The long war

Tom Brokaw • Profile

It’s nighttime in Afghanistan at a remote and heavily fortified base that is home to an elite unit of American special forces, and a land from which Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks against the United States. Almost four years after 9/11, how's the war on terror going? Osama bin laden is still at large -- why is that? Across the border in Pakistan, are they doing enough? In Saudi Arabia, the land of Osama bin Laden's birth, what are the new realities in their war against terror? At the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies, after four years of turmoil, are they better or worse? NBC’s Tom Brokaw travels to the highest echelons and deep inside the war on terror.

In Afghanistan, Marines are on the hunt for a man they suspect of killing two American servicemen. And now, in a show of force, the Marines are demanding answers, convinced that Afghan villagers are protecting the suspect. On this day, the Marines can't find their man and they retreat. It's a scene so much like the broader war on terror, the often frustrating search for a dangerous, but mostly invisible enemy.

Porter Goss: “It makes it all the more difficult to deal with because you're not quite sure where to look and obviously we don't want surprises. So we have to look everywhere all the time, and that is stressful.”

Porter Goss is the new director of the CIA, which was widely criticized for failing to anticipate the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans. In his first television interview, Goss told us what he believes it will now take to keep America safe.

Goss: “You have to get to the terrorists before they get to you. Defense alone will not win, so you have to take the offense. You have to go to the enemy in this.”

And the enemy is not in a central location. The CIA director calls it the "the belt of terror" extending from the Philippines in East Asia, across Indonesia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, through Iraq and the Middle East, and into West Africa and Western Europe. Who knows how many sleeper cells of terrorists are in this country, prepared to launch another 9/11 style attack on America, just as terrorists stunned Spain when they launched carefully orchestrated train bombings that killed almost 200 people in Madrid last year.

So four years after the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror is a global effort, a shooting war, a war of intelligence and a war of psy-ops, psychological operations, all of it costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

One of the earliest pitched battles in the war on terror was in the majestic Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. In October of 2001, a month after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the CIA led a successful unconventional war against the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which had allowed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to use that country as a launching pad for its terrorists.

Today there are still some 18,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan in this forgotten war, and the fight against terrorists has intensified again this spring and summer.

In those first few months of the war, Bin Laden was thought to be cornered in the Tora Bora region. But American military officials on the ground decided local warlords should lead the effort to capture or kill him. They failed and Bin Laden escaped. Now, almost four years later, Bin Laden is still believed to be hiding somewhere in the wild country between Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

Tom Brokaw: Over a ridge line and over a couple of more ridge lines is Pakistan. But before you get to Pakistan, you have the tribal regions. Probably Osama bin Laden is somewhere in there. Do you ever think about him?

Army captain: “Honestly he's not my focus. My focus is this valley and the next valley and the villages we can influence. I think by starting with the populous and separating the insurgents from the populous, then we'll take away that power base that Osama and his associates have.

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