America’s air war was not going well on other fronts either. As the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marines bombed the country, the Taliban simply dug in and appeared to be prepared to ride out the U.S.-led Coalition’s deadly air strikes. But the Coalition had plans to move on the ground as well. The U.S. Army’s Fifth Special Forces Group planned on using the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance as a proxy ground force. These Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara opposition fighters, who had been pushed into small mountain sanctuaries in the northeast and central Hindu Kush Mountains, were all too happy to join the Special Forces in fighting their Pashtun-Taliban blood enemies.
Because the overlord of the Northern Alliance opposition, Massoud the Lion of Panjsher, had been killed by al Qaeda suicide bombers on September 9, 2001, the larger-than-life Uzbek leader Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum took the lead in fighting the Taliban. In November 2001 the horse-riding Uzbeks joined with a U.S. Special Forces A-Team known as Tiger O2 and Air Force combat controllers in launching an offensive from their mountain enclave high in the Hindu Kush.15 Using a combination of medieval-style cavalry charges and precision-guided joint direct attack munition (JDAM) air strikes, the Uzbeks and Americans broke out of the mountains and seized the holy shrine town of Mazar i Sharif from the Taliban on November 9, 2001.16
Dostum’s bold seizure of Afghanistan’s holiest spot struck panic into the heart of the Taliban. Their whole house of cards began to collapse from defections. By November 12 Kabul had fallen to the Northern Alliance, and the northern half of the country was soon thereafter liberated from the Pashtun-Taliban southerners. In Kabul crowds came out to kill stranded Arabs, shave off their own beards, and tentatively begin to discard their burqas.
At this time Osama bin Laden and several hundred of his Arab followers made their way eastward to a base he had built in the Spin Ghar Mountains, which run along the Afghan-Pakistani border south of the Afghan border city of Jalalabad. There, at a place called Tora Bora (Black Dust), he planned to make a heroic stand. This was America’s chance to send in U.S. special forces, including the 101st Airborne, Army Rangers, Delta Forces, and the Marines’ Special Operations Command, to kill or capture the man who was the raison d’etre for the invasion of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, U.S. Central Command head Gen. Tommy Franks decided to rely on bombs and newly deputized Pashai and Pashtun tribesmen to flush out bin Laden. The Afghan tribesmen were taking money from both sides. They were subsequently bribed by bin Laden to allow him and his weary men to flee across the mountains to the nearby border of Pakistan.17
While America’s tribal mercenaries turned a blind eye, bin Laden and his followers fled over the mountains into the Tirah Valley in the Pakistani tribal agency of Kurram. They were said to have been guided by the torches of sympathetic pro-Taliban tribesmen.18 There they took advantage of their deep connections among the local FATA tribesmen, which went back to the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, and the Pashtun tradition of melmastiia (obligation to host and protect a guest) to request sanctuary. Bin Laden and hundreds of his followers had succeeded in escaping to one of the most inaccessible places in the world among the fierce Orakzai and Afridi Pashtun tribes of Kurram Agency. Bin Laden’s escape into the FATA was America’s greatest blunder in the war on terrorism for this was sovereign Pakistani territory. President Musharraf could never allow U.S. troops to directly invade his nation in pursuit of their Muslim enemies for fear of backlash among his own people, who distrusted the Americans.
But this was not U.S. Central Command’s only mistake. The hunt for the Taliban leader Mullah Omar was not going well either. An undisclosed host country (either Uzbekistan or Pakistan) had given the CIA permission to fly armed Predator drones from its territory on October 7, 2001, and they began flying on that very day.19 The drones were actively hunting Omar and on one occasion spotted a Taliban convoy fleeing Kabul. A drone’s high-resolution camera focused on the license plate of one car and found that it belonged to Mullah Omar. But instead of firing a missile at the car, the CIA controller asked for authority to fire on such a high-value target. The request eventually made its way from the duty officer at Central Command headquarters up to General Franks. Franks took the advice of his Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps lawyer and decided not to fire on Omar.20
Having survived a close brush with death without even knowing about it, Mullah Omar subsequently escaped across the border into the Pashtun tribal zones of Pakistan. There he continued to rule the exiled Taliban as the “Commander of the Faithful” from Quetta, the sprawling capital of Baluchistan Province. The Americans’ mistake proved to be catastrophic, for the messianic Omar was able to reunite and inspire his forces for years to come. Nearly ten years after his escape, one Taliban foot soldier explained his total awe of Mullah Omar, saying, “His words have a very powerful effect on us. We obey his orders, every Talib does, and we believe in him.”21
Omar was not the only one who escaped a Predator owing to a reluctance to give firing orders. On as many as ten other occasions, high-value targets (HVTs) escaped after being spotted by drones, whose pilots had to wait for permission and further verification before firing. One officer captured his frustration over this sort of reluctance to fire when he said, “It’s kind of ridiculous when you get a live feed from a Predator and the intel guys say, ‘We need independent verification.’” Another Air Force officer told the Washington Post, “We knew we had some of the big boys. The process is so slow that by the time we got the clearances, and everybody had put in their 2 cents, we called it off.”22
Clearly during the initial stages of the drones’ utilization, the CIA was reluctant to use this latest killing tool to assassinate targets on the ground, even during a war. This infuriated Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was said to have kicked in a door when he heard how Mullah Omar got away. The secretary quickly changed the rules of engagement, making it easier for drone operators to take out their targets without having to go through an extended chain of command.23 (The drones at this stage were being flown by the Air Force, which worked closely with the CIA to create targeting lists in a uniquely hybrid campaign.)
Rumsfeld may have done so just in time, for a drone subsequently spotted a large group of Arabs gathering at a three-story building south of Kabul known as the Yarmouk guest house. On this occasion not only did the drone operator receive instant permission from Langley and the Pentagon to fire on the target, but F-18 Hornets were called in to back up the Predator’s Hellfire ammunition with bombs. The building was subsequently bombed, and the Predator fired missiles on trucks filled with panicked survivors trying to escape the scene of the devastation.24
The American drone pilots then eagerly listened in on the Arabs’ radio chatter to see who had died in the attack. The CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) monitors were surprised to hear the Arabs bewailing the loss of someone described as “al Kumandan” (the Commander). There was only one al Qaeda leader who went by that name: the commander of al Qaeda’s military wing, Abu Hafs al Masri (aka Muhammad Atef), the third highest ranking member of al Qaeda. Masri was not only head of al Qaeda’s military operations, but he was also intimately involved in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa that had killed hundreds of people, predominantly Africans. His daughter had recently married bin Laden’s son to cement his relationship with his friend. The loss of the number three in al Qaeda was to be a tremendous blow to the organization and the first high-profile kill attributed to a Predator drone.