Known and Unknown

by Donald Rumsfeld

  As I wrote my memo, I realized that the many suggestions I was proposing to President Bush were long-term strategic ideas that would require deliberation and discussion, perhaps even trial and error. They would take political capital, which by 2006 was in short supply. What I was proposing transcended any one department. To examine some of these recommendations and conduct a wholesale review of our government’s organization, I proposed a bipartisan presidential commission of distinguished officials modeled on the Hoover Commission of 1947. After I handed the President my memorandum, he told me the ideas were worth discussing. However, to my knowledge, there was never a high-level meeting on my proposals. That was not surprising in an administration that at that point was fighting two wars and was under siege by the Congress and the press. Nonetheless, I believed we missed a significant opportunity. Perhaps they were ideas whose time had not yet come.

  CHAPTER 43

  Gardening

  “The way to keep weeds from overwhelming you is to deal with them constantly and in their early stages.”

  —George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph

  While Afghanistan and Iraq commanded the focus of national security officials, there were 190 other countries that also needed monitoring and attention. Some of those nations, of course, were friendly to the United States, some less so, but all had daily interaction with our government at some level. Even officials from international pariahs such as Iran and North Korea were meeting with lower-level American diplomatic and intelligence officials and our intermediaries.

  With our various economic and trade relationships and diplomatic and military reach, America does not have the luxury of pursuing policies of isolationism or neglect. We had to keep our attention on the world’s many significant activities, meeting constantly with foreign leaders, forging diplomatic and trade agreements, and standing firm and responding as necessary when unfriendly nations provoked our country. George Shultz referred to this kind of daily maintenance with foreign governments as “gardening.”1 Throughout the Bush administration, while waging two wars and being on guard for another attack on our shores, many in the administration worked hard to be effective “gardeners”—with varying degrees of success.

  When it came to personal diplomacy, George W. Bush was an active and productive, if publicly underestimated, asset. His decidedly informal brand of diplomacy was novel for some foreign leaders. What he chose to dispense with in polish, he made up for in persistence and reliability. In meeting After meeting, I saw the President put his foreign interlocutors at ease. This personal rapport paid dividends with leaders as diverse as Spain’s Prime Minister José María Aznar, Jordan’s King Abdullah, and Australia’s John Howard. His relationships translated into closer ties between our countries and tangible support for initiatives like the ninety-country Proliferation Security Initiative and on-the-ground assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  One of the administration’s important strategic successes was in our own hemisphere: helping to keep a democracy of forty-five million people from succumbing to the longest-running, best-financed, and most violent insurgency in Latin America. For more than a decade, the United States had been waging a war against drugs in Colombia. I thought that stopping the flow of drugs into our country, while important, was fated to be unsuccessful as long as the powerful demand for illegal drugs persisted. The Colombian government could spray coca fields and interdict drug runners, but as long as there were millions addicted to drugs around the world, people would find a way to produce and sell what the market demanded. Since the late 1990s, the Clinton administration’s $5 billion Plan Colombia had been a bipartisan antidrug initiative demonstrating that our government was doing something about the drug problem.

  By 2001, Colombia was teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state, a refuge for drugs and terrorists. The instability was fueled by the narcotics trade and Marxist guerrillas known as the FARC. The guerrillas controlled an area of Colombia larger than Switzerland. It was a safe haven for coca cultivation, kidnapping, murder, extortion, and Communist-inspired terrorism. Many had written off the Colombian government’s war against the insurgency as a doomed effort. Some 60 percent of Colombians believed that the FARC would win. If that proved true, a stalwart democracy to our south would be replaced by a narco-terrorist dictatorship.

  As part of the response to 9/11, I recommended to President Bush that, in addition to authorizing strikes in Afghanistan, he consider a plan to provide military assistance to Colombia’s efforts against the insurgents—not just the drug traffickers. Visibly assisting Colombia, I argued, would reflect the truth that the campaign against terrorists was global, and that we were not targeting only Islamist extremists.

  There was, however, an Islamist terrorist element even in Latin America. Islamist extremists, many affiliated with Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, were taking advantage of ungoverned areas in several locations in the region to operate and raise money. If a government would not or could not govern its own territory, that was an invitation for adventurers of various types—terrorists, political revolutionaries, drug dealers, and other criminals—to enter and take advantage of the vacuum. Such weeds thrive where the atmosphere of authority is thin, and they can spread aggressively.

  President Bush was eager to assist Colombia. Our efforts received an unexpected boost in 2002, when Alvaro Uribe was elected president. FARC rebels had killed his father and attempted to kill Uribe on no less than fifteen different occasions over his political career. As a presidential candidate he campaigned fearlessly against the FARC and vowed to reclaim Colombian territory from the drug lords. After his election he kept track of what he considered the key measures of his war’s success, including the numbers of monthly kidnappings, homicides, acres of land taken back from the FARC, and even the number of kilometers Colombians traveled on their holidays, since for many years traveling on some roads was a death sentence. When I met with Uribe, he would invariably have a yellow note card in his jacket pocket, listing his benchmarks.

  In our first visit in June 2002, weeks After the Colombian elections, I told Uribe we might be willing to lend a hand by offering assistance in an integrated counterinsurgency campaign that strategically combined American and Colombian political, intelligence, economic, and military assets. If we were going to do more than just focus on trying to intercept drug shipments and spraying coca fields, there was one major hurdle: the U.S. Congress. Fearing direct American involvement in a guerrilla war in Latin America, Congress had imposed strict limits on intelligence sharing and military activities with the Colombians. The only authorized missions were those designed to reduce drug production, and there was even a congressionally imposed limit on the number of American military personnel to be allowed in Colombia at any given time.

  Working with policy officials Doug Feith, Peter Rodman, and Roger Pardo-Maurer, we were able to reorient our assistance to Colombia toward counterterrorism and targeting the FARC guerrillas. The Congress agreed to change our authorities to allow for more than just the narrow focus on drugs. Our goal was to help the government of Colombia assert control—effective sovereignty, as we called it—over its entire territory.

  In President Alvaro Uribe, we had the most skillful partner we could have hoped for. Unassuming and slight in build, Uribe was unafraid to take on the FARC and reclaim Colombian territory (he also commanded the overwhelming support of the Colombian people, reaching a 91 percent approval rating at one point).2 With expanded authorities and intelligence cooperation, we could take the fight to the enemy. An energetic Army Reserve Special Forces noncommissioned officer who had fought alongside the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, Pardo-Maurer aggressively sought interagency and bipartisan support. Without adding a dollar to our budget, we made our aid far more effective than it had been before. Drug production decreased, and hundreds of thousands of acres of land were taken back from the FARC. The campaign to win back Colombia from the terrorists proved to be a major success.

  Anot
her significant success involved one of the most worrisome nations in the world—the Libya of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The State Department had long listed Libya as a leading sponsor of international terrorism. Libya was also notorious for its multiyear pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The Gaddafiregime was responsible for the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.

  After 9/11, the Bush administration had a rare opportunity to persuade Libya—and perhaps some other terrorist-supporting or WMD-pursuing regimes—to choose a different path. I believed that if we put sufficient pressure on Afghanistan and Iraq, other countries might recognize that their interests in self-preservation meant that they too needed to end their support for terrorism and their WMD programs. This was the case with Gaddafi, who, After we invaded Iraq, reportedly told Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that he did not want to become the next Saddam Hussein. It was not mere coincidence that only a few days After Hussein was plucked in such a degraded state from his subterranean spider hole and imprisoned in Iraq, Libya’s dictator acknowledged and agreed to dismantle his country’s long-running nuclear and chemical weapons programs.3

  Though our activities elsewhere in the Middle East were gaining few headlines—we wanted it that way—the United States and its partners were also capturing and killing terrorists outside of Afghanistan and Iraq. Sensitive operations involving the CIA and U.S. special operations forces were ongoing in the Horn of Africa, Northern Africa, Pakistan, and Yemen, where terrorists had fled After we put pressure on them in their former sanctuaries in Afghanistan and Iraq. By developing relationships and establishing a presence in those countries beforehand, we made it harder for fleeing terrorists to find refuge there.4 Since 9/11 we had made manhunting and the skills needed to track (find), isolate (fix), and capture or kill (finish) individuals a priority for our military. By 2006, we had become quite successful using highly classified intelligence operations to track down our enemies in countries around the world. These counterterrorism efforts in ungoverned areas required not only careful military preparation and training, but skillful diplomatic support.

  Our administration’s gardening record was not perfect, however. Certainly my “old Europe” comment was not a model of deft alliance management. And in other cases too, our stewardship in foreign affairs left something to be desired, especially in Bush’s second term.

  Shortly After his reelection, President Bush rearranged his national security team. Colin Powell departed as secretary of state. National Security Adviser Condi Rice took over Powell’s post. Her longtime deputy, Steve Hadley, moved up to become national security adviser. CIA Director George Tenet had departed the administration several months earlier and had been replaced by Florida Congressman Porter Goss.

  I hoped that these changes might improve the way interagency meetings were planned and run and the way decisions were summarized and implemented. I also hoped that State’s new leadership would make the department more supportive of the President’s policies. I thought the quiet competence of Steve Hadley might help the interagency process by providing Bush with clear options and ensuring his decisions were carried out. If so, Hadley would be less inclined to seek the forced consensus or bridging approach that I found ineffective in the first term. I hoped he would be more willing to move contentious issues up to the President for decision, where they belonged. I was particularly encouraged by his choice of a deputy, J. D. Crouch, who had served in the Defense Department before becoming the ambassador to Romania.

  I thought Rice could be a good secretary of state in that she was close and loyal to the President. To get the benefit of the skills and resources of the State Department, a president needs someone to lead it who is intent on having that often independent-minded agency follow his strategic guidance. I was confident Rice would be inclined and might even be able to do just that; she had an opportunity to become a secretary of state in the mold of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz by bringing the President’s agenda to the State Department rather than the world’s agenda, as reflected through our diplomats, to the President. Yet despite the realignment inside the Bush administration, 2005 and 2006 witnessed some diplomatic failures.

  On the steps of the U.S. Capitol at his second inauguration, President Bush proclaimed an ambitious goal for the nation: “ending tyranny in our world.” The State Department’s interpretation of the President’s conviction about the benefits of democracy led to complications with nations we needed as friends and partners. Promoting democracy and human rights in closed societies is laudable, and often serves U.S. interests. But sometimes the rhetoric came across as lecturing, and it could on occasion hurt our friends without actually improving human rights. I made a practice of asking whether the United States had any real leverage that might persuade foreign rulers to follow a different course to establish freer political and economic systems. Sometimes berating countries feels good to the beraters and wins domestic political points, but scolding them can often come at the expense of losing critical cooperation and alienating foreigners who see the United States as a bully.

  Instead of labeling countries as good or bad—democratic or nondemocratic, pro–human rights or anti–human rights—I thought a better way of categorizing countries was to consider the direction in which they were heading. If a country that had been a longtime abuser of human rights and a foe of democracy was making steps toward freer political and economic systems, I believed we should calculate whether continued progress in the right direction was likelier to be achieved by encouraging rather than publicly chiding its leadership. I recognized the U.S. interest—practical as well as moral—in having other countries respect basic human rights and function democratically. But I saw that interest of ours as one of several that needed to be considered in the making of U.S. policy. It was not the sole interest, and it did not necessarily trump all others.

  After Rice became secretary of state in 2005, she made it a priority to push Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf toward more democratic practices. Rice publicly called for Musharraf, the senior army officer, to seek democratic elections and relinquish his military uniform—a symbolic step designed to promote civilian rather than military leadership in Pakistan.5 Musharraf was trying to hold together a weak government, filled with elements that did not share his affinity for the United States. We were dependent on Pakistan’s logistic support for our efforts in Afghanistan; the country also had a formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons that could fall into the wrong hands if Musharraf’s government fell to a radical Islamist element. I questioned whether it was for U.S. officials to dictate what clothes Musharraf wore to work. I was disappointed but not surprised when only months After he complied with Rice’s request, he could no longer assert control over the military and was forced by various political forces to step down. The alternatives to Musharraf were, in my view, not likely to be better, and that has proven to be the case.

  A similar situation presented itself in Uzbekistan. In the days After 9/11, Uzbekistan had provided important cooperation for our activities in Afghanistan. From 2001 to 2006, I traveled there several times and met with Uzbek officials elsewhere. By his own admission, President Islam Karimov was not an American-style democrat—there were few if any in the region—but he had shown no hostility toward U.S. interests. In fact, to Russia’s displeasure, he had allowed U.S. forces to use his Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airfield, a key link by which many tens of thousands of tons of supplies and aid, as well as our military forces poured into Afghanistan. We were working closely with the Uzbek military and their helpful minister of defense, Kodir Gulyamov. He was a physicist by training and the first civilian minister of defense in the former Soviet Union. In the spring of 2005, all of that changed, and it led to what I thought was one of the most unfortunate, if unnoticed, foreign policy mistakes of our administration, one that was aided and abetted by a bipartisan group in Congress.

  The facts as best as can be determined are: I
n the early morning hours of May 13, 2005, in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan, heavily armed men stormed the town prison. It appeared that the goal of the assault was to release members of an Islamic extremist group accused of seeking to establish an Islamic state, a caliphate, in eastern Uzbekistan.6 The rebels attacked the town’s government center and took officials hostage, killing some of them.7 Before long, Uzbek government forces massed to put an end to the situation. A firefight between the insurgents and government forces ensued, and innocent bystanders, including human shields used by the rebels, were caught in the crossfire.8 The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency speculated that “[s]ecurity forces probably lost control of the situation and fired on noncombatants.”9 But information remained sketchy.

  Self-proclaimed human rights advocates with longstanding records of opposition to the Uzbek government quickly got into the act. By 2001, “human rights” had become a sizable global industry. For some it was a cause, for some a profession. Many seemed interested in embarrassing the United States and Israel while ignoring human rights abuses by oppressive regimes such as Cuba and Zimbabwe. The facts were often mangled in the process. In spite of the fact that video filmed at the time showed the attackers in Uzbekistan to be heavily armed, the group Human Rights Watch declared them peaceful “protesters” who had come under attack by government forces for being “especially pious” Muslims.* In the Western press, estimates of the number killed by the government ranged from 175 to well over 1,000. Comparisons were made to the massacre of Chinese citizens in Tiananmen Square, and stories circulated of a deliberate massacre of civilians peacefully demonstrating in the street.11 The Uzbek government—which was not accustomed to the demands of a free press—didn’t exactly help its case by refusing to provide much information about its side of events.