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Inside Tora Bora: The Final Hours?

8 minute read
Josh Tyrangiel

The 12 bearded soldiers making their way up a pass in the White Mountains of Tora Bora were decked out in flat-topped Afghan caps and flowing shalwar kameezes. From a distance only one detail gave them away as Americans. Afghan alliance fighters–dedicated but largely untrained–walk upright, making themselves easy targets for enemy fire. The Americans were shimmying up the hill on their bellies.

Late last week American special operations forces quietly made their way to Tora Bora, to the very front of the front lines. The dozen U.S. soldiers used a translator to coordinate with an Afghan commander. To the Afghan fighters at their side, the Americans made it clear they were on a search-and-destroy mission. “We and the Americans had the same goal,” said Khawri, an Afghan who was shoulder-to-shoulder with U.S. troops. “To kill all the al-Qaeda people.” By Sunday, the Afghans were claiming victory, though the U.S. remained guarded.

The war in Afghanistan began nine weeks ago on a battlefield the size of Texas, and it may end in a high, narrow valley smaller than the city of Austin. After weeks of playing Where’s Osama?, military officials believe they have overheard bin Laden on handheld radio in the White Mountains, giving orders to his dwindling al-Qaeda forces. Afghan fighters said they had killed 200 and routed al-Qaeda but the U.S. said too many nooks had yet to be searched. If bin Laden is in Tora Bora, he and his soldiers are trapped in a box: snow-covered peaks loom on two sides, Afghan and American soldiers await on a third, and Pakistani border patrols stand guard on the fourth.

The cornered fighters have little room to maneuver. With no enemy anti-aircraft fire, U.S. spy planes circle the sky, daring al-Qaeda fighters to step out of their caves and become glowing infrared targets. Few have done so. Bin Laden has resorted to giving orders on shortwave radio, U.S. authorities suggest, because there’s no one else left to do so.

But inevitability almost slipped away last week. The three Afghan warlords in control of alliance forces began the week with a successful assault on the Milawa Valley, the lone entrance to Tora Bora from the north. Al-Qaeda soldiers fled quickly, though they did manage to kill a few alliance troops. Having taken the territory, the warlords committed a major tactical error: they withdrew from the valley. When alliance forces returned the next day, they were greeted by three al-Qaeda fighters armed with machine guns who opened fire from 200 meters. No alliance soldiers were killed, but the morning was spent fighting a battle for territory that had already been won.

The follies had only just begun. As al-Qaeda fighters scampered up the mountains in search of safe haven, one of the warlords, Haji Zaman, agreed to a cease-fire without bothering to consult the other two Afghan commanders or the U.S. Zaman claims the Arab-speaking fighters reached him via wireless and offered to surrender on the condition that they be turned over to the United Nations. “They said they had to get in contact with each other and would surrender group by group,” Zaman says. He then announced the cease-fire, halted his troops’ advance and gave the opposition until 8 a.m. to give themselves up.

Zaman’s fellow Afghan commanders were outraged, while U.S. officials appeared shocked. The Americans did not object to an al-Qaeda surrender, but any surrender had to be unconditional. As for the cease-fire, Air Force General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, simply ignored it. “Just for the record,” said Myers, “our military mission remains to destroy the al-Qaeda and the Taliban networks. So our operation from the air and the ground will continue until our mission is accomplished.”

The U.S. ignored the cease-fire and bombed relentlessly. Sure enough, the next day, the surrendering al-Qaeda troops had vanished. Zaman’s aides insist that they were probably “confused” when the U.S. broke the cease-fire and scampered back into their holes. But other Afghan leaders thought Zaman had been duped. “It was a trick,” said Haji Zahir, one of the warlords commanding Afghan troops in Tora Bora. “They were buying time.”

The arrival of Western troops at the front lines had the added advantage of giving the Afghan fighters new resolve. During previous weeks, the Afghans withdrew from their positions during the day in time to break their Ramadan fasts at dusk. With the end–and the Americans–in sight, they held their positions.

From the start of the war, the U.S. has relied heavily on Afghan ground forces rather than deploy a sizable contingent of American troops. But the cease-fire screw-up was a reminder that the Afghans might be useful proxies for some jobs but were perhaps not quite professional enough to finish this one. On Sunday Zaman managed to get back into the U.S.’s good graces–and back into the race for the $25 million bounty on bin Laden’s head–as he ferried Western commandos to the front. By then, U.S. warplanes were pounding al-Qaeda positions with hundreds of bombs and missiles, and more than 100 U.S. and British special-ops soldiers had moved in, signaling to the Afghans and al-Qaeda that the time for mistakes was over.

“al-Qaeda is finished,” crowed afghan commander Hazrat Ali from his battlefield perch below the caves on Friday afternoon. “They are surrounded.” American military leaders were more cautious. “‘Surrounded’ probably is not a terribly good word,” said General Tommy R. Franks, the regional commander of American forces. “But the view of the opposition leaders on the ground is that this al-Qaeda force is contained in that area.”

If a hole is to be found in the tightening alliance net, it will most likely be somewhere along the 1,510-mile Pakistani border. Earlier in the week rumors swirled that bin Laden had been successfully smuggled across, although radio intercepts and the ferocity of fighting in Tora Bora suggested that al-Qaeda was defending more than just snow-covered rock. The Pakistani government, having seen the devastation bin Laden’s presence caused in Afghanistan and having been swayed by the promise of $1 billion in new U.S. aid, insists it is guarding against the possibility of border crossings. Arabs, Macedonians and Turks have recently been arrested trying to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and even some Pakistani extremists were not allowed back into the country until they surrendered their weapons. “We have made it impossible for bin Laden to enter our country,” said Pakistan Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider. Even so, on Saturday there were reports that 50 Arab al-Qaeda fighters had traversed the border in a mule train. Neither technology nor vigilance can secure a border that spans impossibly remote mountain trails.

Forty miles east of Tora Bora lies Pakistan’s Tirah Valley, a semiautonomous tribal belt only nominally under government control. In the late 19th century the British established the area around and including the Tirah Valley as a buffer zone between Afghanistan and British India. The Pakistani government has never had an official presence there, and many of the tribesmen who rule Tirah are deeply conservative supporters of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. But of late, Pakistani military helicopters have been buzzing over the frontier while soldiers patrol on foot. State-run Pakistan Television has broadcast pictures of locals eagerly assisting soldiers as they arrived, but those who know the valley believe they will not take kindly to an armed presence. Given local sympathies, if bin Laden could make it there, he might be well protected.

Of course, $25 million is a lot of money, especially in the Tirah Valley. It’s more than enough to sway convictions. And as alliance forces creep up the mountains and Western special-ops troops take their technology and firepower to each and every cave, bin Laden’s choices are getting as narrow as his chances of escaping. “This is a man on the run, a man with a big price on his head,” says Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. “He has to wake up every day and decide, ‘Do I keep all the security around me, which I need to make sure that some Afghan bounty hunters don’t turn me in but which help to give a lot of reports about my whereabouts, or do I go into hiding?’ He doesn’t have a lot of good options.” He also doesn’t have a lot of time. –Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Matt Forney/Tora Bora and Mark Thompson/Washington

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