A personal recollection of 9/11 by a former Deputy Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the Department of State

The following was written for the Wall Street Journal, in response to their request for first-person accounts of individual experiences on 9/11. They responded positively but have not [yet] printed the piece.

by Tom Maertens

On September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated in Northern Afghanistan by suicide bombers.

Massoud was the leader of the so-called Northern Alliance, and had been very effective in opposing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan (1979-89). After the so-called Peshawar Accord sharing power, he was appointed the Minister of Defense and the government's main military commander.

Massoud has been described as one of the greatest guerrilla leaders of the 20th century, in a league with Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. He united 130 commanders from 12 Afghan provinces in their fight against the Soviet army and was known as the "Lion of Panjshir.”

He subsequently led the opposition to the Taliban, after it took over in 1996.

Foreign observers were uncertain what his assassination portended but knew it could change the game on the ground.

Two days later, on September 11, we found out: Al Qaeda carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in human history.

At 8:45 that morning, I was watching TV news while waiting for a front office staff meeting of the Bureau of Counterterrorism at the Department of State (S/CT). Then the network abruptly switched to New York and footage of American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Was it an accident? That was followed by the now well-known litany -- United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower; American Airlines Flight 77 from Dulles International Airport, was hijacked and was crashed into the Pentagon; and United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after the passengers revolted.

That was the end of the violence for the day, but the beginning of the longest war in US history. There were rumors for days afterward about further attacks, but that was the end of them.

Then we started picking up the pieces, notifying Secretary Powell and other agencies of what we knew. The FBI takes the lead on domestic terrorism cases, but because this was a case of international terrorism, the State Department took the lead, working closely with the FBI, CIA, JCS and others, most of whom had liaison representatives seconded to State CT to facilitate information exchange, who reported to me. I was also appointed director of a multi-agency task force to coordinate our response.

A top priority is always notifying and enlisting allies. NATO responded positively, as expected, invoking the Article V Mutual Defense Clause for the first time in the alliance’s history.

Partway through the day, I got a call from a fellow Foreign Service Officer assigned to the Pentagon who had been the best man at my wedding and whose office was destroyed by AA 77. He reported that he and his office mates were lucky to get out alive – they had to crawl out beneath the smoke. He was looking for vacant desks for his staff, fellow counterterrorism specialists, which we supplied, that afternoon.

In the meantime, we found out that it was Al Qaeda that had assassinated Massoud. Despite his heavy security, the assassins got through by pretending to be European journalists wanting to do a story on Massoud, with a bomb hidden in their camera.

They were all killed in the attack but their willingness to die – “martyrdom operations” – make them feared adversaries.

Within days of the attack we sent an ultimatum to the Taliban – hand over bin Laden and AQ or we would retaliate against the Taliban.

They refused our ultimatum so Washington agencies immediately began preparing to send counterterrorism units to Afghanistan.

The first armed group to arrive on the scene was a five-man CIA Alpha Team, followed by army special forces units. Because there were only five people originally, the daily telegrams back to Washington referred to them only by their first names when describing their efforts to organize and train the many different ethnic groups.

I recall reading about “Mike” and his efforts to do that around Mazar-e-Sharif and the threat of being surrounded and captured, which in fact happened. At some point after he was dead, we learned that “Mike” was Mike Spann, the first US casualty in Afghanistan. He left behind three small children, the first of thousands of tragedies resulting from “mission creep” and the diversion of our attention away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq.

US forces ended up routing the Taliban and AQ in 100 days, which should have been our cue to pull out.

My recollection, in fact, is that most of the people who organized the intervention assumed it would be a short term operation and then we would remove our forces.

Because of mission creep, we ended up staying 20 years, losing more than 2400 Americans killed, and more than 20,000 wounded in action. In addition, we spent more than a trillion dollars.

Many of the terrorists fled to the mountains around Tora Bora in Eastern Afghanistan, while those in the west mostly fled toward Iran. Surprisingly, the Iranians offered to provide identifying information including passport data. My recollection is that we eventually got information on about 300 AQ members, who it should be recalled were/are mostly Sunni Muslims while the Iranians are Shia, two sects long at odds.

Our Pakistani allies, in contrast, supported Taliban cross border operations and provided a haven for AQ for virtually the entire war, despite the billions in aid they collected from the US.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have serious internal tribal differences, but the dominant ethnic group in both countries is the Pashtun, which help explain that support – and the fact that duplicity is routine for Pakistani governments.

The game changer was when George W. Bush, urged on by Dick Cheney and the Pro-Israel “Neocons” used 9/11 and Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction as justification to invade Iraq in 2003, which drew off weapons and resources from Afghanistan.

SecDef Donald Rumsfeld directed his staff within hours of the attack to look for evidence of Iraqi involvement; an aide’s notes of Rumsfeld’s instructions read: "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time...” The notes quoted Rumsfeld as saying, "Need to move swiftly – Near term target needs – go massive – sweep it all up. Things related and not”

Bush’s messianic views likely played a role, as well; he reportedly told French president Jacques Chirac in 2003 that he had “a mission from God” to attack Iraq because the Biblical Gog and Magog were threatening Israel.

But Iraq was only the beginning; the US under Bush subsequently bombed or invaded nine Muslim countries and threatened a tenth in its campaign to make the Middle East safe for Israel. Gog and Magog were apparently everywhere.

The US bears “major responsibility” for the Afghan military’s collapse and the Taliban’s success, said former US Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker. “It began under Pres. Trump when he authorized negotiations between the US and the Taliban without the Afghan government in the room.” Those were surrender talks, he said, where we forced the Afghan government to release over 5,000 Taliban prisoners, who immediately returned to fighting.

The Afghan government, he said, now perceives “rightly that we have hung them out to dry. We did a deal with the Taliban without them in the room.”

We undermined their authority and their confidence and are now seeing the results.

Tom Maertens served as an NSC Director in the White House under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and Deputy Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the Department of State