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Turning the tide in Afghanistan

As war unfolded, US strategy evolved

By Globe Staff, 12/31/2001

This story was reported in Washington by Michael Kranish, Bryan Bender, Anthony Shadid, Anne E. Kornblut, and Robert Schlesinger, and in Afghanistan by John Donnelly, David Filipov, and Lynda Gorov. It was written by Kranish.

Haron Amin, the Washington representative of the Northern Alliance, was a deeply frustrated man in the summer of 2001. Here he was, offering his alliance's help in overthrowing the Taliban government of Afghanistan and tracking down Al Qaeda chieftain Osama bin Laden, but the Bush White House was hardly listening.

First, Amin asked for military support. The White House refused. "Then financial support, then it was political support, and then it was moral support," Amin said. "We got none of them. Zilch. Absolutely zero."

Then came Sept. 11. And, within days, President Bush made one of the most important decisions of the war on terrorism, throwing his lot with the ragtag Northern Alliance and pressuring Pakistan to desert its Taliban clients.

To help arm the alliance, the Bush administration made a previously unthinkable deal, intelligence sources said: It agreed to finance a Russian transfer of arms to the alliance fighters. At about the same time, the United States started getting valuable intelligence from a longtime adversary, Iran. CIA and special forces troops prepared to join the alliance ranks to mark targets with high-tech precision for "smart" munitions that would be launched by US planes.

Thus was born a war strategy that was not on any Pentagon shelf.

Emboldened by a devastating attack at home, the White House was depending on rebel commanders who previously had been accused of human rights atrocities; agreeing to pay a former Cold War foe to supply arms; and relying on Iran, a country still vividly remembered for holding Americans hostage. The United States ran the risk that Pakistan, a nuclear power, might be seized by revolts or a coup d'etat.

The strategy was untested, resulted in some initial failures, and faced criticism that it would place the United States in a "quagmire." But after a few weeks of frustratingly slow gains, the war against the Taliban briskly ousted them from power, with the Northern Alliance playing a key role.

No final victory can be claimed in the war on terror or in Afghanistan itself. The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and a dozen top Al Qaeda leaders, bin Laden among them, are still at large and may be able to launch other terror attacks. The final accounting of the veiled war in Afghanistan will have to wait until much more is known about the Bush administration's secret deals in capitals around the world and its discussions in the White House Situation Room.

There is, though, one unassailable fact: Bush's early decision to go after foreign governments that host terrorists has ended the Taliban reign. This is the story of a mission that unfolded day by day, sometimes in unpredictable, inconceivable ways.

Requests for assistance were unheeded by US

It was Dec. 14, 2000, and Ahmad Shah Massoud, the defense minister and leader of the Northern Alliance, was writing a prescient letter to Vice President-elect Dick Cheney.

"An abandoned Afghanistan has paid a high price," Massoud wrote in a letter obtained by the Globe. "Terrorism, narcotics, extremism, and human rights violations . . . The Taliban movement continues to provide safe haven to some of the world's most dangerous terrorists and wealthy international troublemakers, such as Osama bin Laden."

Massoud urged Cheney to help the Northern Alliance oust the Taliban and the terrorists. But Cheney never responded to the letter, according to Northern Alliance officials. The vice president's spokeswoman, Mary Matalin, said his office could find no record of receiving it.

Massoud had reason to wish for US intervention. The charismatic rebel leader was holed up in a small slice of northern Afghanistan with a few thousand troops, desperate for international support and recognition. He was getting some arms from Russia, but practically nothing from the United States, only an occasional visit from a CIA operative seeking intelligence on bin Laden.

In Washington, the Northern Alliance wasn't faring any better. Amin, who speaks five languages, including a perfectly Americanized English, knew that bin Laden's presence in Afghanistan was the alliance's best argument for US intervention. But Amin could not arouse much US interest.

By all accounts, Afghanistan was low on Bush's radar screen. Despite Al Qaeda's bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and its deadly attacks on US armed forces in the Middle East, "Afghanistan was just below Nepal" on the list of priorities for the US national security apparatus, said a Defense Intelligence Agency official.

The Taliban, dominated as it was by Pashtun tribal leaders, was nurtured by Pakistan, which has a sizable Pashtun minority, and US policy was deeply wedded to its old Cold War ally. Pakistan vigorously opposed any US aid to the Northern Alliance, whose members were of different ethnic tribes - Uzbeks and Tajiks and Hazaras - from the Pakistanis or Taliban. Thus, bin Laden was in effect protected by a US ally, while the alliance went without US help.

Bush hardly mentioned the threat of terrorism during the presidential campaign. The idea that terrorists could mount a serious strike on the US mainland was the stuff of Tom Clancy thrillers and academic commissions.

Indeed, foreign affairs was not atop Bush's agenda, a fact highlighted in November 1999, when Bush faced a foreign affairs quiz by reporter Andy Hiller of Boston's WHDH-TV and could not name the leader of Pakistan: General Pervez Musharraf, who had obtained power in a coup. "The new Pakistani general, he's just been elected - not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country and I think that's good news for the subcontinent," Bush said.

On the morning of Sept. 11, everything changed. Bush was at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla., for an event to promote his education policies when his chief of staff, former Massachusetts legislator Andrew Card, whispered in his ear. Like the rest of the nation, Bush watched the video replay of jets plunging into the World Trade Center complex.

"We're at war," the president said. "Get me the vice president. Get me the director of the FBI."

US intelligence sources, citing electronic intercepts, quickly fingered Al Qaeda. Just what was the White House policy on the Taliban and Afghanistan? The Bush administration for months had put off a decision on the subject. In fact, a crucial meeting on the subject had been planned for Sept. 12, when it was to be discussed at the "deputies committee," a gathering of policy makers at the deputy level of key agencies, including Deputy National Security Adviser Steven Hadley, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Now the administration would have to plan not just policy but a war. "There was no handbook on any shelf in the Pentagon, no plan in any safe over there that even began to lay out a roadmap to deal with this," said Virginia Senator John Warner, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former secretary of the Navy.

On Sept. 11, as Bush raced from Sarasota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and then stopped at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska - in what was called an effort to prevent a possible attack on Air Force One - his aides pondered how to reach out to the Northern Alliance.

But by then, the alliance commander was dead.

Rebels suffer ruinous loss, then become key ally

Two men posing as journalists - apparently sent by bin Laden - detonated a device that killed Ahmad Shah Massoud on Sept. 9. The Northern Alliance tried to hide the news of Massoud's death for eight days. "We tried to keep it hush-hush," said Amin, afraid that the "front lines would collapse and all resistance would die."

If not for the Sept. 11 attacks that revitalized American interest in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance might have collapsed. Instead, its scattered bands of guerrilla fighters, many traveling the countryside on horseback, had suddenly become of critical importance to the world's angry superpower.

The CIA, which heretofore had conducted only minor reconnaissance operations with the Northern Alliance, sent in operatives to meet with its independent and sometimes rival commanders. The agency team had serious concerns. Northern Alliance leaders feuded with each other, had a beleaguered and ill-equipped army, and presented no viable strategy for defeating the Taliban. They needed food, supplies, and weapons.

An even bigger cause of concern was Pakistan. Musharraf opposed the Northern Alliance. US officials feared that Pakistanis sympathetic to the Taliban would riot - maybe even overthrow Musharraf - or that the general would buckle under pressure from religious hard-liners and refuse to help the United States. American concerns were underlined by Pakistan's status as a nuclear power, and US military officials worked with their Pakistani counterparts to better secure its strategic arsenal.

The wooing of Musharraf was vintage Bush. Just as his father had worked with then-General Colin Powell to assemble an international coalition in the Gulf War, the president now employed Secretary of State Colin Powell to isolate the Taliban by assembling a coalition that included Britain, Russia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, India, Iran, China, and other countries.

The crowning moment came when Powell traveled to Pakistan to win assurances from Musharraf, and then visited Pakistan's rival, India, and got assurances of its support. Throughout the war, the coalition never cracked, though a dangerous fissure has now emerged along the Pakistan-India border, where the two nations have massed troops and missiles. The spark between the two nuclear rivals was a terrorist attack on India's Parliament Dec. 13, and US officials are engaged in intensive talks to defuse the crisis.

Musharraf, whose name once was a mystery to Bush, turned out to be the most crucial ally. That was clear on Oct. 7, when Musharraf boldly consolidated his hold on the military. Hours before US air attacks began in Afghanistan, Musharraf promoted two of his allies to top positions - Lieutenant General Muhammad Aziz Khan, who played the key role in the 1999 coup that brought Musharraf to power, and Lieutenant General Muhammad Yousuf, whose views were considered pro-Western.

Musharraf forced the resignation of two pro-Taliban generals and effectively sidelined a third; the most significant of the resignations came from Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmad, the hard-line chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence, a state within a state in Pakistan's bureaucracy. The ISI had been key to the Taliban's rise to power in the mid-1990s.

Musharraf's moves caught US officials by surprise. "We didn't know it was going to happen," acknowledged a longtime State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "This was the point when it was demonstrated that there was no real reason to worry about the stability of the Pakistani government. Winning Afghanistan but losing Pakistan was not what anybody wanted to do."

Pakistan has already received some benefits. The United States waived and suspended economic sanctions, supported Pakistan in International Monetary Fund negotiations, transferred to it $600 million in cash, provided a $300 million line of credit, and reopened a mission of the US Agency for International Development. A debt-rescheduling deal is in the works.

US military embarks on a personal mission

Aboard the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier plying the waters of the north Arabian Sea, the 8th fighter wing was prepared to wreak vengeance for lost lives of the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and the hijacked airliners. On Oct. 7, after a briefing that lasted roughly two hours, Captain David Mercer stood up before his men and said simply: "This isn't business; it's personal." They went to their planes.

Flashes on the ground started almost as soon as they were in Afghan airspace - antiaircraft artillery, or triple-A, in the parlance of the Navy pilots. But the planes were well out of range, and the Taliban defenders had poor aim. The sounds of jet engines were echoing off the mountains, Mercer guessed, giving a false impression of the aircraft's whereabouts to the gunners thousands of feet below. Mercer released his satellite-guided payload on a target near Kandahar.

All across Afghanistan, his Navy and Air Force counterparts were battering Taliban airplanes, airfields, antiaircraft position, military headquarters, fuel depots, and other targets. As formidable as the US arsenal of smart bombs and munitions had been in the Persian Gulf war and the Balkans, its pinpoint accuracy and explosive power had been honed and refined to greater effect in Afghanistan. The United States controlled the air, and there are few things as demoralizing - or destructive - to an army as an enemy that owns the skies.

But it still takes infantry to seize and hold ground.

Altered perspectives led to string of successes

In the early days, the US ground strategy focused heavily on southern Afghanistan, the heartland of the Taliban, at the expense of the Northern Alliance. The strategy was not an immediate success. A much-publicized commando raid by US Army Rangers in late October on a Taliban military compound provided little intelligence and several US soldiers were seriously injured. A US helicopter crashed in Pakistan, killing both pilots. Later, Abdul Haq, an anti-Taliban Pashtun leader who had entered Afghanistan with a small group of followers, was tracked down near Jalalabad, captured, shot, and hanged by the Taliban.

"It was a failure, the military operation in the south," Amin said, that led to a renewed focus on working with the Northern Alliance.

The United States shifted its sights north, where the Pentagon had dispatched what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called a "modest number" of special forces troops to link up with the Northern Alliance. "The perspective on the Northern Alliance had changed," Amin said.

US officials who had resisted working with squabbling, brutal warlords began to receive bullish field reports from the US troops, whose leaders had begun to trust and, in some cases, admire the commanders. This new sense of respect filtered up through the ranks, and Rumsfeld began to speak about working in tandem with the alliance.

In a secret meeting in Uzbekistan on Oct. 30, General Tommy R. Franks, commander of the US Central Command and the head of the Afghanistan war effort, informed the Northern Alliance defense minister, General Mohammed Fahim, that the United States would coordinate its airstrikes with the alliance. From that day onward, the progress of the war increased dramatically.

A growing number of Green Berets and other special forces advised the Afghan commanders, assisted in their resupply, and helped identify targets for US strike planes - even joining in cavalry attacks. Using laser-guided pointers and global positioning systems, the special forces "lit up" the targets and the bombing became far more accurate. At the same time, carpet bombing by B-52s killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban troops.

The bravado that the Taliban warriors had expressed after surviving the first few days of strikes faded when the US bombers returned again and again, using laser- or satellite-guided weapons to strike targets and obliterating swathes of men and materiel with carpet bombing, cluster bombs, and huge "daisy cutters," the Pentagon's largest non-nuclear weapon.

New communications links that quickly transmit intelligence into the cockpit were of paramount importance, senior military officials said. Pilotless drones roamed the skies, giving remote operators command of the countryside and - in the case of those operated by the CIA - the ability to launch Hellfire missiles.

Nor could the Taliban, with its logistical source of supplies - Pakistan - cut off, replace the lost arms and tanks and supplies that the US bombers destroyed. Every day the Taliban grew weaker; the Northern Alliance grew stronger with Russian arms, ammunition, and supplies.

The United States, which had spent $3 billion secretly helping mujahideen fighters defeat an invading Soviet Army during the 1980s, now turned that strategy on its head. The Northern Alliance forces were trained and equipped with Russian-made weapons and could make quickest use of Russian-made replacements. So the United States made a financial arrangement with Russia, never officially disclosed, that allowed Russia to send arms to Northern Alliance fighters. The US deal with Russia was confirmed separately by a US intelligence source and a Northern Alliance source.

Moscow had secretly approached Washington a year earlier and proposed joint military action against the terrorist haven of Afghanistan, but was rebuffed by the Clinton administration, according to a Russian diplomat. "We wanted to go after them, but you guys wouldn't have any part of it," the Russian diplomat said. Now Russia's help was vital.

The United States was desperately short of on-the-ground intelligence in Afghanistan. So, in addition to Pakistan, the United States turned to an unlikely partner, Iran. For many years, Iran had been an archenemy of the United States, having taken American embassy workers hostage two decades ago and encouraged anti-American sentiment. But the relationship had improved slightly in recent years, and Iran had long supported the Northern Alliance.

Iranian intelligence, supplied to the United States through third parties such as the Northern Alliance, included information about how many Pakistanis were crossing the border to join the Taliban and the frequency of airplane flights filled with Arab fighters landing in Kabul.

"This was clearly a case where Iranians had an interest in Afghanistan," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former counterterrorism chief. "They hated the Taliban. We got information from the Iranians. They did it very quietly."

After two weeks of the Pentagon's concentrated bombing of Taliban front lines, the Northern Alliance launched a weeklong series of routs, expanding the territory it controlled from 15 percent to more than 50 percent of the nation. First to fall was the strategic crossroads of Mazar-e-Sharif, which had changed hands several times in the late 1990s in bloody fighting. It was captured on Nov. 9, and within 10 days Kunduz and the capital, Kabul, also fell, as Taliban forces surrendered or fled.

As US gained momentum, alliances began to shift

The Afghan tradition of switching sides as the battle tide changed played an important role. In the town of Imam Shahib during the fight for Kunduz province, the local Northern Alliance commander - Abdul Kayum - served tea to a Taliban commander, Nisan.

For 18 months, Nisan's troops had mercilessly shelled Abdul Kayum's men and their families as they clung to a barren island on the Pyandzh River, unwilling to surrender to the Taliban but with nowhere to go.

Now that the tables had turned, Kayum said, he had forgiven his former foe - who previously had been a longtime friend with whom he had fought the Soviets. Besides, Burhanuddin Rabbani, an alliance leader, had pardoned all the Afghan Taliban. So there was no need for vengeance.

"We're all brothers now," Nisan said, and another unit drifted away from Taliban control.

Success was contagious. CIA operatives and other agents were directing payoffs to prominent tribal commanders who agreed to work with the Americans. The payments varied; each warlord got "less than the price of a Mercedes," according to a senior US official.

The White House knew the payments were working when one such commander helped the United States rescue eight aid workers - including two American women - who had been held captive by the Taliban.

Like latter-day Lawrences of Arabia, US special forces units joined rebellious Pashtun tribes in southern Afghanistan led by Hamid Karzai; they marched on Kandahar and seized that seat of Taliban power.

The shifting loyalties and feuding warlords exacted a price, however, and may have let many Al Qaeda leaders slip away from the US forces. Afghan troops are still conducting a cave-by-cave search in the cold mountains of Tora Bora and Milawa, where US officials had to constantly argue with the locals to get their way. After a group of competing warlords grabbed power in mid-November in three eastern provinces, nothing happened on the ground for two weeks in the hunt for bin Laden. It was not until late November that a US official met with the warlords and urged them to start a military offensive in Tora Bora. Jalalabad Mayor Engineer Ghafar said the Americans "paid lots of money" to two military commanders, Hazarat Ali and Haji Mohammed Zaman, to take on bin Laden's fighters.

The offensive was rushed and poorly planned. Zaman and Ali, who are rivals, neglected to set up a supply line to the front, leaving their own personal armies without blankets or food. Every night for a week, the Afghan soldiers retreated from their positions. Zaman negotiated a cease-fire and a surrender deal with Al Qaeda fighters, who would turn in their weapons and be handed over to the United Nations.

Ali fumed, but US officials were even angrier. The following morning, in Zaman's expansive mud-walled compound in Agam, 5 miles north of the front lines, a 50-ish US official, dressed in civilian clothes, told Zaman, Ali, Ghafar, and other Afghan leaders that the deal was dead. The United States would accept no surrender unless Al Qaeda turned over bin Laden and 22 others on the FBI's most wanted list.

Chastised, Zaman faded, at least temporarily, from the limelight. Ali took the lead role, with Americans guiding the way. US advisers on several occasions sat in the backseat of Ali's four-wheel-drive vehicle as he drove to the front lines.

While Ali and other Afghan commanders strove to minimize the Americans' role for domestic political reasons, there was more than a little truth to it. One of the most enduring questions of the Afghan campaign may be whether the United States relied too much on local ground troops. Tora Bora fell, for instance, but several hundred Al Qaeda fighters are believed to have escaped over the White Mountains into Pakistan.

Opportunity to start over brings call for new role

As for the Taliban, its biggest enemy was itself. With its extremist and eccentric laws - barring women from most work, banning television and music and even kites and balloons - Afghans grew to hate the movement. In Kabul, Afghan after Afghan insisted he opposed the Islamic fundamentalists from the start.

"The Taliban destroyed our country," said Moman, 40, a farmer from Central Afghanistan who lost his land and livelihood to civil war. "They destroyed our houses. They burned the trees. Not only me but all the country hates the Taliban."

Now, Haron Amin, the Northern Alliance leader who once could barely get a hearing from US officials, works out of a spiffy new rowhouse office in downtown Washington and is booked from dawn until late at night.

His mantra to US officials is the same wherever he goes: The bombs have done their part; now billions of dollars in aid - as much as $50 billion in international aid over 10 years, with the United States contributing perhaps $1 billion a year, a senior US official predicted - must be sent for rebuilding. The small country of Afghanistan, Amin insists, holds the key to peace between the West and the Muslim world.

It is not a new argument, Amin said, but this time he hopes Washington and the world are listening.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 2001