In the past 20 years, the most regrettable thing for the top management of the US government is that because of an accident created by a man, the United States was involved in an endless war on terror, thus missing the opportunity to suppress China, which has not yet risen.
This decision to let the tiger go back to the mountains led to the Discovery when americans withdrew from the Middle East that China had grown into a behemoth, the greatest threat to the American hegemonic system, and that man was named bin Laden.
Now let's go back 20 years, to the point in time that changed Sino-US relations and even the world pattern.
At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, New York, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Tower, and about 15 minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center completely collapsed in the raging fire, and the attack shook the world!
Scene of the 911 impact
Bush's expression when he was told the attack took place
At this time, the supreme leader of the United States, President George W. Bush, was attending a public event in a florida elementary school, and when he was first informed of the impact by his aides, George W. Bush thought it was just a small plane, but soon the president learned the seriousness of the matter.
Agents protect George W. Bush from school quickly and board Air Force One, where Bush hears worse news and another plane crashes into the Pentagon. Fearing that the president would also be the target, Air Force One flew over the United States for several hours before landing at Overford Air Force Base in the afternoon after ensuring safety.
When the World Trade Center in New York was attacked, and the president of the world's number one power was forced to circle and hide in the air, George W. Bush's heart held a wave of anger, and even more angry than him were hundreds of millions of Americans.
Since the Gulf War defeated Iraq and the Soviet Union disintegrated itself, the United States has been the world's number one hegemon for 10 years, and Americans proudly believe that they are the first in the world and invincible. But today it has been slapped in the face, and Americans regard 911 as a great shame, knowing that the last time American territory was attacked was half a century ago, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
We want revenge, which is the unanimous demand of all Americans, and of course the priority of the Bush Administration.
The first step to revenge, of course, was to find the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and U.S. intelligence soon sent the name bin Laden to the president. Therefore, in the face of the vast number of Americans, George W. Bush made a promise: I will arrest bin Laden, concentrate the human, material, and financial resources of the United States, and do it at all costs.
The president boasted about Haikou in front of the American public, the Pentagon and the CIA naturally did not dare to slacken off, relying on the huge intelligence system of the United States around the world, the Pentagon can learn that bin Laden is living in Afghanistan as a guest of the Taliban at this time, but about his specific location, it is still unknown, let alone the arrest of Bin Laden himself, and Afghanistan is located on the other side of the world, the United States is thousands of miles away in Central Asia, and there are not many forces that the United States can mobilize in that area.
Since it is not easy to do it directly, then negotiation is the best choice, so the Americans directly approached the Taliban.
The group that rose to prominence in the Afghan civil war now controlled much of the country's land and was within easy reach of unifying the entire country. But in the eyes of the Americans, Saddam Hussein's million-strong army is only his own defeated generals, let alone your small Taliban?
So George W. Bush unceremoniously issued an ultimatum to the Taliban, demanding that they unconditionally hand over bin Laden, release all detained foreigners, and have the U.S. military inspect the Taliban camps.
In other words, when ordinary small countries are intimidated by the United States, most of them choose to obediently do so, but the Taliban are a hard bone, and the leader of the Taliban, Omar, simply refused to speak to the US government, saying that bin Laden was his guest and that it was against the tradition of Muslims to hand him over to the United States.
Of course, Omar is not really stunned, he deliberately left a step for the United States, saying that the United States can provide evidence, let the Taliban themselves set up a court to try bin Laden, or send bin Laden to a neutral country.
Taliban leader Omar
In Omar's eyes, he has already made concessions, enough for Bush Jr. to explain to the following, after all, the United States made similar demands during the Previous Clinton Period, when Omar directly treated the Us demands as farts and did not even respond, but his ideas were obviously very wrong.
This time, George W. Bush issued a military order to all Americans, and under the anger of the crowd, as long as he dared to show a gesture of concession and compromise, it would be self-destructive political career.
If there is no talk, then we can only start fighting.
A month after 9/11, the U.S. military contacted the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan: the Northern Alliance, to discuss cooperation in overthrowing the Taliban, and finally the two sides reached an agreement: the United States provided a large amount of financial and weapons assistance, as well as air fire support, and the Northern Alliance was responsible for attacking from the ground.
From the same day, U.S. missiles and warplanes began air raids on Taliban strongholds.
Before the United States entered the war in 2001, the Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan's territory, and its sphere of influence shrank rapidly after the war began
Compared with the high-tech weapons of the United States, the Taliban's equipment is backward like primitive people, and the Taliban's marksmanship is accurate, and it cannot compete with bombers at a height of several kilometers and cruise missiles flying hundreds of miles away.
On November 12, a month after the U.S. airstrikes began, Taliban forces fled kabul, the Afghan capital, and the Taliban regime collapsed substantially, and the U.S. military achieved initial victory.
But for George W. Bush, this is meaningless, with the strength of the US military, it is strange that the battle cannot be won, and he is most concerned about one thing, whether he has captured bin Laden?
By this time bin Laden had gone into hiding in eastern Afghanistan, in a mountainous region called Torabora, where mountains were dense, gorges and terrain were complex, and bin Laden had to use this complex mountain to hide his tracks.
In order to deal with bin Laden, U.S. aircraft bombed day and night, dropping a total of 700,000 pounds of ammunition in 3 days, some of which were specially guided bombs that could penetrate caves in the mountains, and some of which were enough to burn everything within 500 meters into coke, killing many of the Taliban who followed bin Laden.
At this point, the Americans seem to have forced bin Laden into a dead end, but they also face a major problem, the U.S. military strength is not enough to completely block the Tora Bora Mountains to Pakistan, they can only send a limited number of ground troops, to cooperate with the northern alliance warlords to search.
On December 12, U.S. Delta Force soldiers, once only 2,000 meters from bin Laden's ranks, were able to intercept bin Laden's radio call signals with their own equipment. With the support of air fire, they eventually killed 220 militants and captured more than 50 people, but they did not capture bin Laden, who had entered Pakistan.
The Americans think that they have laid a net of heaven and earth, but bin Laden still escaped, which makes Bush Jr.'s face very hanging, but there is nothing to do, the Taliban has been completely destroyed, Pakistan will not allow the United States, send a large number of troops to its country to search and arrest, military operations end here, an intelligence war to search for bin Laden began.
Caves in the Tora Bora Mountains Bin Laden hid in them when he fled
Shouldering this heavy responsibility was the CIA, a secret service that had been in direct opposition to the Soviet KGB for decades in the Cold War, and had developed countless eavesdropping reconnaissance equipment and technologies, but these methods had little success in searching for bin Laden.
Bin Laden knew that the americans' superb technical prowess was absolutely unmatched by himself, so he did the opposite, completely avoiding the areas in which the Americans were good at, believing that the more backward the method, the more it could compete with the advanced technology of the Americans. From the time he fled to Pakistan, he completely stopped using any modern communication technology, including telephone networks or even radio, and all his communication with others was achieved only by word of mouth, the oldest method.
The trick proved to be quite effective, and after the CIA lost its most powerful technical advantage, the search for bin Laden's tracks was almost impossible, and no matter how skilled they were, they could not knock on people's brains to see what he was thinking, or install wiretaps in the homes of every Pakistani.
In the days of hiding his tracks, bin Laden did not forget to continue to oppose the United States, and from time to time he released a videotape of himself to the outside world through his subordinates, which basically condemned and ridiculed the United States, and talked about recent current events in order to prove that he was still alive and well.
The CIA also tried to analyze the contents of the videotape to find clues to bin Laden's whereabouts, but to no avail.
After countless failures, the CIA had to admit that it was difficult for them to locate bin Laden by technical means, so the Americans began to emulate bin Laden, using some of the oldest and most traditional means of obtaining intelligence, that is, to capture members of al-Qaida and then torture them to extract confessions.
While the U.S. government has consistently preached that they value human rights and oppose abuse and punishment, in practice they have not done so.
After the events of 9/11, the United States set up a military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, specifically for the detention of Al-Qaida elements, a site that can be said to be well-intentioned. Guantanamo Bay was seized by the United States from Spain in the early 20th century, and since the Cuban Revolution, the Castro government has not recognized the possession of the U.S. military, but the Americans have seized this area with their own military superiority until today.
Location of the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba
It is reasonable to say that the forcible occupation of other countries' territories is despicable enough, but the Americans are not ashamed, but proud, and have also built military prisons with the special status of this place, claiming that because this is not American territory, the prisoners held here are not protected by American law, so the CIA is free to abuse and torture them until these people explain where bin Laden is.
Although the United States has tried to block the news, through various reports, it is still possible to understand the terrible abuses and punishments in Guantanamon. Interrogators used endless noise and bright spotlights to keep prisoners awake for days and nights, torturing prisoners with tools including barbed wire, sharp broken glass, and burning cigarette butts, and they would force prisoners to inject drugs, make them become addicted, and then stop providing injections, so that addicts would have seizures and cry out for forgiveness.
When some of the prisoners could not bear the pain and chose to go on a mass hunger strike, the CIA tied them up firmly and forced food from their mouths and noses with feeding tubes to ensure that they could not die.
These were just the tip of the iceberg of Guantanamo's torture, where the mouths of al-Qaida elements were pried open one by one through bloody inhuman means, and in 2004 the CIA learned the code name of the messenger who delivered bin Laden's message, named Ahmady Kuwait. It took another 3 years for the CIA to figure out the real name of kuwait.
But that's all they have, and bin Laden still seems out of reach.
Inmates in Guantanamo Prison
Searching for a living person by a single name is an incredibly difficult task, with agents traveling through small towns and villages, pretending to inquire casually on various occasions, and intelligence listening 24 hours a day to suspicious signals, day after day, year after year, and finally ushering in a turnaround in 2010.
Kuwait was on a phone call with an al-Qaida member who had already been tapped, and the CIA intercepted the news, followed Kuwait along the lines, and in August 2010 they witnessed Kuwait entering a building in a compound in Abbottabad.
The Americans immediately made the compound a key target, and the CIA rented a building in Abbottabad as a stronghold, sending agents close to monitor and reconnoiter the compound, while using satellite photography aids.
In a month of exhaustive investigation, the Americans found many major doubts: the yard is 3500 square meters in size, but the houses in it occupy only 1/8 of the area, which is a very abnormal waste of land And its concrete façade is 3.7 to 5.5 meters high, far more than ordinary houses, and the walls are also equipped with barbed wire, which should be to prevent others from climbing and peeping; there are two walls in the courtyard that surround the main building, apparently out of the need to protect the safety of personnel; the house is not connected to any telephone and Internet lines, and even the occupants inside never throw garbage outside.
They burned the garbage directly in the yard, and Kuwait and one of his brothers often came and went, but there was a mysterious man who lived on the third floor who almost never left, and even when he came out, he only walked inside the two walls.
Based on this series of findings, the CIA judged that the courtyard was custom-made to hide and protect important people, and that the mysterious man on the third floor was most likely bin Laden, but lacked conclusive evidence that no one dared to be sure.
With this breakthrough, the CIA did not dare to act rashly, but reported the situation to the superiors, at this time it was the new President Barack Obama, the killing of bin Laden was a brilliant achievement for him, can gain a large number of popular support, but after all, Bin Laden is not in that courtyard, no one can be sure, Obama is not willing to take risks, so he instructed the CIA to strengthen surveillance and find out who the mysterious man really is.
The mysterious compound of Abbottabad
At the president's order, the CIA tried to investigate the next few times, a task that was quite arduous, because they had to get as close as possible to the reconnaissance, but they could not move too hard to scare the snakes and alarm the occupants of the compound, after all, it took the Americans 9 years to find the yard, which was the closest they had ever had to bin Laden since they had left the Tora Bora Mountains.
CIA agents tried a variety of methods, including extracting sewage from the yard's underground water pipes to see if bin Laden's DNA could be detected, and designing a bird-like drone to get close to the people in the yard that had been attacked by eagles because it was so realistic.
But these methods ended up being fruitless, and more were rejected because the risk was too high.
After a long tossing and turning, the CIA officials had to admit to Obama that they had not yet been able to get pictures or audio of the mysterious man, and if they wanted to determine who he was, the only way to do that was to break into the courtyard, and the longer they dragged on, the easier it would be for the other side to detect.
At this point, the hunt has finally reached a dead end, the Americans are poor, if Bin Laden is not in this yard, then they can only think that they are unlucky to continue to find, which is a gamble for the president, he wants to bet on whether this mysterious person is bin Laden, in early 2010, Obama made a decision: take down the mysterious man.
After the president made up his mind, the Pentagon and the CIA developed three sets of plans.
One is to communicate with the Pakistani government for a joint military operation, a plan that has the advantage of not leaking information if it can get the support of the Pakistani government, then the mysterious man can not fly, the Pakistani military can easily control the entire Abbottabad; but the disadvantage is also obvious: once such a secret is revealed to Pakistan, it is difficult to guarantee that the information will not leak, resulting in bin Laden's escape.
Suspicious of Pakistan, Obama ruled out the plan from the outset.
The second option is to launch an air strike, which has two options, the more violent is to use B2 stealth bomber air raids, with heavy explosives to level the entire building, and the more restrained, send predator drones to launch Hellfire missiles, blow up the mysterious people walking in the courtyard.
The advantage of airstrikes is that they are the least risky for the United States, but the disadvantage is that it is difficult for them to determine whether the victim is os-os-jain, and the airstrikes may hurt innocent people and cause bad public opinion.
After weeks of discussions, Mr. Obama similarly rejected airstrikes, ultimately opting for the riskiest and most rewarding option three: sending special forces to raid.
The advantage of this plan is that the identity of the mysterious person can be confirmed, and the information of Al-Qaida can be captured, resulting in relatively small casualties, but the disadvantage is also obvious, the risk of failure is high, and U.S. forces need to secretly penetrate hundreds of kilometers into the territory of other countries and then complete a surprise attack, in which any accident may occur.
Although many officials felt that the risk was too great, on April 19 Obama approved the implementation of Plan Three, and a week later, on the 26th, THELS flew out of the United States and arrived at the US military base in Afghanistan the next day to make final preparations before the operation.
On April 29, Obama signed the order, but the next day the fog was too thick to attack, and the operation was postponed to the day after tomorrow, may 1.
Obama and a host of high-ranking officials in the war room include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden
At three o'clock in the afternoon of May 1, Obama entered the White House War Room, accompanied by a number of high-level officials who would watch the entire operation together. Shortly after nightfall pakistan, two specially crafted stealthy Black Hawk helicopters took off from a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, and 24 SEALs arrived over Abbottabad after an hour-and-a-half flight.
But at the beginning of this raid, there was an accident, the Black Hawk helicopter that should have landed in the courtyard, when it landed, the tail crashed into the courtyard wall, fortunately the pilot operated properly to force the landing, seeing this situation, another helicopter also gave up the original plan of hovering above the house to let the soldiers descend to the roof, but landed safely in the courtyard.
The SEALs on board the two helicopters converged and quickly launched a fortified operation, using bombs to blow open the metal door and then raid in groups of three. On the first floor of the house, when Kuwait was preparing to check on the situation with an AK47, the special forces soldiers ruthlessly solved him. Later, during the cleaning of the first floor, Kuwait's brother tried to pick up a weapon on the ground and was also killed.
There is an iron gate on the stairs leading to the second floor on the first floor, and after the SEAL forces blow it open, bin Laden's 23-year-old son is found on the second floor and killed him. Then, on the second floor staircase leading to the third floor, the SEALs finally saw the guy they had been hunting for a decade: bin Laden.
He was tall, wearing loose pajamas, and one of the team members opened fire on him, but bin Laden immediately retreated to his room and dodged the shooting, but by this time there was no way out.
The SEALs stormed the house and saw bin Laden and his two wives, one of whom screamed loudly to cover bin Laden, but was immediately pushed to the ground by the strong soldiers, and the second member who entered the room fired a precise second shot, which shot into the man's chest and head, knocking off part of the skull. The commando reported the code number via the intercom: Jeronimo EKIA, meaning the target that had been killed.
Obama, in the White House war room, after receiving the news from the front, whispered: "We killed him." ”
After a decade, the Americans finally completed their revenge.
After killing bin Laden, the team tied up his two wives and sent them downstairs, where they filled bin Laden's body in a bag. They searched and took away all the information in the room, including hard disks, CDs and USB memories. After the arrival of the supporting Chinook transport aircraft, the Navy SEALs blew up the Black Hawk with its tail damaged and unable to take off, and all the members boarded the plane to leave, taking 38 minutes from the moment they began to attack.
Americans celebrating the death of bin Laden in front of the White House
There are no impermeable walls, and there were many rumors walking around the Internet that night, and the official news was that at 11:30 p.m. that night, Obama gave a speech to the whole country, and he announced to the world: We killed bin Laden.
The whole of the United States fell into a frenzy, with people gathering in front of the White House and the ruins of the World Trade Tower to celebrate.
But these Americans may have forgotten how bin Laden was born.
Bin Laden was one of the Soviets who invaded Afghanistan more than 30 years ago, and the United States provided weapons and training to the resistance forces there to use to weaken the Soviet Union. The Americans domesticated this poisonous snake and successfully dragged down the Soviet Union, but in the end they could not escape the fate of being bitten back.
The cycle of fate is so wonderful that all actions come at a cost!