Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World. Christina Lamb
a.m. The North at 10.28 a.m.
Time they took to fall: twelve seconds.
Total number killed (official figure as of 9 May 2002): 2,819
Number of firefighters and paramedics killed: 343
Number of NYPD officers killed: 23
Number of Port Authority police officers killed: 37
Number of WTC companies that lost people: 60
Number of employees who died in Tower 1: 1,402
Number of employees who died in Tower 2: 614
Number of employees lost at Cantor Fitzgerald: 658
Number of nations whose citizens were killed in the attacks: 115
Number of Jews killed: estimated between 400 and 500
Ratio of men to women who died: 3:1
Bodies found ‘intact’: 289
5
Losing bin Laden – the Not So Great Escape
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