As the ongoing war against al Qaeda and its Taliban allies gradually shifted across the border from eastern Afghanistan to the Pashtun tribal zones in neighboring Pakistan, the Americans would continue to wrestle with a paradox. While the war against the Taliban was transformed into a hunt for HVTs, it became obvious that America’s most advanced weapon in the hunt for elusive terrorists might also be their worst enemy in the underlying battle to win the hearts and minds of the people of this volatile region.
5
Manhunt
It’s a new kind of war. We’re fighting on a lot of different fronts.
We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without shutting down those safe havens.
By the spring of 2002 the Pentagon believed that the majority of hardcore Taliban members had been driven from Afghanistan. Those few Taliban members who were still sniping at U.S. troops in Afghanistan were described by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as “dead enders.”1 Operation Enduring Freedom had been one of the most effective invasions in the history of the Afghan “Graveyard of Empires.” It was now time to fill the void left by the collapse of the highly unpopular Taliban regime and rebuild the war-torn country that the United States had previously abandoned after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. The vast majority of Afghans wanted a return to school for their sons and daughters, new roads, demined fields, democracy, jobs, security, and an end to the Taliban’s harsh misrule. To prevent the Taliban from coming back, the Americans and their NATO allies would have to rebuild the devastated nation from the ground up and offer this long-suffering people hope.
Unfortunately, the United States did not initially invest in Afghanistan’s security and future because the Bush White House was adamantly opposed on principle to the notion of nation building. Candidate George Bush famously summed up his views on this topic when he stated, “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.”2 For this reason the United States limited its military presence in the Texas-sized country of Afghanistan to less than ten thousand troops for the first few years of the conflict. The lack of a U.S. ground force allowed the down-but-not-out Taliban to begin to regroup in the Pashtun south as they awaited orders from their Pakistan-based leadership in the FATA and Baluchistan.
It also allowed the soon-to-be insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to return to the country. Hekmatyar, as mentioned previously, was the notorious fundamentalist mujahideen leader who had made a name for himself by throwing acid into the faces of unscarved women in Kabul, shelling the Afghan capital in the 1990s, and turning against his American sponsors during the 1991 Gulf War. In 1997 this Pashtun fundamentalist had been driven into exile in Iran by the Taliban, but in February 2002 he secretly returned to his old jihad stomping grounds in eastern Afghanistan. There he and his followers declared jihad on the American “infidels.”
In May 2002 the CIA tracked Hekmatyar to a base in the forested mountains of Kunar Province on Afghanistan’s northeastern border with Pakistan. There a CIA drone launched its Hellfire missiles at him and his followers. According to news reports, the missiles killed several of Hekmatyar’s followers but failed to take out the leader himself.3 From this point forward Hekmatyar is said to have changed “his location every five minutes” to avoid the drones.4 The United States suspected that one of the locations Hekmatyar hid in was the FATA, a region he had used as a rear-area staging ground during the 1980s jihad against the Soviets.
Hekmatyar was not, however, the only ex-mujahideen warlord to ally himself with the Taliban as they licked their wounds in 2002 and prepared to launch an insurgency in the Pashtun belt of southeastern Afghanistan. The former CIA-backed mujahideen leader Jalaludin Haqqani had been courted by the CIA in 2001, but Haqqani saw the world in Manichean black and white jihad terms. To him the Americans were infidel invaders who needed to be expelled from Afghanistan just as the Soviets had been before them. As the American bombs fell in Operation Enduring Freedom, Haqqani and his followers fled from their base in the eastern Afghan province of Khost over the border into the neighboring Pashtun FATA tribal agency of North Waziristan. Haqqani had been based in this area during the 1980s, and he knew it well. There the so-called Haqqani Network regrouped in 2002 and awaited orders from its nominal leader, Mullah Omar. There were thus three Pashtun terrorist-insurgent networks, not including al Qaeda, based in the FATA and preparing to launch an insurgency against the Americans, who had too few troops to control this vast area of Afghanistan. Fortunately for the Taliban and al Qaeda, America’s attention was about to be directed elsewhere—and America was about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
As the Taliban and its allies regrouped in the FATA, the United States’ attention began to be diverted toward the Iraqi ruler, Saddam Hussein. As early as February 2002 the United States began preparations for a massive invasion of Socialist-Baathist Iraq, which was said to have dangerous weapons of mass destruction. The head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), Gen. Tommy Franks, summed up this redirection of NSA satellites, special operations troops, and Predator drones from Afghanistan to Iraq as follows: “We have stopped fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan. We are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.” Franks described the downgraded mission in Afghanistan, a conflict that would soon become known as the “forgotten war,” as a “manhunt.”5 Eventually 75 percent of U.S. drones would be transferred from Afghanistan to the new theater of action in Iraq.6
Shortly after the Iraq War started, one U.S. official said, “If we were not in Iraq, we would have double or triple the number of Predators across Afghanistan, looking for Taliban and peering into the tribal areas. We were simply in a world of limited resources, and those resources are in Iraq. Anyone who tells you differently is blowing smoke.”7
In a fascinating incident in 2002, one of the newly transferred Predators entered an impromptu dogfight with an Iraqi MiG 25 Foxbat fighter plane. This was the first incident in which a UAV waged combat against a manned aircraft. Unfortunately for the drone, the faster-flying MiG jet fighter easily shot down the slow-moving Predator. The last thing the drone’s remote pilots saw on their screens back in the United States was a missile shooting toward their aircraft as their own missile streaked toward the oncoming MiG. Then the screen went blank as the MiG’s missile hit and destroyed the Predator.8
But the Predator’s major headlines in 2002 came not from the new war in Iraq but from Yemen, where one of America’s chief al Qaeda enemies, Qaed Senan al Harethi, known as the “Godfather of Terror,” was planning terrorist attacks on the United States.9 Harethi had been a wanted man ever since 2000, when he had helped plot the al Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole, which killed seventeen sailors. The U.S. government had requested that the Yemeni government arrest Harethi, and so the Yemenis sent their troops to capture Harethi, who was living in the Marib region of Yemen with allied tribes. But the arrest attempt ended in disaster as Harethi’s tribal allies fought back and killed eighteen Yemeni police.10 This incident vividly demonstrated the limitations of trying to arrest terrorists in remote tribal regions where the writ of the government is not recognized. Similar calls for the CIA to arrest suspected al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan overlook the impossibility of penetrating these regions and arresting militants among thousands of their armed supporters.