US drops 'mother of all bombs' on IS-held caves in Afghanistan.

[727Sky]

They knew exactly where to bomb because the CIA built the caves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazi...-bora.html

Afghan war, the decade-long, C.I.A.-financed jihad of the 1980's against the Soviet occupation. Rising to more than 13,000 feet, 35 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Jalalabad, Tora Bora was a fortress of snow-capped peaks, steep valleys and fortified caves. Its miles of tunnels, bunkers and base camps, dug deeply into the steep rock walls, had been part of a C.I.A.-financed complex built for the mujahedeen. Bin Laden had flown in dozens of bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment from his father's construction empire, the Saudi Binladin Group, one of the most prosperous construction companies in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Persian Gulf. According to one frequently told story, bin Laden would drive one of the bulldozers himself across the precipitous mountain peaks, constructing defensive tunnels and storage depots.
Indeed, by December 2001, when the final battle of Tora Bora took place, the cave complex had been so refined that it was said to have its own ventilation system and a power system created by a series of hydroelectric generators; bin Laden is believed to have designed the latter. Tora Bora's walls and the floors of its hundreds of rooms were finished and smooth and extended some 350 yards into the granite mountain that enveloped them.
Now, as the last major battle of the war in Afghanistan began, hidden from view inside the caves were an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 well-trained, well-armed men. A mile below, at the base of the caves, some three dozen U.S. Special Forces troops fanned out. They were the only ground forces that senior American military leaders had committed to the Tora Bora campaign.
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Yunis Khalis long worried that such a moment would arrive. A theologian and warrior of considerable repute, Khalis knew the Americans well: he had fought for them two decades before. And if there was one thing that the octogenarian leader knew, it was that he really didn't like the Americans much at all. Nevertheless, as one head of the fratricidal alliance of Afghan resistance groups, he had accepted Washington's largess, and over the years, as the war against the Soviet occupiers progressed, Khalis, among the seven resistance leaders, would receive the third-largest share of the more than $3 billion of weapons and funds that the C.I.A. invested in the jihad. As the godfather of Jalalabad, the capital of the province of Nangarhar, Khalis controlled a vast territory, including Tora Bora. It had been a key operational center for his fighters during the anti-Soviet war. And it was a key operational center for Osama bin Laden now. The caves were so close that Khalis could see them from the verandah of his sprawling stucco home.
One evening earlier this summer, I asked Masood Farivar, a former Khalis officer who had fought in Tora Bora during the jihad, to tell me why the caves were so important. "They're rugged, formidable and isolated," he said. "If you know them, you can come and go with ease. But if you don't, they're a labyrinth that you can't penetrate. They rise in some places to 14,000 feet, and for 10 years the Soviets pummeled them with everything they had, but to absolutely no avail. Another reason they're so important is their proximity to the border and to Pakistan" -- less than 20 miles away.
Bin Laden knew the caves as well as Farivar and Khalis did. He had fought in nearby Jaji and Ali Khel and in the 1989 battle of Jalalabad. He knew every ridge and mountain pass, every C.I.A. trail. For this was the area where bin Laden had spent more than a decade of his life.
It was also during the war years that bin Laden first met Khalis; the two men became very close friends. Indeed, when bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in May 1996 from his base in the Sudan (after the United States insisted that the Sudanese government expel him), it was Khalis, along with two of his key commanders -- Hajji Abdul Qadir and Engineer Mahmoud -- who first invited him. And it was also Khalis who, later that year, would introduce bin Laden to the one-eyed leader of the Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Omar, who had fought with Khalis -- and would later become his protégé -- during the jihad.
"Khalis had an avuncular interest in bin Laden," Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit and the author of "Imperial Hubris," told me recently when we met at a Washington coffeehouse. "Osama lost his father when he was young, and Khalis became a substitute father figure to him. As far as Khalis was concerned, he considered Osama the perfect Islamic youth."
Bin Laden, along with his four wives and 20-some children, moved into the well-fortified Khalis family compound nine years ago and then to a farm on the outskirts of Jalalabad. But shortly thereafter, Engineer Mahmoud was assassinated, and there were two assassination attempts against bin Laden, too. "They were both very crude," Scheuer said, "and they smacked of the Saudis" -- who had earlier tried to assassinate bin Laden in Khartoum. "As a result, bin Laden wanted to move away from the main road. So Khalis gave him two of his fighting positions in the mountains -- Tora Bora and Milawa. Bin Laden immediately began to customize and rebuild the two: Tora Bora for his family and his key aides; Milawa for his fighters and as a command center and logistics hub. By the time bin Laden moved to Kandahar" -- then a Taliban stronghold -- "in May of 1997, the two mountain redoubts had been completely refurbished and modernized: they were there, just waiting for him in 2001."
Some six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks and nearly two weeks after the bombing of Afghanistan began on Oct. 7, American military leaders -- who had no off-the-shelf invasion plans, not even an outline, for Afghanistan -- finally succeeded in getting the first forces in: a 12-man Special Forces A-team helicoptered in from Uzbekistan to the Panjshir Valley. There they joined forces with the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban militia that controlled only 10 percent of Afghanistan but to whom Washington delegated the ground war. The view prevailing among senior American military leaders was that overwhelming air power, suitcases full of cash and surrogate militias could win the war. The intricacies of Afghan tribal life appeared to elude everyone.
In late October or early November, according to Scheuer, American operatives went to see Khalis to seek his support. "Khalis said that he was retired and doing nothing now," Scheuer told me. "It was the last time" American intelligence officials saw him. "It was so bizarre! Didn't anybody know about Khalis's friendship with bin Laden? Or that Khalis was the only one of the seven mujahedeen leaders who remained neutral about, and sometimes even supported, the Taliban?" He shook his head and then went on: "And even after Sept. 11, indeed in spite of it, as soon as our bombing of Afghanistan began, Khalis issued a well-publicized call for jihad against U.S. forces in Afghanistan."
When Khalis turned the Americans down, Special Forces troops recruited two of his former commanders. They made an unlikely couple: Hazarat Ali and Hajji Zaman. The former, with just a fourth-grade education, was barely literate, a bully and unrefined; the other was a wealthy drug smuggler, fluent in English and French, and a polished raconteur who was lured back to Afghanistan from his exile in France by the United States. Both were schemers who had come of age on the battlefields of the anti-Soviet war, Ali as a teenager in Tora Bora and Zaman in Jalalabad. Ali had joined the Taliban for a time, then moved north and embraced the Northern Alliance; Zaman had supported neither, and when the Taliban came to power, he chose exile. Ali owed his rise largely to the Pentagon, which ultimately enlisted him to lead the ground battle in the Tora Bora caves; Zaman, a Pashtun leader and member of the Khugyani Tribe, had his own base of support, something that Ali, a member of a minor, non-Pashtun tribal grouping, lacked.
A third militia leader -- less experienced but of more distinguished pedigree -- who would bring his forces to Tora Bora was Hajji Zahir, the 27-year-old somewhat skittish son of Hajji Abdul Qadir, Yunis Khalis's former military commander and one of the three men who had welcomed bin Laden when he returned to Afghanistan. Indeed, as the Americans were recruiting his son, Hajji Abdul Qadir was about to reclaim the governorship of Nangarhar Province, a post he had relinquished when the Taliban arrived, in a power transfer Khalis and bin Laden would help to consummate.
Bin Laden had returned to Jalalabad on or about Nov. 10, a U.S. intelligence official told me recently, and that same afternoon, according to a March 4, 2002, report in The Christian Science Monitor, he gave a fiery speech at the Jalalabad Islamic studies center -- as American bombs exploded nearby -- to a thousand or so regional tribal leaders, vowing that if united they could teach the Americans "a lesson, the same one we taught the Russians" when many of the chieftains had fought in America's first Afghan war. Dressed in a gray shalwar kameez, the long shirt and bloused trousers favored in Afghanistan, and his camouflage jacket, bin Laden held a small Kalakov, a shorter version of the Kalashnikov, in his hand. As the crowd began to shout "Zindibad [Long live] Osama," the leader of Al Qaeda moved through the banquet hall dispensing white envelopes, some bulky, some thin, the thickness proportionate to the number of extended families under each leader's command. Lesser chieftains, according to those present, received the equivalent of $300 in Pakistani rupees; leaders of larger clans, up to $10,000.
Bin Laden really didn't have to buy the loyalty of the Pashtun tribal chiefs; they were already devoted to him. He was, after all, the only non-Afghan Muslim of any consequence in the past half-century who had stood with the Afghans. But on that November afternoon, and on the nights that followed it, as bin Laden began to lay the groundwork for his escape from the Tora Bora caves, the elusive Qaeda leader was determined to be absolutely sure.
The following evening, or the evening after, bin Laden, according to an Afghan intelligence official, dined in Jalalabad with other Pashtun tribal chiefs from Parachinar, Pakistan, an old military outpost I first visited nearly 20 years before. Parachinar had been a key staging area for the C.I.A. during the jihad, and its tribal leaders had profited immensely. A picturesque town in the Kurram Valley, Parachinar was also Pakistan's first line of defense against any Afghan incursion. Beyond it lie only the White Mountains -- and the caves of Tora Bora -- and desolate stretches of no man's land.
The last time bin Laden was seen in Jalalabad was the evening of Nov. 13, when he, along with Khalis's son, Mujahid Ullah, and other tribal leaders negotiated a peaceful hand-over of power from the Taliban to a caretaker government. Under its terms, Khalis would take temporary control of the city until the formation of a newly appointed U.S.-backed government. He, of course, made certain that the Eastern Shura, as the government is called, was stacked with men who owed their loyalty to him. Hajji Abdul Qadir, his former military commander, became Nangarhar Province's governor again.
Bin Laden's Arab fighters had used Jalalabad as a base and as a command center for a number of years, and now they dispersed, loading their weapons and their clothing, their children and their wives into the backs of several hundred lorries, armored vehicles and four-wheel-drive trucks. Some Taliban fighters followed suit. Others disappeared, removing their signature black turbans and returning to their villages and towns.
As the convoy was being readied, bin Laden said his goodbyes: to the Taliban governor; to Mujahid Ullah, Khalis's son; and to scores of the tribal leaders who had received his white envelopes three days before. He was dressed now as he had been dressed then and cradled his Kalakov, even though he was surrounded by some 60 armed guards.
Then he entered a custom-designed white Toyota Corolla, and the convoy sped away toward the mountains of Tora Bora, where he waited for the Americans to arrive.
By late November, Hazarat Ali, Hajji Zaman and Hajji Zahir had assembled a motley force of some 2,500 men -- supplemented by a fleet of battered Russian tanks -- at the base of Tora Bora. The Afghans were ill equipped and poorly trained. They also lacked the commitment that bin Laden's fighters had. Hidden from view at 5,000 feet and above in the scores of valleys, forests and caves, the Qaeda fighters not only had the tremendous advantage of the terrain; their redoubts were replete with generators, electricity and heat and copious stocks of provisions. Snow covered the mountain, and it was bitterly cold. The Afghan fighters at its base grumbled and quarreled endlessly. It was also the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, and some of the Afghans had the irritating tendency to leave their posts and return home to celebrate iftar, the evening meal that breaks the fast.