bora bin Laden said farewell to three of his younger children, who were taken away from the battle zone by one of his followers. He was emotional as they all made their goodbyes, not knowing if they would see each other again.
The very heavy bombing began soon afterward, on the morning of December 3, 2001. “Not a second would pass without a fighter plane passing over our heads day and night,” bin Laden recalled later. “American forces were bombing us by smart bombs that weigh thousands of pounds and bombs that penetrate caves.” Between December 4 and 7, U.S. bombers dropped 700,000 pounds of ordnance on Tora Bora.
Bin Laden told his three hundred followers to dig trenches to protect themselves from the intense American bombing. It was a distant echo of the Prophet Mohammed’s Battle of the Trench in 627, when the Prophet’s followers dug a trench around the city of Medina, which had held off their enemies.
A messenger came to Tora Bora to tell Zawahiri that his wife, Azza, and his son Mohammad and daughter Aisha had all been killed in a U.S. air strike. Bin Laden embraced Zawahiri and burst into tears. He could become quite lachrymose about those he regarded as “true” Muslims.
But Zawahiri communicated only stoicism. Through a Taliban official, the journalist Faraj Ismail exchanged messages with him and offered his condolences. Zawahiri replied, “No condolences should be offered for their martyrdom if it was granted to them.”
There are few accounts of how al-Qaeda’s soldiers fought during this period, although Commander Muhammad Musa, one of the Afghan ground commanders allied to a small group of U.S. Special Operations Forces at the Tora Bora battle, described them as fierce and said that when they were captured, some committed suicide using hand grenades. The Americans began to conclude that the Afghan forces they were allied with were not capable of finishing off bin Laden and his followers. CIA officer Gary Berntsen, who was leading the agency’s operations in Afghanistan, wrote a cable on December 2 to CIA headquarters requesting eight hundred elite Army Rangers to block the escape routes of al-Qaeda from Tora Bora. The request made it to General Tommy Franks, who had overall control of the Tora Bora operation, who pushed back, pointing out that U.S. Special Forces allied to local Afghan forces had performed well fighting the Taliban. Indeed, on December 7 the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar had fallen to the forces of the future Afghan president Hamid Karzai aided by an eleven-man Special Forces detachment.
Franks also believed that introducing more troops into Afghanistan would replicate the Soviets’ military failure in the country. This analogy was quite misleading. The Soviets occupied Afghanistan for a decade and inflicted a brutal war on the Afghans, killing at least one million of them and forcing a third of the population out of their homes. They had created what was then the largest refugee population in the world. By contrast, the Afghan War was the first time in the history of NATO that all its countries had invoked Article 5, the collective right to self-defense. Plus, the enemy they were pursuing was not beloved by the Afghan population. So sending a force of eight hundred American soldiers into the remote region of Tora Bora for the limited purpose of hunting down bin Laden was hardly replicating the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Was such an American force available that could have been deployed to Tora Bora? Indeed, there was. In late November 2001 Marine Brigadier General Jim Mattis had just led the deepest insertion of Marines into a war zone in U.S. military history. His force of one thousand Marines had seized an abandoned airfield one hundred miles from Kandahar city, the seat of Taliban power. A more gung ho commander leading a more gung ho group of Americans was hard to imagine. In early December Mattis proposed a plan to send his Marines into Tora Bora, where they would set up around-the-clock observation posts on the high ground to cut off any escape routes and would be backed up by rifle companies to pick off retreating members of al-Qaeda. There was no response from the Pentagon to Mattis’s plan.
In addition, there were more than one thousand soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division stationed in Afghanistan’s neighbor to the north, Uzbekistan. As its name implies, the 10th Mountain specializes in alpine warfare and fighting in cold weather. Yet Franks continued to rely on local Afghan warlords to do the fighting at Tora Bora, supported by American air strikes.
On December 9, a U.S. bomber dropped the most lethal non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, a fifteen-thousand-pound device known as a Daisy Cutter, on al-Qaeda’s positions in Tora Bora. That night a bomb also landed on bin Laden’s bunker. His followers worried that their leader had been killed. But bin Laden was not where he was supposed to be. He had dreamed about a scorpion descending into one of the trenches that his men had dug for him, and so he had moved several hundred feet away from his bunker before it was hit.
By now bin Laden’s followers were desperate. The caves they were sheltering in were at nine thousand feet, where the temperature was ten degrees below freezing. The siege was tightening. There was no water, because it was frozen. Snow was falling steadily while a barrage of bombs was landing on them around the clock. Bin Laden himself spoke to his followers, saying, “I am sorry for getting you involved in this battle; if you can no longer resist, you may surrender with my blessing.”
Al-Qaeda officials offered a cease-fire and promised that bin Laden would personally surrender. Bin Laden lived in a world that was awash in the signs of the divine, and he took it as a sign of Allah’s favor that his enemies accepted this truce. That truce would take place between the 12th and 13th of December 2001, the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, sacred in the Muslim calendar as the “Night of Power” when the gates of heaven are opened. At the battle of Jaji on this same day in 1987 bin Laden had witnessed a Russian fighter jet miraculously fall out of the sky. Fourteen years later bin Laden was witnessing another miracle; he and many of his men might live to fight another day if they could find a way to escape.
Under the cover of darkness at 11 p.m. on December 12 bin Laden and his followers took advantage of the truce to leave Tora Bora. Bin Laden together with his sons Mohammed and Osman and Zawahiri sneaked out of Tora Bora, staging one of history’s great disappearing acts. Confounding expectations that they would likely flee across the border into Pakistan’s tribal regions, they traveled instead to northeastern Afghanistan, where they vanished into the densely forested mountains of Kunar province.
The same day that bin Laden left Tora Bora, General Franks, the commander of the Afghan War, was briefing the plan for the coming Iraq War to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Franks had spent the past week revising the several-hundred-page plan. Rumsfeld was deeply invested in the war against Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, at the very moment that their architect was escaping the Pentagon’s grasp. It was one of the most spectacular misjudgments in U.S. military history.
As he fled Tora Bora bin Laden drew up his will. It was a sober document; he knew he had only narrowly cheated death. He wrote, “Oh my wives! You were, after Allah, the best support and the best help; from the first day you knew that the road was full of thorns and mines. As to my children, forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have chosen a road fraught with dangers and for this sake suffered from hardships, embitterment, betrayal, and treachery. I advise you not to work with al-Qaeda.”
The leader of al-Qaeda was telling his own children not to join his group, which had been bin Laden’s life work for the past decade and a half. It showed bin Laden’s downcast state of mind as he hastened from the Tora Bora battlefield.
Soon afterward, on December 14, U.S. signals operators picked up bin Laden’s voice on a radio transmission in Tora Bora. It seemed like more of a sermon than bin Laden speaking live to his men, and they concluded it had been prerecorded to help disguise the fact that al-Qaeda’s leader had fled.
As it happens, bin Laden had planned his escape carefully. He had paid a local commander, Awal Gul, $100,000 during the first half of November 2001, before the Tora Bora battle began. He trusted Gul because he had taken care of bin Laden’s security when bin Laden had lived at Tora Bora in 1996.
Early in the morning of December 13 bin Laden and Zawahiri made their way to Gul’s house in Jalalabad, thirty miles north of Tora Bora, where they rested. The next leg of their journey, one hundred miles to the northeast, was to the Shigal district in Kunar province, a valley at five thousand feet surrounded by looming mountains. The region was so remote that there were no paved roads, so bin Laden and Zawahiri rode there by horse. They settled in the hamlet of Khwarr, which was so obscure it didn’t appear on maps. It was a perfect place to disappear.
While they were hiding in Kunar province bin Laden and Zawahiri were under the protection of the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was one of the Afghan leaders of the anti-Soviet jihad. During that war bin Laden had sometimes fought alongside Hekmatyar’s men, and al-Qaeda’s leader had known Hekmatyar for the past decade and a half. Hekmatyar’s faction had been a major beneficiary of CIA largesse during the anti-Soviet war, receiving an estimated $600 million of American aid. Yet Hekmatyar and his followers would protect bin Laden from the Americans for much of 2002.
Two weeks after he had escaped from Tora Bora, bin Laden spoke on a videotape that aired on networks around the world. Visibly aged, he did not move his entire left side during the half-hour tape, likely because he was injured during the battle. On the tape bin Laden appeared defeated, saying, “I am just a poor slave of God. If I live or die, the war will continue.”
But there was a sense of defeat too on the American side. A week later, on January 4, 2002, Michael Morell, President Bush’s CIA briefer who had briefed the president virtually every day for the past year, had the unenviable task of informing Bush that it was the CIA’s assessment that bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora.
Bush rarely raised his voice, but he was now madder than Morell had ever seen him. Bush asked, “How the hell could he have possibly eluded you? What are your plans now?”
Morell had nothing to do with bin Laden’s disappearance, but he held his tongue.
Bush then got on a secure video call with Cheney, Rice, and Tenet and the president immediately asked them, “What the hell is this? Michael just told me something about bin Laden getting away?”
Seemingly embarrassed that the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks had slipped their grasp, top officials in the Bush administration later claimed that there was no evidence that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. President Bush said, “If we had ever known for sure where he was, we would have moved heaven and earth to bring him to justice.” Rumsfeld claimed, “No one knew for certain that Osama bin Laden was there,” adding for good measure that “there was far more to the threat posed by Islamist extremism than one man.” Rice asserted, “There were conflicting reports about his whereabouts at the time, and as a result the military did not request additional sources to conduct a strike.” Another approach was to simply pretend that the Tora Bora episode had never happened; Cheney didn’t mention the battle of Tora Bora at all in his more than five-hundred-page autobiography.
In fact, there was considerable intelligence that bin Laden was in Tora Bora for weeks during the late fall of 2001, which was known to top Bush administration officials at the time and which they even talked about publicly. On ABC News on November 29, 2001, Cheney explained why bin Laden was likely in Tora Bora: “I think he was equipped to go to ground there. He’s got what he believes to be fairly secure facilities, caves underground. It’s an area he’s familiar with. He operated there back during the war against the Soviets in the ’80s.” Two weeks later Paul Wolfowitz, the number two official at the Pentagon, was asked if bin Laden was in Tora Bora, and he told reporters, “We don’t have any credible evidence of him being in other parts of Afghanistan or outside of Afghanistan.”
Lieutenant General Michael DeLong, General Franks’s top deputy, confirmed in his memoir, “We were hot on Osama bin Laden’s trail. He was definitely there when we hit caves. Every day during the bombing, Rumsfeld asked me, ‘Did we get him? Did we get him?’ ” The official history of U.S. Special Operations Command also concluded that bin Laden was at Tora Bora: “All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9–14 December.”
If more American forces had been positioned in Tora Bora they certainly would have faced obstacles; the region is large, six miles long and six miles wide, and its peaks rise to fourteen thousand feet. The battle took place during the middle of winter and there were a number of escape routes for bin Laden and his men to flee into Pakistan’s tribal regions or elsewhere in Afghanistan. Yet no effort was made to insert additional American forces into Tora Bora, which was quite surprising given that the ruins of the World Trade Center buildings were still smoldering. In the end, there were only around seventy U.S. and British servicemen at Tora Bora, while there were around an estimated one hundred journalists on the ground covering the battle. This demonstrated the timidity of the Pentagon at the time and the inattention of senior Bush administration officials. Bin Laden would go on to lead al-Qaeda for another decade.I
If bin Laden had been captured or killed at Tora Bora, along with many of his key lieutenants, might the subsequent “war on terror” have played out differently? After all, the Afghan War had started because the Taliban would not give up bin Laden, and with bin Laden no longer on the battlefield much of the energy about avenging 9/11 would likely have dissipated. Making the case for the Iraq War would also have been harder if bin Laden had been defeated, since the Bush administration was making his purported connection to Saddam Hussein a reason to invade that country. And a peace deal with the Taliban might have been more achievable in the years immediately after 9/11 if the Taliban’s alliance with al-Qaeda was no longer an issue.
I. Tom Greer was the lead officer for U.S. Special Operations Forces at the Tora Bora battle. In his account of the battle, Kill Bin Laden, which Greer wrote using the pen name Dalton Fury, he recalled that there were forty Delta operators from Special Operations Forces, fourteen Green Berets from U.S. Special Forces, six CIA operatives, a few Air Force tactical controllers and signals interceptors, and a dozen British commandos from the Special Boat Service who were at Tora Bora. CNN correspondent Nic Robertson and Washington Post correspondent Susan Glasser both covered the Tora Bora battle, and both gave the author similar estimates of the number of journalists who covered it on the ground: circa one hundred.