Twenty-five years ago, the collective shock of the terrorist attacks on the US was upon us. Foreign Editor David Pratt’s essay recounts what it was like to report on their aftermath and how those events shaped our world
IT would be about 17 years ago now. Embedded as a correspondent with a US military unit, I found myself sitting one afternoon swapping stories with American helicopter pilots in the shade of a sweltering hot day at their airfield base near the Afghan city of Jalalabad. As we chatted, I asked a casual question.
“Do you know Samarkhel? It’s near here,” I enquired of the pilots. In turn, they wanted to know why I had asked. I told them that it was around there back in 1989 that I had bumped into Osama bin Laden and had drunk tea with him.
As the pilots swapped looks of incredulity and laughed a little nervously, unsure of whether I was being funny, I thought it best to explain.
I recounted how, long before the Americans were in Afghanistan, I’d visited the country as a reporter on and off for almost 10 years.
During that time, I often accompanied the Afghan mujahideen guerrillas fighting the Soviet Red Army occupation.
I told the pilots, too, of how during one such stint we ran across bin Laden and other Arab fighters in the later stages of a battle around the Samarkhel garrison near Jalalabad.
It was a story I’d told many times before and beyond the pilots’ obvious surprise, never for a moment did I imagine there would be any comeback. But that day I imagined wrong.
No more than two hours after recounting my tale, I was told to report to an office on the airbase where, for some time, two US military intelligence officers questioned me about those years. They were especially interested in my conversation with bin Laden, who at that time was still being hunted.
Before writing this piece, I was determined not to mention my brief meeting with al-Qaeda’s infamous leader. Over the intervening decades, I’ve occasionally felt a sense of guilt at having dined out on it so often. But I’ve given up worrying about that now.
The fact is that every year around the time of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I find it impossible not to reflect on that fleeting encounter with the man whose followers referred to him as “the Sheikh”.
Likewise, I can’t help mulling over how that September day back in 2001 would not only determine bin Laden’s ultimate fate, but that of countless others like myself caught up in the subsequent events the Americans dubbed the “war on terror”.
Historians and biographers by now have well documented how back on September 11, 2001, bin Laden and his close
al-Qaeda associates had prepared to watch the “planes operation” on television.
Terrifying in its mundanity, the story goes that outside the mouth of the cave in which they were hiding in the Sulaiman mountain range above the Afghan city of Khost, bin Laden’s Yemeni bodyguard struggled to get a signal from the satellite dish.
“It is very important we are able to watch the news today,” bin Laden is known to have insisted to the guard, directing him this way and that while clicking his tongue in annoyance. As it turned out in the end, there was no picture, and it became obvious to everyone that they were going to have to listen on the radio, while the rest of the world watched.
Among those able to watch was bin Laden’s al-Qaeda ally, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, aka Mokhtar, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
But before he settled down to watch, historical accounts tell of how Mokhtar called for a takeaway from the local branch of Dunkin’ Donuts for himself and his fellow 9/11 plotters who were crowded around a TV set in an apartment in the Pakistani city of Karachi.
Only when the Twin Towers collapsed did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed perhaps fully realise the potential gravity of the consequences and is said to have looked panicked.
“Shit,” he reportedly commented. “I think we bit off more than we could chew,” captured al-Qaeda members later reportedly told interrogators about him saying at the time.
Elsewhere, I was just one of the countless other millions around the world able to watch that same “planes operation” unfold on TV in real time.
It was a Tuesday; for some reason, I always remember that. I had only come into my newspaper office at the start of the working week to pick up a book before heading to the airport to begin a journey to Israel.
Clustered around the news desk television, I came across most of my colleagues. On the screen, in a live broadcast the first of the Twin Towers was already burning from the impact of the first fuel-laden airliner.
Only when the second plane slammed into the remaining tower did the silence of my colleagues lift, replaced by gasps and cries from those standing around. My world, our world, changed at that moment. The sight of that second plane meant this was no accident, but an act of terrorism.
The enormity of this act was difficult for many of us to fully comprehend, a point made again these past few days by journalist Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker magazine.
“The dislocation and disorientation of those first days in the city, and of the weeks, months and even years that followed, are hard now to redescribe adequately, even for those who lived through them.”
Personally, I never made it beyond Heathrow Airport on September 11, 2001. Israeli airspace, like that of the United States, was shut down. But a short time later, I found myself back at another airport.
This time I was on my way to Pakistan and Afghanistan, as it slowly became clear that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were what US president George W Bush described as the “prime suspects” behind this attack that had taken almost 3000 lives.
“The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” declared Bush, after grabbing a megaphone as he stood on the rubble of the Twin Towers surrounded by New York firefighters a few days later.
This was only the beginning. Bush was right; we would hear from the United States and many others in the months and years that followed.
A short time after the New York attacks, having been duly dispatched to cover the US military response, I found myself in the Pakistan frontier town of Peshawar that borders Afghanistan.
On its smoggy, humid streets, most Pakistanis and Afghans were as courteous and polite as I remembered them to be from previous visits during the years of the Soviet War in Afghanistan. Some things, however, had changed. Street vendors now sold books on the Taliban, maps of Afghanistan and T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Jihad is the way”.
One morning while waiting at Peshawar airport, a Pakistani man ushered two toddler boys toward me.
“I would like you to meet my two sons, this is Osama and this one Saddam,” the father announced, touching each of the boys on the head in turn.
At first I thought it was a joke. The father’s way of saying to a rarely seen Westerner at that time, do these boys really look like terrorists or a threat to the world?
But there was no humour in the man’s voice or eyes, and just as quickly as he had introduced the boys, he quickly led them away.
Looking back, I realise now that for many people not just in Pakistan and Afghanistan but much further afield, bin Laden and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had become heroes. Men who were prepared to take the fight to the United States and the West.
For a time it seemed almost as if political scientist Samuel P Huntington’s Clash of Civilisation hypothesis, whereby people’s cultural and religious identities would become the primary source of conflict, might indeed have a ring of truth about it.
This though was to forget that Muslims were as much targets and suffering disproportionately at the hands of Islamist-inspired terrorism.
In Baghdad, the bombers of al-Qaeda and in Mogadishu, al-Shabaab, another of its offshoots, rarely made any distinction when it came to who they would blow apart.
Asked in an interview some years ago why he attacked innocent children, a failed suicide bomber in Pakistan replied: “Who says children are innocent?”
IF the world experienced some degree of consensus in terms of disgust at the 9/11 attacks, then within a few years, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had put an end to that.
One afternoon on the rooftop of a compound in the Iraqi town of Baquba while embedded with the US Army’s 1st Infantry Division, an American officer told me that he was proud to be part of the “payback for 9/11”.
In the street beneath us just minutes before, two car suicide bombers had rammed their vehicles into the walls, leaving the body parts of the drivers and their Iraqi victims strewn across the street.
None of these people were part of the 9/11 conspiracy or attacks, I put it to the officer.
“How can you say that?” the officer replied, incredulity in his voice. “Iraqis, Afghans, all ragheads are responsible,” he replied.
His thinking was not uncommon among many US soldiers I met in Iraq, for whom their reason for being there was still inextricably connected to the events of 9/11.
In Afghanistan at least it was a little different, given that the country’s Taliban had hosted bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cadres before and during the 2001 attacks.
Within a month of the attacks on New York, Bush was not just letting the Taliban and al-Qaeda “hear” from the US, but ordinary Afghan citizens too.
For these civilians, it was all a terrible rerun of years before during the Soviet War there.
Afghans were once again uprooted and displaced, fleeing their homes this time not from Russian bombs and missiles but American ones and those of their allies.
As the Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif observed at the time, American drones hovering over Pakistan’s northern areas “were programmed to work based on the logic that their targets are guilty until proven dead”.
In the years following 9/11, the mismanagement of the wars born out of it became an enormous story in itself and a significant factor in shaping much of the troubled world in which we live today.
Just this past week, my colleague, the Canadian journalist Kathy Gannon, who has covered Afghanistan for decades and was in the capital Kabul on 9/11, summed it up perfectly.
“The ‘war on terror’ began with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, which ended in failure, because America turned the country over to thugs and warlords, feeding their corruption with suitcases full of money, while focusing its troops on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.”
Bin Laden, the man who masterminded the 9/11 attacks, was not there, and America instead would find him years later when US Special Forces came knocking at his door in a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
While the invasion of Afghanistan may have seriously degraded al-Qaeda, it only helped other terrorist groups to flourish. In place of one al-Qaeda, the world went on to face many al-Qaedas.
In prosecuting its war against this disparate enemy, the US effectively turned to outsourcing it, leading to the use of private security firms.
It also brought us hitherto almost unheard of things like “extraordinary rendition” and “waterboarding,” and turned torture into “enhanced interrogation.”
It led in turn to a dramatic growth in what has been called “dirty wars”, the hallmarks of which are targeted killings, the snatch and grab of individuals and directing drone and cruise missile strikes.
It was, to be frank, the beginning of the erosion of the global rules-based order that today all but lies in tatters.
But as Gannon rightly points out, perhaps the worst legacy of 9/11 and the war on terror is the way it has today “left us all living in fear, whether it is fear of those of another faith or nationality, another country or colour, another political party or view”.
Back in 1989, when I briefly met bin-Laden in Afghanistan, he was all but unknown here in the West. When asked why he had come so far to fight in a foreign land, there was an uncomfortably long pause, during which I sensed the unease of my Afghan hosts sitting alongside me.
“I am a soldier, one without boundaries,” bin Laden replied, speaking to me through an interpreter.
That “soldier” has long since gone, but the legacy of the terrorism he helped unleash and the response it provoked remains indelibly etched in the minds and lives of so many today.
