The Afghan War

Operation Enduring Freedom 1001–2014

Anthony Tucker-Jones

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473842281
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Drugs, war and terrorism were the unholy trinity that brought the US-led air campaign crashing down on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in October 2001 in Operation Enduring Freedom, and this photographic history is a graphic introduction to it. The immediate aim was to eject the Taliban from power, and to capture or kill the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his supporters whom the Taliban were sheltering. The decade-long war that followed, first against the Taliban regime, then against Taliban insurgents, is one of the most controversial conflicts of recent times. It has also seen the deployment of thousands of coalition troops and a huge range of modern military equipment, and these are the main focus of Anthony Tucker-Jones's account. He covers the entire course of the conflict, from the initial air war, the battle for the White Mountains and Tora Bora, the defeat of the Taliban, the escape of bin Laden and the grim protracted security campaign that followed an asymmetrical war of guerrilla tactics and improvised explosive devices that is going on today.

Chapter One

War is Declared

Operation Enduring Freedom was born after British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with President George W. Bush at the white House on 20 September 2001. Following the first news of the 9/11 attacks Blair was convinced it was the work of al-Qaeda and his immediate response was to offer his support to the US. Britain’s intelligence chiefs, notably the heads of the Security Service, Secret intelligence Service and the Government Communications Headquarters, immediately flew to Washington for urgent talks with their counterparts.

Blair’s intelligence advice was that bin Laden was the only one capable of such an attack, and he did not believe any rogue states were involved. In addition, Blair was of the view that simply removing bin Laden from the picture would not be enough – he was right as militant islam was already much too well established around the world. To some the spread of Saudi wahhabism, which preaches a return to the pure and orthodox practice of the ‘fundamentals’ of islam, was seen as a threat to more moderate Muslim beliefs. Blair wanted a long-term strategy for dealing with islamic fundamentalism, but what he really meant was islamic militancy. Bush told Blair that the focus would be Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan’s Taliban government. Washington demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden immediately – they refused.

The very day after 9/11 Bush declared the attacks on the American homeland as acts of war and requested Congress provide the resources to fight the terrorists wherever they might be in the shape of $20 billion. Congress’s response was to approve double this sum. The following day US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, confirmed that Osama bin Laden, believed to be hiding in Afghanistan, was a key suspect.

Behind the scenes the American government had been expecting such a spectacular attack for almost ten years. In addition, Blair was very familiar with islamic militant groups because Britain had tolerated fundraising offices in London for so long and had a growing awareness of al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden’s complicity in the planning of 9/11 was confirmed by a videotape made in January 2000 (obtained by the Sunday Times). This showed 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah at bin Laden’s HQ at Tarnak Farms, near Kandahar airport, in Afghanistan. In total the 9/11 attacks are estimated to have killed 2,973 people, some 2,602 at the World Trade Center, 125 at the Pentagon and 40 in Pennsylvania; 15 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, 2 from the United Arab Emirates, 1 from Egypt and 1 from Lebanon.

Bin Laden later said, We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all . . .’. US forces discovered a videotape recorded in November 2001 containing this statement by bin Laden, which was made during a meeting with a Saudi supporter in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. With these words he became America’s public enemy number one. What most Americans did not realise was that Washington had spent the last four years trying to kill him.

On that fateful day the first aircraft struck the World Trade Center north tower at 8.47am local time, the second smashed into the south tower 16 minutes later. By 10.30am before the world’s media both towers had collapsed into a mass of shattered glass, concrete and steel. Manhattan disappeared into a pall of choking smoke and dust centred on what become dubbed ‘Ground Zero’, a term normally associated with the impact of a nuclear warhead. New Yorkers covered in choking dust staggered about their city in a daze of incomprehension and terror.

Less than an hour after the first New York attack, just outside Washington the third hijacked aircraft flew into the south-west side of the Pentagon at 9.38am. The attack was so precise many initially though the building had been hit by a missile. About 25 minutes later the fourth aircraft came down in Pennsylvania after the intervention of the passengers who had sought unsuccessfully to regain control of the aircraft.

The United Nations had acted against Afghanistan, or more precisely the Taliban, for harbouring bin Laden and those implicated in the attacks on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the US embassies in Africa, the USS Cole off Yemen and an earlier attempt to blow up the World Trade Center during the 1990s. A UN Security Council resolution came into effect in November 1999, banning the Afghan carrier Ariana Airlines from operating overseas and freezing Taliban overseas assets.

Throughout the late 1990s the Central intelligence Agency (CIA) had been instructed to capture bin Laden using lethal force if necessary. This lead to confusion over President Clinton’s true intentions. He argued he wanted bin Laden dead, the CIA countered they were only instructed to capture him. UN Security Council resolution 1333 of 19 January 2001 followed a month’s grace to allow the Taliban to comply with demands to hand over bin Laden and close down the terrorist training camps. The Taliban’s acquiescence of the presence of al-Qaeda and its complicity in the country’s drug trade had ensured Afghanistan remained a pariah state.

Since the end of 2000 the UN had been demanding that Afghanistan stop giving sanctuary to bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organisation. However, 9/11 was a harsh reminder of the failure of the world to act effectively in concert against the growing threat posed by extensive international islamic terrorist networks. An attack of this magnitude and visibility against air travel simply could not be ignored. After 9/11 Washington would have happily seen him dead and by this stage armed aerial drones were available to help pinpoint and kill terrorist leaders.

initially, al-Qaeda had planned hijacking a total of ten planes with the intention of crashing them into targets on both coasts of the US. The targets would have included nuclear power plants and tall buildings in California and Washington State. This could have been devastating, but as it was just four planes had the desired effect. The US asked itself what had it done to inspire such an act of hatred by militant members of islam? The international community was also put on notice that such outrages would become more commonplace in the world’s capitals over the next decade.

Following 9/11 the international community immediately rallied to the US. The very next day UN Security Council resolution 1368 and General Assembly resolution 56/1 called for immediate international cooperation to bring the perpetrators to justice. They also called for much broader cooperation against global terrorism and this was followed on 28 September 2001 by UN Security Council resolution 1373. Enacted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, it required every member state to undertake seventeen measures against all those who support, directly or indirectly, acts of terrorism.

For the very first time the NATO invoked its mutual defence clause on 2 October 2001, whereby an attack on a member state is considered an attack on all. Five days later the American and British-led Coalition began systematic air attacks on the Taliban. At the same time, American forces tried to kill Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khalid Shaik Mohammed (architect of 9/11) and Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. The al-Qaeda and Taliban hit list was much longer than this, but they were the ones that really mattered and the intelligence community naively hoped that by decapitating al-Qaeda the threat would somehow vanish.

This was too little too late, and 9/11 was in fact the culmination of a decade of steadily spreading militant islam not the start. Memories were short, for few beyond the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies recalled Ramzi Yousef’s dramatic, if illfated, truck bomb attack on the world Trade Center on 26 February 1993, which heralded the transnational jihad against the US. The bomb tore through five sublevels near the north tower killing six and injuring over a thousand. It took over a year and a half to restore the damaged complex. His attack-predated bin Laden’s declaration of war on the American homeland by three-and-a-half years. In that time militant Islam’s rise had gone unchecked.

The US Special Operations Command was granted a budget increase of almost 50 per cent with $250 million being spent on Predator and another $610 million on the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles or drones in order to step up the so-called war on terror. After 9/11 the CIA’s counter-terrorist efforts came under the scrutiny of a joint inquiry conducted by the US Senate Select and House Permanent Select Committees on intelligence. To add to the indignity the CIA’s Office of inspector General was then required to endorse the inquiry’s scathing findings.

Damningly, the joint inquiry concluded that before 9/11 neither the US government nor the US intelligence community had a comprehensive strategy for dealing with al-Qaeda. The view was that the Director General Central intelligence ‘was either unwilling or unable to marshal the full range of IC resources necessary to combat the growing threat to the United States’. In light of the evidence the Office of inspector General had little choice but to agree with these findings.

In particular, coordination failures between the CIA and the National Security Agency were identified. The latter was reluctant to share its signals intelligence with the CIA, which hampered the Counterterrorism Center’s efforts against al-Qaeda. It likewise stymied coordination between the CIA and US military.

The US military did not escape criticism either. The Pentagon was censured for being reluctant to conduct operations in Afghanistan or support or take part in CIA operations against al-Qaeda prior to 9/11. It was noted that one of the reasons cited for this was the CIA’s failure to provide adequate intelligence to support such operations. As a result, the US Defense Department felt it could not put troops on the ground in Afghanistan or conduct cruise-missile attacks on bin Laden-related sites, over and beyond the August 1998 strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan. Disagreements over replacing lost pre...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Unholy Trinity
• Chapter One: War is Declared
• Chapter Two: OEF – The Air War
• Chapter Three: OEF – Liberation of Kabul
• Chapter Four: OEF – The Battle for Tora Bora
• Chapter Five: NATO Takes Charge
• Chapter Six: ‘Terry’ Taliban
• Chapter Seven: The IED War
• Chapter Eight: Tour of Duty
• Chapter Nine: UOR – The Jackal
• Chapter Ten: Shouldering the Burden
• Epilogue
• Suggested Further Reading