Andy Worthington is a journalist and author. He writes regularly for numerous publications including the Guardian, Truthout, the Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Antiwar.com, AlterNet, ZNet, Cageprisoners, the Future of Freedom Foundation and the Daily Star, Lebanon, and has also written for the New York Times and Amnesty International. He is also the author of two books on modern British social history, and is the co-director, with Polly Nash, of the new documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo."

The Guantánamo Files

The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison

Pluto Press

Contents

"Operation Enduring Freedom"

Osama Bin Laden: Wanted, Dead or Alive

Guantánamo was not even on the radar, when, on September 17, 2001, President Bush announced that Osama bin Laden was the "prime suspect" for the 9/11 operation. Instead, the rhetoric was pure vengeance. "I want justice," the President said. "And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.'" On September 20, he delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban, telling them to hand over the leaders of al-Qaeda, to close all "terrorist training camps," and to "hand over every terrorist and every person in their support structure, to appropriate authorities." "The Taliban must act and act immediately," he added. "They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate." Anticipating that the Taliban would not comply with these demands, Bush was briefed on the plans for "Operation Enduring Freedom" on the following day by General Tommy Franks, the US military commander, who told him that US Central Command "would destroy the al-Qaeda network inside Afghanistan along with the illegitimate Taliban regime which was harbouring and protecting the terrorists."

From the beginning, therefore, the administration equated bin Laden with the Taliban, even though this was not an entirely valid assumption. When bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996 (after four years in Sudan, where he had moved after the Saudis exiled him on his return from Afghanistan in 1992), he was regarded with suspicion by the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, who retained a parochial outlook and was, reportedly, furious when bin Laden announced a global jihad against the United States in 1998. Ironically, when al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania later that year, Omar was finally drawn into bin Laden's orbit: he had been in the process of betraying bin Laden to the Saudis, but reneged on the deal after President Clinton ordered air strikes on al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Even so, it remained apparent to those who were studying Afghanistan closely that, at the time of "Operation Enduring Freedom," the overlap between the Taliban and al-Qaeda was extremely small. According to a senior US intelligence official, "In 1996 it was non-existent, and by 2001, no more than 50 people."

As the plan for the invasion of Afghanistan developed, the administration, anxious to avoid repeating the fate that befell the Soviet Union — losing 25,000 lives in a ten-year war that was ultimately unsuccessful — decided that the best way to "destroy" al-Qaeda and the Taliban was through a proxy war, in which a few hundred Special Forces operatives, backed up by substantial, targeted bombing raids, would work with the leaders of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (aka the Northern Alliance) to ensure the victory that the loose confederation of anti-Taliban warlords in the north of the country had been striving for over the previous seven years. What this meant in practice was supporting Afghanistan's ethnic minorities — the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras — against the Pashtun majority in the south and east, crushing the Taliban while attempting to ensure that moderate Pashtun leaders could be found to prevent the northern victors from exacting a terrible revenge on the Pashtun population and starting a whole new cycle of atrocious violence.

In order to intervene in Afghanistan's long-standing civil war, it was necessary for the US administration to indulge in a collective bout of amnesia: to forget that, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the US had, through a strategic intermediary — Pakistan's powerful intelligence service, the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) — poured billions of dollars into the creation of the mujahideen, a fighting force of tens of thousands of anti-Soviet Muslim warriors, primarily drawn from Saudi Arabia and the Yemen. Some of these — including Osama bin Laden — became so enamored with the notion of a holy war that they went on to form al-Qaeda ("the base"), a warrior corps devoted to pursuing "holy war" in other Muslim countries.

It was also necessary to maintain a good relationship with America's oil-producing friends in Saudi Arabia (and to ignore its funding of the Taliban), and to embrace Uzbekistan's dictator, President Karimov, who had a reputation for boiling dissidents alive, to secure a military base that could be used until the Taliban had been driven from northern Afghanistan. Most important of all, however, was the need to form a strong alliance with Pakistan — until recently something of a pariah state, because of its nuclear program — and to overlook its role in funding and supporting the Taliban. In many ways, Pakistan was the most dubious of all America's new allies. In order to hold onto his position, President Musharraf, the military dictator who had seized power in 1999, was required to juggle a number of potentially lethal factions within Pakistani politics; in particular, the Pashtun sympathizers in the government, the ISI and the military, who, either by stealth or as a long-standing component of Pakistan's foreign policy, were pro-Taliban, and also the country's many militant Islamists, who had been providing the Taliban with a steady stream of foot soldiers through their madrassas (religious schools). Although it was easy for the US administration to threaten to bomb Musharraf "back to the Stone Age" if he did not support them, it was by no means clear that this support would be as dependable as they would have liked.

Almost as alarming as these dangerous exercises in realpolitik was the amnesia that was required in order to strike up relationships with the warlords who would fight America's proxy war. The military leader of the Northern Alliance, a charismatic Tajik called Ahmed Shah Massoud, had first encountered the Americans in 1984, when he was fighting the Soviet Union, although he was deprived of American financial assistance at the time because he was implacably opposed to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord favored by the ISI. Gary Schroen, a senior Special Forces operative who directed operations in Afghanistan during the first three months of "Operation Enduring Freedom," resumed contact with Massoud in 1996, and for the next five years he and others who were aware of the threats posed by the Taliban and bin Laden tried and failed to secure financial and military support for Massoud's struggle. During a CIA visit to his base in the Panjshir valley, north of Kabul, in October 1999, when his help was sought in tracking down bin Laden, Massoud told the delegation that the US policy was "doomed to fail," because they failed to see the bigger picture. "What about the Taliban?" he asked. "What about the Taliban's supporters in Pakistani intelligence? What about its financiers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?" In November 2000, after al-Qaeda's bombing of the USS Cole, CIA officers drew up a wish list for Massoud — including weapons, trucks, helicopters and substantial amounts of money to bribe commanders and to compete with the Taliban's Arab-funded treasury — but President Clinton refused, and President Bush only approved the plan a week before 9/11, at which point the Taliban controlled 90 percent of the country and even Massoud was feeling the pressure.

Five days later — and just two days before 9/11 — Massoud was assassinated by two Tunisians, working on behalf of al-Qaeda and posing as journalists, in a mission that was clearly intended to destabilize the Northern Alliance in preparation for a final push on the remaining 10 percent of the country that was under their control. While his death was a significant loss to the anti-Taliban Alliance, however, his legacy was secure. Through his meetings with the CIA over the previous five years, he had essentially set the conditions for "Operation Enduring Freedom," and although the Americans were unfamiliar with his successor, General Mohammed Fahim, their relationship with Massoud provided an invaluable base on which to build a new relationship. Even more importantly, in the months before his death Massoud had strengthened the Alliance considerably, cementing relationships that would become crucial to the Americans: with General Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord and former ruler of the strategically important northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, who had been encouraged by Massoud to return from self-imposed exile in Turkey in April 2001; with the Tajik Ismael Khan, the former governor of Herat, the relatively wealthy western province which straddled important trade routes to Iran and Turkmenistan; and with Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from the prominent Popolzai tribe, which had 500,000 clan members in Uruzgan and Kandahar provinces, who had served as deputy foreign minister in the post-Soviet government, but had been forced into exile in Pakistan by the Taliban.

Where the amnesia kicked in for the Americans was in overlooking the Alliance's history over the previous nine years. When the Soviet-backed regime collapsed in 1992, three years after the Soviet withdrawal, General Dostum, who had been fighting with the Russians throughout the occupation, surrendered to Massoud's forces, allowing the Tajiks to take the capital. Although Massoud's ally Burhanuddin Rabbani subsequently became President, it was a fragile peace, and the country soon descended into civil war as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, allied with the Hazaras, attempted to wrest power from Rabbani and Massoud. When Dostum changed sides again in 1994, allying himself with Hekmatyar, Kabul was all but destroyed as the various sides attempted to annihilate each other. Between 1992 and 1994, over 50,000 people lost their lives in the capital alone, and throughout the country human rights abuses were so widespread that in November 1994, when Kandahar was taken by a small group of Pashtun fighters — the Taliban, strict Islamists influenced by Saudi Arabia's ultra-orthodox Wahhabi doctrine — they were initially regarded as saviors. Over time, however, as they were infiltrated by the ISI and their facade of purity slipped to reveal a harrowing brutality, they became at least as reviled as their predecessors, but as they steadily took over the country in the years that followed, it was their world — a terrifying simulacrum of a medieval Islamic state, with added Kalashnikovs — that confronted the Americans as they prepared to embark on "Operation Enduring Freedom." It was perhaps too easy to forget the carnage that had come before and the part that some of their new allies had played in it.

"Operation Enduring Freedom"

On the night of October 7, 2001, the American mission to "destroy" al-Qaeda and the Taliban commenced in a rain of bombs — on Taliban military facilities, and on 23 military training camps in the south and east of the country, which, in a sign of the hyperbole to come, were all alleged to belong to al-Qaeda. The bombers then targeted locations frequented by bin Laden and Mullah Omar, although Omar himself had already been allowed to escape. On the first night of hostilities, he was identified, fleeing Kabul in a convoy of Taliban vehicles, by a remote-controlled Predator surveillance plane, but by the time the CIA went through the process of requesting permission to fire the Predator's Hellfire missiles — a request which had to be made through Central Command's headquarters in Florida — he had slipped away, never to be seen again.

For the next month, as US Special Forces hooked up with the commanders of their proxy army, the Taliban refused to buckle, and reports of widespread civilian casualties — some that were manufactured by the Taliban for propaganda purposes, but others that were all too real — threatened to derail the war. As the US began, for the first time, to drop cluster bombs on any convenient gathering of Taliban soldiers, the UN's Human Rights Commissioner, Mary Robinson, called for a pause in the bombing to allow aid agencies access to the millions of Afghans who were threatened with starvation, and who had not managed to take advantage of the millions of dollars' worth of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) that the Americans had also dropped on the hapless population. As the progress of the war swayed in the balance, Musharraf weighed in, insisting that the US held back from the total destruction of the Taliban front lines. "If a power vacuum was filled by the Northern Alliance," he declared, "we would be thrust back to the anarchy and atrocities we saw in the past." Overlooking the Taliban's atrocities of the previous seven years, he neglected to mention how many Pakistani officers were advising the Taliban, how many Pakistani foot soldiers were already serving alongside the Taliban, and how many others were streaming over the border to join the fight.

It was not until a month into the war, when Musharraf's delaying tactics were overruled and US forces began dropping 15,000 pound "daisy-cutter" bombs on the Taliban lines, that the way was paved for what would be the war's pivotal moment, the capture of Mazare-Sharif on November 9. The size of a car, "daisy-cutters" incinerate everything within a radius of about 900 meters, and their effect on the Taliban was devastating, incinerating hundreds of soldiers and traumatizing the survivors. In a three-pronged attack, with Special Forces riding in with Dostum's men on horseback from the south and the Tajiks and Hazaras advancing separately from the west, Mazar fell rapidly. Although thousands of Taliban soldiers fled — mainly to the city of Kunduz, 150 km to the east — many more were massacred, and when a thousand stragglers were found in a madrassa, Special Forces called in bombers who scored four direct hits on the building, and Dostum's soldiers stormed the ruins to finish off the survivors. "When the smoke cleared," Gary Berntsen wrote in his account of the war, "Dostum's men counted 450 dead."

After the fall of Mazar, which allowed the Americans to reopen the "Friendship Bridge" to Uzbekistan and bring supplies in by road, the Taliban's collapse throughout northern Afghanistan was spectacular. Over the next few days, Ismael Khan recaptured Herat, and the Hazara recaptured Bamiyan in their central heartlands. Repeatedly hit by air strikes, the Taliban in the north-eastern city of Taloqan, which had been the Northern Alliance base until they captured it 14 months earlier, followed a long-standing Afghan tradition and changed sides, and dozens of other towns also capitulated or were captured. So swift was the fall of the Taliban that on November 13, after a number of significant defections and another will-sapping bombing campaign, in which, according to Berntsen, 2,000 soldiers were killed in 25 air strikes, the Taliban lines broke on the Shomali Plains, north of Kabul. Despite the Americans' insistence that the Alliance should hold back five miles from the capital until an anti-Taliban Pashtun leader was confirmed, to establish some kind of power balance, the Alliance commander, Bismullah Khan, was unwilling or unable to hold back his men, and they entered Kabul in triumph. Although there were a number of summary executions, there was no Mazar-style slaughter, probably because the Taliban, for the most part, had already left, after looting everything in sight, including $6 million from the national bank.

The last city to fall in the north — and the first where prisoners, in large numbers, would have to be dealt with — was Kunduz, where those who had fled the fall of the other cities joined an existing army of Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers. The exact numbers were unclear, although the Northern Alliance estimated that there were as many as 20,000 men holed up in the city, including 10,000 recent arrivals from Pakistan, and 2,000 foreign al-Qaeda fighters. Whether or not this was a reasonable estimate, the numbers were significantly reduced when, with the approval of the US administration, Musharraf was allowed to avoid political embarrassment by arranging for several planes to airlift Pakistani soldiers and intelligence operatives out of the city. According to a senior intelligence official, the operation "slipped out of control" and an unknown number of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters also joined the exodus, which probably numbered several thousand people.