America vs. Al Qaeda: A Foe’s Best Fried /
Sultan, the Afghan, waited five weeks for this moment at his observation post on the Shomali Plains between the Panjshir Valley and Kabul. He knew that al Qaeda jihadis, in the name of Allah the merciful, had smashed airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. He was first stunned, then impressed, by the breadth of the attacks. Then he settled in to wait. Suddenly, a wave of B-52s struck Taliban positions. He saw with an Afghan warrior’s eyes the unimaginable sound and fury that Americans rained down 150 meters in front of him. The ground trembled, and dust blotted out the sun. Sultan was silent for a moment, his eyes wide, with a hashish cigarette forgotten between his fingers. “I don’t know about Afghanistan’s future because it’s hard not to make war here,” he finally told me. “But I know one thing: it is over for al Qaeda. America has won.”
Ali, the Iraqi, had been waiting for three weeks. In fact, he had waited since the first Gulf War. He knew from the heavy bombing of Baghdad that U.S. forces hurrying through the desert would soon reach the capital. Then he saw Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy’s Marine unit help a small crowd of Baghdadis pull down that statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square; the dreaded leader’s metal head was chiseled from its body to be dragged the length of Saadoun Street and then Hassan, the Hotel Palestine shoeshine
boy, mounted it like a pony.
I saw tears well in Ali’s eyes. “I don’t know about Iraq’s future, if there will be war between Sunnis and Shiites or with Iran,” he said, “but I know one thing: Saddam is finished, and America has won this war.”
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After the shock of 9/11, at the dawn of the 21st century, Sultan the Afghan and Ali the Iraqi both believed the United States would win a lightning victory, durable and definitive. Each supported the Americans in different circumstances but for similar reasons: a hope of freedom, contempt for oppression, and disgust at wars in their countries that had continued, off and on, for two decades. Sultan, a Tajik, joined the Afghan army to fight the fleeing Taliban. Ali, a Shiite, became an intelligence officer in what Washington called the “new Iraq.”
Seven years later, as President George W. Bush prepares to leave office at the end of a decade in which little happened as planned, Sultan and Ali see how wrong they were. Both were deceived, their hopes dashed. America did not win its wars. Al Qaeda is unvanquished. And their homelands are ravaged battlefields.
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