102 Days of War: How Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda & the Taliban Survived 2001 by Yaniv Barzilai

Author:Yaniv Barzilai [Barzilai, Yaniv]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Military, General
ISBN: 9781612345338
Google: I0KkAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Published: 2014-01-31T23:40:33.169520+00:00

The Kunduz airlift was kept so secret that even Secretary of State Colin Powell was not informed.40 While Under Secretary of Defense Doug Feith was also unaware of the airlift, he explained the context that may have enabled it to occur. “I don’t know anything about the Kunduz airlift,” Feith recalled. “If Musharraf called the president, it would not surprise me at all that the president would tell Condi or Rumsfeld about the call. Rumsfeld would have been receptive in general to help Musharraf. Rumsfeld considered him to be an important partner for the U.S. military.”41

Although it is clear that some al Qaeda and Taliban operatives escaped Kunduz on Pakistani planes, the quantity and identities of those militants remain a mystery. The Kunduz airlift nevertheless clearly illustrated the level of integration of the ISI, the Taliban, and possibly al Qaeda that immediately followed 9/11. Although these connections were ostensibly severed following Musharraf’s acceptance of the seven American demands, the legacies of the previous decade proved difficult to undo. According to Dexter Filkins, the journalist who wrote the first article exposing the Kunduz airlift, “there was no question that Pakistani airplanes were coming in. . . . The Pakistanis had a lot of military advisors in there, and it sounds like they all got off, and lots of other people got on the planes too.”42 Seymour Hersh later reported:

The airlift “made sense at the time,” the C.I.A. analyst said. “Many of the people they spirited away were the Taliban leadership”—who Pakistan hoped could play a role in a postwar Afghan government. According to this person, “Musharraf wanted to have these people to put another card on the table” in future political negotiations. “We were supposed to have access to them,” he said, but “it didn’t happen,” and the rescued Taliban remain unavailable to American intelligence.43

The Northern Alliance controlled all of northern Afghanistan by the end of November. The Taliban had lost its last stronghold in the north with the fall of Kunduz on November 24. Meanwhile, General Dostum negotiated the surrender of about three hundred al Qaeda fighters and transferred them to a makeshift prison at Qala-i-Jangi, an eighteenth-century fortress on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, where CIA operatives would interrogate them. But Dostum’s forces did not search the detainees, who concealed weapons and explosives underneath their clothing. The prisoners rioted on November 25, taking control of part of the fortress and killing CIA officer Mike Spann, the first American combat casualty in Afghanistan. After four days of heavy bombardments, the remaining al Qaeda prisoners surrendered when Dostum’s forces flooded their basement shelter with cold water.44 Journalist Ahmed Rashid reported that Dostum refused to make similar mistakes with prisoners again:

Several thousand surviving Taliban prisoners [under Dostum’s control] were packed into container lorries—stuffed in like sardines, 250 or more to a container—so that the prisoners’ knees were against their chests and there was no air to breathe save for holes punched through by machine-gun bullets. The prisoners were driven to a jail in Dostum’s home town of Shiberghan.

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