Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — The camera was the bomb. Two days before the towers fell, a man posing as a journalist detonated himself in the room of Ahmad Shah Massoud (pictured above), the commander still leading the armed resistance to the Taliban. Almost no one in America noticed. Within days, they would care about nothing else.
The Americans and Afghans whose accounts follow, gathered for a Hoover Institution oral history project relating to that war, remember those days from opposite ends of the earth. For the Americans, September 11 began on a clear Tuesday morning on the East Coast of the United States. For the Afghans, it began two days earlier, on September 9, in the northern province of Takhar, in the room where Massoud died.
America on September 11
Ryan Crocker watched the towers come down from the back of a taxi. A career diplomat of the Arab world, newly installed as a deputy assistant secretary of state, he was on a shuttle from Washington descending toward LaGuardia that morning, with meetings at the United Nations on his calendar. From the plane he could see smoke coming off the first tower. His was, he recalls, close to the last flight to land in New York that day. By the time his taxi reached the Queensboro Bridge, both towers were gone. "I actually saw the collapse of the towers," he says, in the flat register of a man who has never quite stopped seeing it.
Karl Eikenberry was closer than that. He was an Army officer on the staff at the Pentagon, in a third-floor office on the building's outer wall, when American Airlines Flight 77 came in at ground level and passed, he says, almost directly beneath him.
He is alive because of the angle; the severe losses were on the floors below. He stayed to help people out, then turned to save himself, and what he remembers is the smoke: stumbling blind through a black corridor, climbing over a barrier and dropping down the far side, feeling his own mind warn him that he was taking in too much and nearing the point of no return, until he found a seam of light and followed it to the center of the building.
Behind him, two young officers went forward to look for survivors in the Army staff area, found none, and then came the rumble that was the wall coming down. For Eikenberry, who had studied Soviet tactics in Afghanistan from a safe distance during the Cold War, the war he would spend much of the next decade fighting had just arrived beneath his feet. Of al-Qaeda he says simply, "they visited me in my office, in the Pentagon. It was personal."
Both men came to that morning from a Washington that had stopped thinking about Afghanistan at all. Crocker liked to point out that the State Department drew its own internal border between the Near East and South Asia precisely along the frontier of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, so that the two halves of his own building almost never met, "except in those exceptional post-9/11 circumstances." Eikenberry, who had been traveling on government business in 1996 when the Taliban seized Kabul, remembered that afterward almost no one in Washington was looking.
Afghanistan was a place American officials had read about, if that. Two days after Massoud died, it became the only place that mattered.
Afghanistan on September 9
Two days earlier, and half a world away, Atta Mohammad Noor was already inside the war. A commander in Massoud's northern resistance, he had spent the previous night, by his account, on the phone with Massoud himself, finalizing an offensive: how many helicopters, how much ammunition, which districts they would try to take back from the Taliban.
Massoud told him to call again the next day at half past twelve for the flight schedule. Noor called. No one answered. Massoud, he says, never turned his phone off. The news reached him the way bad news travels in a war, in fragments over a borrowed number: a suicide attack, in Khwaja Bahauddin, up close, inside Massoud's own room, under the cover of an interview. Noor did the arithmetic out loud. "Inside his room, an interview and a suicide bombing? Aamer Sahib has been martyred," he said, while the voices on the line were still insisting the commander was only wounded. "The world suddenly turned dark for me."
That night the elders of the resistance telephoned him one by one and could not bring themselves to say it. They spoke only in parables, of the Prophet's companions and of a beloved commander killed years before, until Noor understood. Then Marshal Fahim called, and wept before he could speak.
Younus Qanooni was in the Panjshir Valley, in an office he had built into the mountainside to stay clear of the rockets. He had rigged a small turbine in the river to give the office electricity, and he had been teasing Massoud about it. He had called him, he remembers, to announce that the turbine was finished and that a proper inauguration ceremony was waiting: the commander would have to come and cut the ribbon.
Massoud laughed and said he would come. "I completed the project," Qanooni says, "but did not inaugurate it." The next day the journalists arrived with their camera, and there was no one left to hold the ribbon for.
One Operation, Two Rooms
For the Afghans, September 11 was not the beginning of anything. It was the second blow, and for some of them it arrived almost as an explanation. What no one could understand on September 9, why al-Qaeda would spend one of its most elaborate operations to kill a single Afghan commander in a place most Americans could not have found on a map, made a terrible kind of sense two days later.
Crocker worked it out on the drive home. Grounded in New York with the airports closed, he and a colleague rented a car and took the long way back to Washington, and somewhere on that road they connected the two events. The killing of a single resistance commander, he says, "just didn't make sense until 9/11."
Then it did: al-Qaeda had taken its most capable adversary off the board first, so that when the Americans finally came, and now they would have to come, there would be no Massoud to fight beside them. Qanooni, at his unlit turbine, reached the same conclusion from the opposite direction: the killing and the towers, he says, were one operation, begun in one room and finished in another.
An American ambassador on a highway south to Washington and an Afghan politician in a Panjshir gorge, strangers to each other and years apart in the telling, arrive in the archive at the identical sentence.
After that, the same two days sent everyone down roads that would not cross for years, and then would cross at the worst possible moment. Crocker, whose expertise had always run west into the Arab world, was pulled east within days: a call from the deputy secretary of state sent him to Geneva for the first of many quiet meetings with the Iranians about Afghanistan, and by January he was in Kabul opening an American embassy, arriving, as he puts it, about ten days after Hamid Karzai, present at the creation of a republic.
Eikenberry would come back as a commanding general and later as ambassador, to the country whose war had found him at his desk. And Noor got the thing the resistance had asked the Americans for and been refused: in October, a small team of American Special Forces soldiers and CIA officers finally walked into his northern strongholds, and, as he tells it, he set the terms plainly.
His men would lead, and would not let a single American soldier stand on the front line; the Americans would provide the airpower and the supplies. The alliance that might have saved Massoud arrived just after he was gone.
The Hardest Verdict
That is the shape the Hoover Afghanistan Relief Team (HART) archive keeps returning to, and it is why the interviews will not let September 9 and September 11 come apart. Eikenberry, who watched the response take form from inside the Pentagon and then from inside the Army's planning, gives it its hardest verdict. The campaign that followed was, he says, a capital success and a strategic failure: brilliant in the execution, hollow at the center, waged by people who had been told that the question of what came after was not important right now. Twenty years later they had their answer.
In 2021 the Americans left, the republic Crocker had helped build fell in August after a summer of collapsing provinces, and men like Noor and Qanooni, who had held power in that republic and helped hollow it out, were driven from the country again, some of them for the second or third time in one life.
Hoover's oral history project asks each of them where they were on that Tuesday, and the answers keep doubling back to a Sunday two days before, and to a warning that no one with the power to act had believed. Massoud had gone to Europe that spring and told whoever would listen that al-Qaeda was going to strike the United States. The people who most needed to hear it were the same people who had already decided he was not worth supporting. Twenty-five years on, the question the archive really puts to them is not where they were. It is who saw it coming, and who was believed.
Dr. Halima Kazem is a Hoover Visiting Fellow and the oral historian who led the Hoover Afghanistan Research and Relief Team Oral History Project. The voices in this essay are drawn from that project, a collection of firsthand accounts of the U.S.-Afghan war and its aftermath at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
The voices in this essay are firsthand accounts from the Hoover Afghanistan Research and Relief Team Oral History Project, recorded with the participants and preserved in their own words.
