Bush At War Part 23

There were some nods from around the table.

"Inspect every SUV that's moving in this area," he directed. "Hunt and seek. Patrol the roads."

"The south is going to be more cla.s.sic guerrilla struggle against the Taliban than holding ground," Tenet said. "It's going to be a re-supply challenge. We want to try to marry up our southern strategy today. There are tribals who are willing to hunt al Qaeda for us. We need a communication channel and a way to coordinate it."

Rice asked about Pakistan.

"Tommy says the first priority is to close the border," Rumsfeld said. "Our concept is to - "

"If he moves elsewhere," the president interrupted, "we're just going to get him there."

EPILOGUE.

THE CIA PARAMILITARY teams and the Northern Alliance intercepted some Taliban and al Qaeda radio communications as American bombs started to fall on their troop concentrations. The sounds of explosions and panic could be heard. What many remembered most were the screams.

There was a television antenna on top of a small hill in Kabul that had been a favorite target of the Soviets though they had never succeeded in hitting it. The Northern Alliance had also tried and failed. An American jet streaked in and, with one bomb, the antenna was gone. Word spread through the capital: The Americans are going to win, this is over.

ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12, General Myers reported to the president that while three days earlier the Northern Alliance had controlled less than 15 percent of Afghanistan, it now had forces in about half. Afghanistan was cut in two, the north controlled by the Alliance. Konduz, Herat and Bamiyan had fallen.

Most significantly, Kabul had been abandoned, with thousands of Taliban and al Qaeda fleeing south to the Pakistan border and east to the Tora Bora region. Rice received reports from the Situation Room on the fall of Kabul that were first based on media coverage, not their own intelligence. When she pa.s.sed them on to the president, he said, "This thing is just unraveling on them, it's just coming apart." Soon there were pictures of real liberation - women in the streets doing all the things that had been forbidden previously. Rice felt they had underestimated the pent-up desire of the Afghan people to take on the Taliban.

The NSC debate about whether or how to take Kabul, or to keep the Northern Alliance out, or whether to bomb during Ramadan had been overtaken by events. The Alliance and a variety of Pashtun tribals occupied the city. There was an uneasy equilibrium but there had not been a bloodbath.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar explained the retreat to his troops, "Defending the cities with front lines that can be targeted from the air will cause us terrible loss." The confrontation had s.h.i.+fted from a cla.s.sical force-on-force stalemate to an extraordinary exploitation of American power. The president later recalled, "It looked like our technologies may have been too sophisticated until we were able to match them up with the conditions on the battlefield." Now the CIA paramilitary, the Special Forces and the bombers made it impossible for the Taliban and al Qaeda to hold on to territory or even a.s.semble in large numbers.

At his November 27 briefing to the news media, Rumsfeld took the position that this outcome had been certain all along. "I think that what was taking place in the earlier phases was exactly as planned." The suggestions that things had not gone well initially were uninformed. "It looked like nothing was happening. Indeed, it looked like we were in a" - and he asked the press to join in - "all together now, quagmire."

Reporters chuckled softly.

ON DECEMBER 7, the Taliban's southern stronghold of Kandahar fell, effectively leaving the Northern Alliance, its Pashtun allies and the U.S. in charge of the country. It was front page news but there was no big celebration. Bush had promised no parades and no surrender signing ceremony. He was right. It wasn't clear what it meant.

In all, the U.S. commitment to overthrow the Taliban had been about 110 CIA officers and 316 Special Forces personnel, plus ma.s.sive airpower.

Powell was to help set up a new government in Afghanistan in conjunction with the United Nations. He appointed James F. Dobbins, a 59-year-old veteran diplomat and former a.s.sistant secretary of state, to head the negotiations with the Afghanistan opposition groups to find a leader.

Dobbins knew the division of labor for the region was split comically among three State Department bureaus. The South Asia bureau was in charge of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India; the European bureau had Uzebekistan and the other "Stans"; the Near Eastern bureau had Iran.

He made the rounds at the CIA, where several officials mentioned Hamid Karzai, the moderate Pashtun, as a leader who had broad appeal. Karzai had been a junior minister with the Taliban and he had defected years ago and joined the opposition. General Franks also recommended him.

Dobbins joined a conference in Bonn, Germany, brokered by the U.N., where factions of the Afghan opposition were trying to see if they could agree on a leader. The new head of the Pakistani intelligence service said Karzai was a possible, and the Russian representative told Dobbins, "Yes, he's been to Moscow, we know him well, we think he's a good person."

The U.S. Defense Department representatives in Bonn opposed consulting the Iranians, but Powell told Dobbins to go ahead and do so.

"Oh yeah," Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told Dobbins at the mention of Karzai. "He lived in Iran for a while and we think well of him."

In Bonn, the Afghans negotiated at all-night sessions, so Dobbins met Zarif at breakfast as they slept. "You know, yesterday I read in the press that your foreign minister was making a statement about how Iran opposed a peacekeeping force," Dobbins said one morning. "Why is he saying that when you here keep telling us you favor a peacekeeping force?"

"Well," Zarif replied, "you can just consider it a gesture of solidarity with Don Rumsfeld."

Dobbins was amused that even Zarif knew that Rumsfeld was opposed to peacekeeping forces.

"You know, Jim," Zarif added, "both you and I are well beyond our instructions at this point, aren't we?"

Dobbins was nation-building. He found Karzai had good communication skills, empathy and an ability to forge personal relations.h.i.+ps rapidly. The Alliance and the Pashtuns chose Karzai as their new leader and he took the oath of office in Kabul on December 22. Regime change had been accomplished 102 days after the terrorist attacks in the United States.

IN DECEMBER, A battle began in Tora Bora in the White Mountains, elevation about 15,000 feet, where many al Qaeda and Taliban had fled - supposedly including bin Laden. Three Special Operations men and two from the CIA infiltrated right into the guts of Tora Bora and for about four days called in air strikes using their laser designators. At one point the five directed a B-52 strike some 1,500 yards from their position.

Pakistani forces were posted on their side of the border to interdict the fleeing terrorists and they captured several hundred. The Afghan tribals were supposed to do the same on their side, but Hank concluded they had done a sorry job. Also, there had been poor coordination with the Pakistanis and there had been no Plan B. From the available intelligence, Hank believed that around December 16, bin Laden walked or rode by mule into Pakistan with a core group of about a dozen outriders, probably at Parachinar, a finger of Pakistani territory about 20 miles wide that juts into Afghanistan.

The president's personal scorecard of al Qaeda leaders captured or killed was showing thin results. Bush had put a big "X" through the photo of Muhammad Atef, who had served as bin Laden's military chief and top planner of the September 11 attacks. Atef had been confirmed dead in the heavy bombing the previous month.

Initial reports that bin Laden's top a.s.sociate, Dr. Zawahiri, had been killed prompted Bush to go to his Oval Office drawer, take out his scorecard and put an "X" though his picture. But the CIA soon determined that the killing could not be confirmed, and Bush dutifully erased the "X." In all, 16 of the 22 top leaders were still at large, including bin Laden.

TENET WAS EXTREMELY proud of what the agency had accomplished. The money it had been able to distribute without the kind of traditional cost controls had mobilized the tribals. In some cases, performance standards had been set: Move from point A to point B and you get several hundred thousand dollars. A stack of money on the table was still the universal language. His paramilitary and case officers in and around Afghanistan had made it possible - a giant return on years of investment in human intelligence.

CIA or CIA-supported teams were covertly breaking into places around the globe to gain detailed information on the whereabouts of suspected terrorists. Hundreds and eventually thousands of suspects were rounded up, taken into custody, and interrogated by cooperating foreign intelligence services and police.

Cofer Black had been right, people would have to die. On November 25, Johnny "Mike" Spann, a paramilitary officer with the CIA Alpha team that took Mazar, was killed when 600 Taliban and al Qaeda revolted at a prison fortress outside the city. Spann was the first U.S. combat fatality in the war. Contrary to CIA tradition, Tenet released information about Spann. It was front page news in nearly every newspaper.

Spann had served 10 years as a Marine before joining the CIA. The request that he be buried at Arlington Cemetery was turned down. They were running out of room. John McLaughlin called Andy Card and told him, "We are going to present him with the Intelligence Star, which is the equivalent of the Silver Star, and that typically is the hurdle you have to cross to get into Arlington." Card took it to the president, who approved.

Later a 79th star was added to the marble wall at the entrance to CIA headquarters where agency officers who gave their lives in the line of duty are honored.

The CIA calculated that they had spent only $70 million in direct cash outlays on the ground in Afghanistan, and some of that had been to pay for field hospitals. The president considered it one of the biggest "bargains" of all time. At headquarters they had created a so-called Magic Map that electronically located their dozens of paid a.s.sets and sources inside Afghanistan so they could be warned to move away from planned bombing. The a.s.sets were directed away on more than 100 occasions, and not a single one was killed in the first phase of the war.

In the end, Tenet believed they would find state sponsors.h.i.+p of the September 11 attacks. It was all part of the granularity of terrorism. Not specific authority, direction or control, but elements - a little money, training, equipment, communications, hiding places. His focus initially was on Iran. He believed that eventually they might find Iranian tracks in September 11. The Revolutionary Guard has a sophisticated network, and they had both motivation and capability. They are opportunists. Iran's long-term political agenda in the Middle East is served exactly by the sort of instability that bin Laden was trying to create.

Al Qaeda bought services wherever it could find them. So the cla.s.sic model of direct support and control of terrorism no longer applied. Tenet had everything but proof that there was state sponsors.h.i.+p.

For years, the CIA had thought Syria was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. It had taken close to a decade to establish that it was Libya. Anyone who had not been through one of these complicated terrorist investigations had better hold on to his hat, Tenet believed. The CIA would develop leads and go places that did not at first seem possible.

Over the course of his 8 A.M. intelligence briefings, Tenet presented all this to Bush. Yes, there would be Iranian mood music in this, and likely in the end, in the same, convoluted, indirect way, Iraqi mood music. "You should discount nothing," he told the president.

"We'll follow it where it takes us," Bush said.

Tenet believed he had learned a personal lesson about the price of doubt and inaction. Bush had been the least prepared of all of them for the terrorist attacks. As he sat with the president 15 to 30 minutes nearly every morning Tenet saw what was driving him. He was going to act. There are always a hundred reasons not to act, not to move. The fearful wouldn't act. Those not afraid would work their way through all the problems that surfaced. Problems overwhelmed some people, and they would come up with 50 reasons why they were insoluble. Not Bush. Suddenly the CIA had a new ethos - no penalty for taking risks or making mistakes. Bush had given it to them.

Tenet himself had been too fearful and hesitant prior to September 11, too afraid to push the envelope. He had been yelling and screaming about the bin Laden threat for years. In a memo as early as 1998, he had declared "war" against bin Laden but he had not come out straight to Clinton or Bush and proposed, "Let's kill him." Clinton had responded with additional funding, enabling the CIA to reestablish a covert presence in Afghanistan, but no lethal authority. Bush, though quick to respond after September 11, did not pursue the bin Laden threat aggressively enough in his first eight months in office.

ON JANUARY 9, 2002, Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporter Dan Balz and I went to Rumsfeld's office to interview him for a newspaper series we were doing on the first 10 days after the September 11 attacks. Characteristically, Rumsfeld wanted to deal in broad strategic concepts, not specifics, and he had jotted down 12 of them on a piece of paper - everything from the necessity to preempt terrorists to the opportunity to rearrange the world.

We wanted to deal with specific moments, and Balz asked him about the day after the attacks when Rumsfeld had raised the question, Is there a need to address Iraq as well as bin Laden?

"What the h.e.l.l did they do!" Rumsfeld exploded. "Give you every G.o.dd.a.m.n cla.s.sif - .. . take that off the . .."

I urged him not to worry.

"I didn't say that," Rumsfeld declared and then tried to pretend that someone else had shouted. He pointed to Larry DiRita, his civilian special a.s.sistant. "Larry, stop yelling over my shoulder, will you please?"

I said that perhaps we could put an IBM-second gap in our tape.

"Now you're talking," Rumsfeld said.

The 19-page transcript that the Defense Department later released of the interview deleted his explosion and the "h.e.l.l" and "G.o.dd.a.m.n."

A COUPLE OF months later on March 19, 2002,1 was at the Pentagon for interviews when I ran into Rumsfeld just inside the front entrance. He was walking fast, jacket on, his tie slightly loose. He had a large, heavy bandage across the back of his neck where a tumor had been removed. (His spokesperson, Torie Clarke, had drafted a short press release saying that he had had a "fatty tumor" removed. Rumsfeld struck out the word "fatty.") I stopped him to ask a question. In his early days as defense secretary, Rumsfeld had clearly antic.i.p.ated that the United States was going to be surprised by some attack, perhaps something along the lines of September 11 - the totally unexpected. How did you figure that out? I inquired.

He replied that when he had headed the Ballistic Missile Commission he had examined what intelligence the U.S. agencies had about three significant "events" or weapons developments in key countries. What he discovered was that U.S. intelligence had learned about the events from five to 13 years after they occurred. "We were surprised," he said, "but we didn't know about the surprise for years!" He became very intense about this, launching off in a verbal high-dive about his concept that the "unknown unknowns" were the real killers, the times when U.S. intelligence didn't even know what they didn't know.

I could see the trifocal lenses in his gla.s.ses we were so close. We were standing just inside the entrance as a parade of uniformed military men and women and civilians walked by.

"Known threats are not the worry," he said. On one occasion he had asked about the number of warnings before the USS Cole had been attacked in Yemen in 2000. The answer had been in the thousands.

"Can you believe that!" Rumsfeld said. The sea of warnings becomes meaningless. No one really paid attention and if people acted on each threat, he said, the U.S. would be chased out of places like Yemen.

How was the war going? I asked.

"There is the war you see and the war you don't see," he said. This was accompanied by appropriate hand motions - the war up here, above and seen, and the war down there, covert, unseen.

"They'll hit us again," Rumsfeld said in a matter-of-fact tone. "We have them off balance." He then jabbed three of his fingers into the center of my chest, tipping me back and slightly off balance.

Nice wrestling move, I thought, but then I s.h.i.+fted forward, taking the bait. I said that it was not enough because I had regained my balance rather quickly.

Rumsfeld gave one of his big, healthy, happy, full-faced smiles that overpower his face. He had made his point. We talked for a few more minutes. He asked for my address and a fax number so he could send me some material on his work on the defense commissions and walked off preppy and peppy. A man at war? It didn't seem that way. He was very comfortable, exuding self-confidence. I didn't know if he was too confident.

IN THE SPRING, after having had the run of Afghanistan for nearly five months, the U.S. military discovered huge amounts of munitions that the Taliban and al Qaeda had hidden in caves. In one they found 2 million rounds of ammunition; in others mortars, rockets, even some tanks. It was a whole underground support system. It was quite embarra.s.sing to discover it so late in the game.

"Are you going to destroy all of this?" Bush asked Rumsfeld.

"No," he replied, "we're saving it to arm the new Afghan army."

Rice joked that it was going to be called Rumsfeld's Cavalry.

Rumsfeld wondered why they couldn't just let the Afghan warlords create an army. Powell and the State Department argued that Karzai was their guy and they needed a strong central government so Afghanistan did not, yet again, become a great power game in which all interested parties would try to carve out territory or spheres of influence.

Rumsfeld had become something of a media star because of his daily televised briefings. On Wednesday, May 1, 2002, he and General Pace, the JCS vice chairman, had been answering questions for half an hour when a reporter asked what Rumsfeld had achieved. He bristled.

"We fas.h.i.+oned a new defense strategy," he said. "It is a strategy that is more appropriate for the 21st century than what we had, we believe. We are convinced, we are unanimously convinced - the senior civilian and military leaders.h.i.+p."

He listed new constructs, planning guidance, plans, the selection of maybe a dozen new four star officers. "We have been involved in the global war on terrorism," he said. He had to contend with department procedures which can take two years. "The freight train comes down the track and it's filled way over there, and until it runs to the end, you can't see what's inside of it. And every time you try to reach in, it's like putting your hand in a gear box, because this depends on that, and this depended on that, and each piece depended on something else. And you think you're making a wise decision if you grab in the middle of it, but in fact, if all the layers that led to those things are not readdressed back up, you end up with a situation that is kind of ad hoc; it is - it's a perfectly responsible, isolated decision, but if you make a series of them, they end up random; they don't end up with coherence. And so all this appet.i.te to kill this, or do that, or start this, my att.i.tude is, look, we'll do it the best we can. And as I look back, I say to myself, 'Not bad.' "

A reporter tried another question.

"Oh, no, no. I love that ending. I - (laughter). If you think I'm going to mess that one up, you're wrong! No, sir! I'm out of here!"

ONE OF POWELL'S greatest difficulties was that he was more or less supposed to pretend in public that the sharp differences in the war cabinet did not exist. The president would not tolerate public discord. Powell was also held in check by his own code - a soldier obeys.

Bush might order, Go get the guns! Get my horses! - all the Texas, Alamo macho that made Powell uncomfortable. But he believed and hoped that the president knew better, that he would see the go-it-alone approach did not stand further a.n.a.lysis. Hopefully, the Afghan war had provided the template for that understanding.

The ghosts in the machine were Rumsfeld and Cheney in Powell's view. Too often they went for the guns and the horses.

IN THE SPRING of 2002 the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became so violent that it threatened to overwhelm the war on terrorism. Palestinian suicide attacks escalated. On March 27, a suicide bomber killed 29 and injured 140 at a Pa.s.sover seder. Israeli Prime Minister Sharon launched a small war, dubbed Operation Defense s.h.i.+eld, into Palestinian-controlled areas and cities in the West Bank.

There was a growing chorus from abroad that the U.S. had to get involved. At an NSC meeting, Bush said he wanted to send Powell to see if he could calm things down, get some peace process restarted. Powell was reluctant. He said he didn't have much to offer, too little leverage with either side. The U.S. couldn't be more desirous of peace than the parties themselves, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Even Rumsfeld argued that Powell should not be used just to try to stop the bleeding. The secretary of state should not just be expended, thrown into a diplomatic firefight with no positive agenda or script. Failure would be a serious blow to his prestige and to the U.S.

We are in trouble, the president told Powell. "You're going to have to spend some political capital. You have plenty. I need you to do it."

"Yes, sir."

As they were walking out of the Situation Room, Bush turned to Powell. "I know how hard this is going to be but you have enough standing in the region and with the parties and just in your own situation that you can afford it."

Powell understood this to mean, You can lose three layers of skin, you've got underlayers.

The president was going to give a speech outlining a policy to get negotiations restarted. Arafat would have to denounce terrorism unequivocally and Sharon would have to begin to withdraw.

Do you understand what you're saying to the Israelis? Powell asked him. You're going to have to look Sharon in the eye and say get out.

He said he understood.

On April 4, Bush delivered a Rose Garden speech calling on the Palestinians to end the terror. "I ask Israel to halt incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas and begin the withdrawal from those cities it has recently occupied." Powell would be going to the region the next week to seek support.

Two days later in Crawford with Tony Blair, Bush said, "My words to Israel are the same today as they were a couple of days ago: Withdraw without delay." He later backtracked. His heart seemed to be with the Israelis.

In the Middle East, Powell was getting rudder orders from the White House - go left, go right, correct your course so many degrees.

First, Cheney and Rumsfeld sent word through Rice that Powell should not meet with Arafat. "Aw, Arafat, he's a spent force, leave him alone," Rumsfeld said.

Powell knew it was ridiculous to try to negotiate without meeting with both parties. But everyone in Was.h.i.+ngton was worrying about Israel and there was mounting pressure from both Republicans and Democrats to back Sharon.

Powell had to worry about some 300 million irate Arabs who were starting to burn cars in emba.s.sy parking lots. There were demonstrations in places where there had never been before, such as Bahrain, a bastion of pro-Americanism. Arafat and Sharon were two bad guys, Powell thought, but he couldn't ignore one. He went ahead. The first meeting with Arafat was merely okay, but a second was much worse.

After 10 days, having made little progress, Powell was preparing a departure statement that proposed an international conference and security negotiations.

Rice called Armitage at the State Department to ask him to tell Powell to scale back his statement, make less of a commitment about future negotiations. There were real concerns that Powell was going too far.

In Was.h.i.+ngton, Armitage was almost chained to his desk so he could talk to Powell between his meetings. It was midnight, 7 A.M. in Jerusalem, when Armitage explained Rice's concerns.

Powell went nuts. Everybody wanted to grade papers! he said. No one wanted to step up, face reality! They wanted to be pro-Israel and leave him holding the Palestinian bag by himself. They had sent him out on a nearly impossible mission.

"I'm holding back the f.u.c.king gates here," Armitage reported. "They're eating cheese on you" - an old military expression for gnawing on someone and enjoying it. People in the Defense Department and the vice president's office were trying to do him in, Armitage said. He had heard from reliable media contacts that a barrage was being unloaded on Powell. He was leaning too much to Arafat, the White House was going to trim his sails, he was going to fail. Armitage said he couldn't verify who was leaking this, but he had names of senior people in Defense and in Cheney's office.