My Share of the Task(46)
As such silly issues arose, Dan McNeill used rural North Carolina wisdom to remind us to maintain perspective. “Sometimes the dogs are going to run us up into a tree,” he’d counsel. “But let’s not get treed by Chihuahuas.” Over time, Bragg settled into a more sustainable pattern.
Six days later, in the House of Representatives, President Bush announced the start of what he called the global war on terror. To the Taliban he issued a set of demands, including delivering Al Qaeda’s leaders and dismantling all terrorist camps in the country. To other nations on the periphery of this new war, he delivered an ultimatum whose simplicity earned applause that evening but controversy later: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
Far away, in Kandahar, the reaction to these demands was less than urgent. In the days that followed, Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, met with his ambassador to Pakistan. For the past seven years, Omar, an elusive, one-eyed former mujahideen commander, had led the Taliban in Afghanistan’s grinding civil war, and controlled all but a small enclave in the north. His group’s relationship with Al Qaeda was more complicated than we understood, but after Omar wrapped himself in the Cloak of the Prophet in front of a large crowd in 1996, bin Laden had sworn allegiance to him. Now Omar’s ambassador, just back from Pakistan, explained nervously what he knew of the impending American assault—including air strikes and coordination with opposition groups to unseat the Taliban. To the ambassador’s dismay, Omar was unmoved. He thought America was full of bluster and “there was less than a 10 per cent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats.”
He was wrong. On October 7, military operations against the Taliban began with a torrent of strikes against training camps and Taliban leadership. The ground invasion started twelve days later with the insertion of Green Berets into northern Afghanistan. The same night, Rangers executed a dramatic parachute drop onto an airstrip in southern Afghanistan, while Army commandos raided Mullah Omar’s compound outside Kandahar.
Back at Bragg, in the XVIII Airborne Corps, noted for its ability to deploy rapidly, we mostly waited for something to do.
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Most of us still knew relatively little about bin Laden or the threat he represented. At first we tended to simplify Al Qaeda, assuming it was a tightly bound terrorist band like many we’d faced in the previous three decades. But over time we began to understand that the enemy was really three things in one: an organization, an idea, and most recently a brand. September 11, 2001, represented the confluence of all three—and the culmination of the last.
After sporadic attacks that Al Qaeda claimed to support throughout the early 1990s and bin Laden’s forced departure from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, the East Africa embassy bombings in August 1998 made Al Qaeda’s name. While Al Qaeda had until then been an organization—the base—and an idea, its attacks in Africa in 1998 and two years later against the USS Cole began to make it recognizable as the Islamic group landing blows against the United States.
The emergence of this brand coincided with, and was inseparable from, a significant change in the group’s organization and outlook. Three years before 9/11 and a few months before the embassy attacks, bin Laden had issued a joint statement with Ayman al-Zawahiri and four other terrorist leaders. Since he was fourteen, Zawahiri had been obsessively focused on the Egyptian regime, which later tortured him in prison until he informed on his comrades. But now he accepted a turn in strategy. The jihadists could not defeat the apostate Arab regimes—the “near enemy” that stood in the way of a restored caliphate—directly. Instead, they had to attack Israel and the United States, the “far enemy,” whose indispensible backing of the Arab regimes made them impossible to take down head on. The “crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims,” bin Laden wrote. In the face of this aggression, bin Laden issued a fatwa, or “finding,” endorsed by his cosigners. It was the duty, he declared, of all Muslims to kill Americans “wherever they find them.” Al Qaeda would wage a global struggle in order to achieve regional results.