The Longest War (2 page)

The book also aspires to provide an analytical net assessment of the “war on terror”: to see what conclusions might now be drawn about what al-Qaeda and its allied groups accomplished in the first decade of the twenty-first century and where the United States and her partners have succeeded and failed in their wars with the militants.

Al-Qaeda and America face each other in a conflict in which no short-term resolution appears possible. Al-Qaeda’s
jihad
has failed to achieve its central aims. Bin Laden’s primary goal has always been regime change in the Middle East, sweeping away the governments from Cairo to Riyadh with Taliban-style rule. He wants Western troops and influence out of the region and believes that attacking the “far enemy,” the United States, will cause the U.S.-backed Arab regimes—the “near enemy”—to crumble. For all his leadership skills and charisma, however, bin Laden has accomplished the exact opposite of what he intended. A decade after the September 11 attacks, his last remaining safe havens in the Hindu Kush are under attack, and U.S. soldiers patrol Afghanistan and Iraq.

Above all, this is a mark of the weakness of his leadership. Osama bin Laden has proved an inspiring figure to many in the global jihadist movement; but he has overreached, failed to appeal to any wider constituency, and
failed to build a secure and effective operational base after the loss of Afghanistan. Though it survives intact and dangerous, al-Qaeda is hemmed in, weakened and limited in its operations. Its ability to force a decisive change in America’s Middle East policy is close to zero, even though it remains capable of dealing lethal blows around the world; like a snake backed into a corner, a weakened al-Qaeda is still dangerous.

Events since the launch of the “war on terror” have become deeply politicized: the debate about whether bin Laden could have been killed at the battle of Tora Bora in the winter of 2001; the putative linkages between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which were an important rationale for the war in Iraq; whether the American effort in Afghanistan was shortchanged because of the Iraqi conflict; the efficacy of coercive interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees and of military commissions to try militants held at Guantánamo; the scale of the threat to the West posed by al-Qaeda and its affiliates; the extent to which President Bush’s “surge” of troops into Iraq in 2007 or other factors brought a measure of stability there; and whether President Obama is committing his presidency to a war in South Asia that will replicate the failures of Vietnam. This history aims to provide an assessment of these and other issues that have not received enough objective analysis.

This is also a book about the power of ideas. We are a highly ideological species with a deep need for ideas that help us to narrate and make sense of an often senseless world. For bin Laden and his followers, the world is explained by the idea that Islam is under assault by the West, in particular the United States, and that only by attacking America will this state of affairs ever be reversed. For its part, the Bush administration believed deeply that al-Qaeda and its supposed ally Saddam Hussein posed an existential threat to America and conflated that big idea with smaller fixations, such as its opposition to “nation building,” all of which contributed to the problems the United States has since faced in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Muslim world overall.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, titled “Hubris,” traces al-Qaeda’s miscalculations, and in particular its profound misunderstanding of the likely American response to 9/11, while also interweaving the strategic missteps of the United States from its initial anemic efforts in Afghanistan to its counterproductive invasion of Iraq.
Part II
, “Nemesis?” traces how the American government and military learned from their mistakes in Iraq and, later, Afghanistan and have since regained the initiative against al-Qaeda and
its allies. At the same time, bin Laden and his followers have severely damaged themselves with their actions in the Muslim world, from Indonesia to Iraq. Yet the West has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory a number of times already in this long war, and the jihadist militants led by bin Laden have proven surprisingly resilient despite the wide range of forces arrayed against them.

As a general rule
, the easiest way to achieve complete strategic surprise is to commit an act that makes no sense or is even self-destructive.

—maxim once displayed on the desk of Robert Gates,
U.S. secretary of defense in the administrations
of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama

No one loves
armed missionaries.

—Maximilien Robespierre

A
t 2:30
A.M
. on August 29, 2001, the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta called Ramzi Binalshibh, his al-Qaeda handler, telling him he had
a riddle
that he was trying to solve: “Two sticks, a dash and a cake with a stick down—what is it?” Binalshibh thought for a while and suddenly realized that the two sticks were the number 11, and a cake with a stick down was a 9, and that Atta was telling him the attacks would happen in two weeks, on 11/9. That date is known as 9/11 in the United States.

Binalshibh, a slight, intensely religious Yemeni who had volunteered to be one of the hijackers, was
turned down
for an American visa. As a consolation prize for not becoming a “martyr,” Binalshibh took control of the coordination of al-Qaeda’s plans for the attacks on America from his apartment in Hamburg, Germany. Atta communicated by email from the United States with Binalshibh, apprising him of the progress of the plot. In his email messages, Atta posed as a university student writing to his girlfriend “
Jenny
.” Atta used an innocuous code to alert Binalshibh that the plot was nearing completion: “The first semester commences in three weeks. … Nineteen certificates for private education and four exams.” The nineteen “certificates” referred to the nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers and the four “exams” to the four targets of the soon-to-be-hijacked planes.

On September 5, Binalshibh left Germany for Pakistan, where he
dispatched a messenger
to Afghanistan to warn Osama bin Laden about the exact timing and scope of the attacks. Expecting some kind of American reprisal for the coming assaults on Washington and New York, likely in the form of cruise missile attacks like those President Clinton had ordered following al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, all of the organization’s camps and residential compounds were put on high alert in the days before 9/11. A Yemeni living at al-Qaeda’s al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan recalled that the
trainers at the facility said
, “If anyone wanted to leave, we were free to leave. There might be problems and there might be bombings.”
In Kandahar
, the southern Afghan city that served as the de facto capital of the Taliban, bin Laden urged his followers to evacuate to safer locations in early September.

Earlier that summer the scuttlebutt around the al-Qaeda campfires was that a large anti-American attack was imminent.
Feroz Ali Abbasi
, a British militant of Ugandan descent who was eager to conduct terrorist operations against Jews and Americans, remembered “this information being commonly known amongst everybody in the training camps and guesthouses.” Even “American Taliban” John Walker
Lindh heard an instructor
at his camp tell a group of trainees that bin Laden had dispatched dozens of suicide operatives for attacks against the United States and Israel.

In mid-June 2001 bin Laden and his top military commander, Mohammed Atef, also dropped broad hints that a major attack was in the works, during a meeting they held in Kandahar with Bakr Atyani, a correspondent for the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation. Atef said that “in the next few weeks we will carry out a big surprise and we will strike or attack American and Israeli interests.”
Atyani asked bin Laden
, “Would you please confirm that?” The al-Qaeda leader responded only with one of his slight, enigmatic smiles. The report about al-Qaeda’s plans for an anti-American attack was subsequently picked up by the
Washington Post
on June 23. For those who cared to look during the summer of 2001, al-Qaeda’s plans to wreak havoc on the United States were
an open secret
.

But the timing, targets, and scale of the operation was information that was
tightly held
, confined only to the top leaders of al-Qaeda and the pilots of the planes to be hijacked. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the Egyptian Jihad group, first learned of the details of the operation in June 2001, and that was only after his organization had
formally contracted its alliance
with
al-Qaeda. Bin Laden even kept his spokesman in Afghanistan, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, in the dark. A former high school teacher from Kuwait, Abu Ghaith
learned about the attacks
on Washington and New York from media reports.

Similarly, the “muscle” hijackers on the four planes, whose primary role was to restrain the passengers on the flights, knew that they were volunteering
for a suicide mission
in the United States, but only at the final stage of the operation were they told their targets. Before they journeyed to the United States, the hijackers videotaped
suicide “wills,”
which al-Qaeda’s video production arm would release over the coming years to milk the 9/11 tragedy repeatedly.

In the final run-up to the attacks, Binalshibh made a last call to Ziad Jarrah, a onetime Lebanese party boy who had moved to Hamburg in 1996 and had fallen in there with the zealots in al-Qaeda’s local cell.
Despite his increasing militancy
, Jarrah continued to date a pretty Turkish dentistry student he had met in Germany. Now Jarrah was in the States to train as a pilot-hijacker, but in the summer of 2001 Binalshibh was concerned that personality clashes between Jarrah and the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, a dour misogynist known as “the Ayatollah,” might endanger the entire operation. Binalshibh asked Jarrah, “
How do you feel
?” He replied, “My heart is at ease, and I feel that the operation will, Inshallah [God willing] be carried out.” Jarrah would soon crash United Airlines Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field, killing everyone on board.

Bin Laden was more optimistic than other al-Qaeda leaders that what they termed the “
Holy Tuesday
” operation would result in mass American casualties. Drawing on the experience he had working in his father’s construction company, one of the largest in the Middle East, bin Laden calculated that the impacts of the crashes of the two planes into the World Trade Center towers would take out
three or four floors
of each building and would then cause intense fires fed by the jet fuel inside each of the hijacked aircraft, which were both headed to the West Coast on full tanks. As bin Laden explained to a fawning Saudi supporter who visited him a few weeks after 9/11, those white-hot fires would then in turn collapse all the floors above their points of impact. “This is all that we had hoped for,” bin Laden told his Saudi guest.

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who made propaganda videos for bin Laden, hooked up a satellite receiver for the al-Qaeda leader so he could watch live coverage of the attacks, but Bahlul had trouble finding a satisfactory video signal in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan. And so as their workday on
Tuesday, September 11, finished, eight and a half time zones ahead of Manhattan, bin Laden and some fifty other members of al-Qaeda
gathered around radios
to listen as the attacks unfolded.

When the news of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center was broadcast on the BBC’s Arabic service, it was around 5:30
P.M
. local time. Bin Laden’s followers exploded with joy at the news, shouting and crying, “Allah Akbar! God is great!” Their leader, knowing there were more attacks to come, urged them, “
Be patient
!”

Ramzi Binalshibh was in Pakistan watching the attacks live on television with a group of others from al-Qaeda. Knowing how the plot was to unfold, Binalshibh could not contain his own excitement: “
Our brother Marwan
[one of the pilots] was violently ramming the plane into the Trade Center in an unbelievable manner! We were watching live and praying: ‘God! Aim! Aim! Aim!’”
Binalshibh remembers
the elation of his colleagues: “They all chanted ‘Allah Akbar!’ and bowed to Allah in gratitude and they all wept.”

But shrewder members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban felt otherwise. They realized that the 9/11 attacks might not be the stunning victory that al-Qaeda and many in the West took them to be at the time, and might in fact more resemble a kamikaze operation that would decimate their ranks. Vahid Mojdeh, a Taliban Foreign Ministry official, immediately
understood that the game was up
: “I was listening to BBC radio broadcasting news that several buildings in the States are burning and planes have crashed into those buildings, and it said that al-Qaeda is behind the attack. As soon as I heard the news, I realized that the Taliban were going to be terminated.”