The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Within forty-eight hours, Blair was again travelling the globe as the coalition’s chief advocate to the world. Not everyone was impressed. Even the saintly Nelson Mandela jibed that Blair was turning himself into ‘America’s Foreign Secretary’. The Americans were happy for him to take on this role. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was preoccupied trying to cover his own back from his enemies inside the administration.59 George Bush ‘felt pinned to Washington’60 and anyway had little time and even less inclination to trot the globe nurturing allies. It was ‘a really trying and stressing time for the United States’, says Condi Rice, noting that 9/11 was followed by an alarming spate of anthrax attacks. Blair’s willingness to take on the role ‘was a multiplier effect for the United States that at that point had a lot to do’.61

  The opportunity presented itself, and was grabbed with relish by Blair, to be the roving ambassador for the campaign against the Taliban. According to Bush’s Chief of Staff:

  It was very important because Prime Minister Blair could move more nimbly than the President. When the President of the United States travels he has a very large footprint, and expectations are frequently beyond what can be realised. Whereas the Prime Minister could travel with a relatively small footprint, deliver very important messages and help to find allies that otherwise might not be found.62

  Blair was not only willing, he was eager to effectively become an Ambassador at Large for Bush. ‘Tony is in his element. He loves this stuff,’ one of his senior aides told me during this period.63 ‘Blair was at the height of his powers. He had great domestic capital and great international capital,’ comments David Manning. ‘The role went with his natural activism and suited Bush at the time.’64 It made him feel pivotal to historic events on a stage much greater than Britain. During a parliamentary debate that autumn, Blair didn’t mind at all when a Conservative MP inadvertently referred to him as ‘the President’. He was transcending being the electorally successful leader of a European power to become a globe-girdling statesman.

  In the eight weeks after 9/11, a period which covered the build-up and the execution of the military campaign in Afghanistan, Blair took thirty-one flights for fifty-four meetings with other leaders.65 He travelled nearly 50,000 miles, a double circumnavigation of the globe, on coalition-building and intelligence-gathering tours. He called on Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Geneva, Moscow, Islamabad, Delhi, Geneva, Muscat, Cairo, Damascus, Riyadh, Amman and Jerusalem. It was a commitment to the cause that was not displayed by any other ally of the United States.

  It was not a role without risk and Blair would candidly confess in private that it meant ‘getting his hands dirty’ by shaking them with some of the grislier leaders of the unfree world. A tour of the Middle East in late October and early November reverberated to the sound of Arab leaders slapping him in the face. His first call was on Damascus, where Bashar al-Assad, the young new leader of Syria’s police state, seemed to offer the prospect of a more constructive relationship with the West than his father. Their private talks went tolerably well, but at the joint news conference afterwards Assad played to the Arab gallery, giving Blair ‘a total banjaxing’ by lambasting the war in Afghanistan and condoning terrorist attacks on Israel. The look on Blair’s face showed that he was already translating it into the headlines he would get back home.

  As soon as he escaped that ordeal, he turned to Tom Kelly. ‘Don’t bullshit me,’ he said. ‘How bad is it?’ ‘Bad,’ nodded Kelly.66 The headlines were indeed terrible, speaking of his ‘disaster in Damascus’. Afterwards, Blair tried to laugh it off, saying: ‘It could have been worse, he could have taken out a gun and shot me.’67

  Other legs of that tour were mildly more productive. While secretively supportive of the toppling of the Taliban, neither the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia nor the King of Jordan would publicly support the military action for fear of the reaction on the Arab street. Blair pointedly told the Saudis that George Bush also had ‘his street’. They should not think that they were the only ones with public opinion to satisfy.68 He came away empty-handed when he tried to persuade the Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, that this was the moment to advance the peace process. The leaders of the Gulf States, worried that a prolonged conflict would inflame their own populations, urged Blair to tell Bush to hurry up and get the campaign over before Ramadan.69 Some of the Arab press expressed grudging admiration that he was prepared to engage with their grievances and take hostile questions, not something their own undemocratic leaders ever did.

  The slights he was prepared to bear and the miles he was ready to travel enhanced his value to the White House. He was lionised in America. Enormously popular there,70 he became one of those rare British Prime Ministers – Churchill and Thatcher were others – whom Americans recognise almost as instantly as their own President. The conservative Wall Street Journal, which a few months earlier had been describing Britain as a Third World country, now saluted Blair as ‘America’s chief foreign ambassador’. The New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s noisy tabloid, commended his ‘bull-dog spirit’. In the American media, his oratorical skills were elevated to the same pedestal as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. In the British media, he was variously compared with Churchill, Gladstone and Palmerston. These analogies, even when they were intended to be cautionary or jeering, further burnished his status.

  As he travelled the globe sustaining the 68-nation alliance against the Taliban, he looked like the staunchest of allies in the eyes of the United States and seemed a moderating influence on Washington to everyone else. Even some of his most vituperative critics at home regarded this period as a high point of his premiership. ‘I think this was Tony’s best moment,’ says Clare Short, who could never be confused with a member of his fan club. ‘Tony bestrode the world stage, started getting on aeroplanes, going around the world, trying to hold everyone together with America, have a sensible strategy towards Afghanistan. At that stage, he was doing absolutely the right thing. And I was proud of him.’71

  It bred an uneasy mixture of respect and resentment among his counterparts in the European Union. European leaders – many more of them than Blair had originally intended – came for a dinner at Number 10 on 4 November. There was already an atmosphere about the way in which Blair had appointed himself as America’s voice abroad. Jacques Chirac then launched into a vigorous denunciation of the conduct of the military campaign. Waving his fork as he delivered a mordant warning, the French President predicted: ‘A mosque will be bombed during Ramadan.’72

  The Afghan campaign was being run by a War Cabinet which met daily early in the morning. ‘Blair would come down from his flat looking tousled having just had his shower while the rest of us had been up for hours,’ noted one envious member of the War Cabinet.73 The Prime Minister would typically open by turning to Admiral Boyce and asking: ‘What are we achieving?’ He was visibly frustrated by Boyce’s frank replies that it was hard to interpret the impact of the bombing and missile strikes. His ‘impatience with the military’ was palpable, as was his lack of chemistry with the cautious Boyce.74 There had been three successful operations by Special Forces, but by their nature they could not be boasted about. The Admiral was badgered by an impatient Campbell: ‘We want to show that we’re doing something.’ Boyce in turn found it hard to conceal his distaste for Campbell’s obsession with how the campaign could be sold to the media and thought it ‘dangerous’ that all else was regarded as subordinate to Downing Street’s craving ‘for headline success’.75 Blair also vented some of his irritability on the Defence Secretary. Geoff Hoon remarks: ‘Tony was always more concerned about how it looked here rather than how it was going there.’76 The media was inevitably reporting the victims of the military attacks, refugees flooding out of Kabul and anti-American riots in Pakistan. The Americans started talking about ‘running out of targets’. Their use of cluster and daisy cutter bombs, which inflicted large civilian casualties, were alienating public opinion. The world was reacting in a fairly pred
ictable way to the spectacle of the planet’s most powerful military machine unleashing so many munitions on one of the poorest countries on the face of the earth.

  For ground forces, the Americans were relying on the Northern Alliance, a loose coalition of Afghan tribal chieftains who were united in their hatred of the Taliban but not a whole lot else. Colin Powell would joke that ‘they may be in the north, but they are not an alliance.’77

  By early November, Blair and many of his team were fearful that the campaign was stuck.78 The apparent lack of progress in defeating the Taliban was accompanied by the flaking away of domestic support for the war. He did not share these fears with his Cabinet, who were only intermittently given progress reports and were never invited to debate strategy, setting a pattern for the future. Decisions were increasingly not taken in the War Cabinet either. The military ‘did not like Gordon Brown’s presence there. When you’re fighting a war, you don’t want the bean counter sitting in the corner telling you what you can’t spend,’ said one senior military figure.79 Blair was anyway averse to discussion, saying: ‘You cannot have a campaign run by committee.’80

  The key debates took place in cabals convened by the Prime Minister in his den. When Boyce briefed on the progress of the campaign, it left the Prime Minister increasingly apprehensive. ‘The military command sounded alarmist about how badly things were going.’81 As was also totally characteristic, Number 10 displaced its own anxieties by lashing out at media criticism of the conduct of the campaign. Downing Street berated broadcasters for giving too much airtime to ‘Spin Laden’ as some in Number 10 took to calling him.

  The real revelation of the Afghan campaign was about the Americans. Though this was not yet apparent in public, to some on the inside it was becoming clear that the Bush administration was riven with internal conflict. The Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld and the State Department under Colin Powell were simply not communicating. Boyce found that the Pentagon relied on him to supply information to them about the thinking at the State Department and vice versa. Even more astonishingly, Boyce knew more about US military plans than did America’s most senior general, Dick Myers. Rumsfeld entirely bypassed Myers and the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The US Defense Secretary instead gave orders direct to Tommy Franks, the General running the Afghan campaign. ‘The highest part of the American military command were entirely cut out.’82 This was an early warning, if Blair cared to heed it, of the perils of being too enthusiastic about tying himself to the dysfunctional Bush administration.

  On 8 November, the Prime Minister made a quick dash across the Atlantic for a six-hour visit to Washington to try to convince Bush to display more sensitivity towards international opinion and make more effort to win over the Muslim world. A repeated Blair refrain was that the West had to be more vigorous about making its case, an implicit concession that bin Laden, who had become a poster boy terrorist for demonstrators in some parts of the Islamic world, was winning the propaganda battle in Muslim countries. There was also ‘a worry about how the Northern Alliance would behave when they occupied Kabul. Would there be a tremendous bloodbath?’83

  At their joint news conference afterwards, Bush trowelled on the praise for his visitor, saying that America had ‘no better friend in the world than Great Britain’ and he’d ‘got no better person I would like to talk to than Tony Blair’.

  The air campaign had begun exactly a month before. Bush shrugged off questions about the apparent lack of progress by saying: ‘This is a long struggle and a new kind of war’, which Blair echoed by adding: ‘This is not a conventional conflict.’84 In private, Blair was rebuffed when he attempted to interest the President in putting more effort into the Middle East peace process. There was also a clear and public retort to Blair’s multilateralism when Donald Rumsfeld declared: ‘The coalition must not determine the mission.’ Here was another warning of how little the Bush administration cared for the notion of ‘the world community’ advanced by Blair in his conference speech.

  These differences did not erupt any more publicly at this stage because suddenly the campaign scored a sequence of rapid successes. As David Manning puts it: ‘There was a worry: “My God is this ever going to move” and then it all moves very quickly.’85 When the fall of the Taliban regime finally happened, it was swift. The Northern Alliance advanced with the support of the US air force directed by Special Forces teams on the ground. On 9 November, the key objective of Mazar-i-Sharif was captured. The major city in the west, Herat, was taken without a fight. On the 13th, Kabul fell and with it Mohamed Omar’s diabolical regime. The next day, Blair boasted to MPs of the ‘total collapse’ of the Taliban and hailed ‘the liberation’ of Afghanistan from ‘one of the most brutal and oppressive regimes in the world’.86

  Never had regime change appeared to be so easy. Television images of US missiles and bombs flashing in the night sky over Kabul were deceptive about how the campaign was won. In reality, the unpopular Taliban mostly scarpered from their trenches before the bombs fell. Large bribes supplied by the CIA to local warlords also melted resistance. The war was basically won with ‘suitcases of money and buying the Northern Alliance. There was very little standing fighting,’ says Admiral Boyce. ‘The Taliban faded and disappeared with surprising speed.’87 Most of them vanished from their front-line positions and fled Kabul and Kandahar without putting up any resistance. The aim of closing down al-Qaeda training camps was easily achieved. The rapidity of this victory seemed to confound all the dire warnings beforehand about Afghanistan being a notorious graveyard for foreign armies.

  Bush privately told Blair that he thought Osama bin Laden was dead, but could not say so in public in case he should pop up.88 Pop up he soon did, issuing bragging and taunting video tapes through al-Jazeera. The principal obsession of the Americans evaded the Special Forces and bunker busters that scoured and blasted the mountains of Tora Bora.

  That failure only slightly diluted the triumphalist assessment of the campaign in the White House. One hawk wrote that ‘with less than a month to prepare, American troops and aircraft had charged into this country, overthrown its government, destroyed its terrorist bases, and hunted down their enemies, while losing only fifteen of their own to enemy action.’89

  Bush’s approval ratings surged again. He did not have much to say about the future of Afghanistan, which made a striking contrast with his British partner. Blair bought into the argument that the West helped to create the monster of al-Qaeda by allowing Afghanistan to become a failed state in the years after the Soviet Union retreated from its disastrous attempt to occupy the country. ‘This time,’ he promised, ‘we will not walk away.’90

  In the opening week of the New Year, he was the first foreign leader to make the hazardous journey to Kabul. Though it was now two months since the Taliban retreat, the capital was still like ‘a war zone’.91 Cherie, who decided to risk being ‘a martyr’ with her husband, joined the trip. They crossed the Khyber Pass aboard a Hercules fitted with counter-measures against missile attack from fighters on the ground. Conditions on board were primitive. The loo was a bucket. As they entered Afghan airspace, all the aircraft lights were turned off. After a corkscrew descent on Bagram air base, the Hercules landed in total darkness. A red carpet was laid out on the tarmac. It served more than an honorific purpose. The airport had been sown with landmines and not all of them were yet cleared. ‘Stay on the carpet,’ they were all warned before they disembarked. ‘Don’t deviate to left or right.’ 92

  As Alastair Campbell got off the plane, his big black briefcase burst open, sending all his papers, including secret documents, fluttering over the runway. Campbell and Manning scrambled to retrieve them in the dark without getting themselves blown up.93

  The Afghan national army band then struck up a welcome. Blair was taken to a former Soviet barracks, in which all the windows had been blown out, for his talks with Hamid Karzai, the interim leader who would become the Afghan President. Trying not to shiver in a temperature o
f minus ten, the Prime Minister pledged that the West would not betray Afghanistan again. He promised Karzai that the allies were ‘in this for the long term’.94

  Was this a promise that Blair was in a position to keep? George Bush took an utterly divergent view. Much had been changed by 9/11, but one thing that had not was the Republican President’s visceral aversion to any sort of commitment to ‘nation-building’. The British embassy in Washington warned Blair that he should not even use the phrase, so allergic were the Americans to it.95

  At a meeting of his National Security Council on the very day that the Taliban fled Kabul, the President declared: ‘The US forces will not stay. We don’t do police work.’96

  This disastrous doctrine had a very influential advocate in Donald Rumsfeld. The British were beginning to recognise that he was ‘a consummate bureaucratic warrior who knew how to ruthlessly cut other people out of decisions’.97 Rumsfeld took the view that the mission should be confined to the installation of a US-friendly regime and the hunting of al-Qaeda. One senior British officer characterises the attitude: ‘The posse has arrived. We’re into Kabul. End of story.’98

  David Manning was having constant conversations with Condi Rice about how to stabilise the ‘very tenuous new regime’ in Afghanistan and who was going to contribute to an international force.99 Blair was forced to spend some of his precious political capital with Bush persuading the American President to overrule his Defense Secretary. Even then, Rumsfeld succeeded in keeping the American deployment to a minimum. The Pentagon was neither interested in making a serious commitment to secure Afghanistan nor in taking action against the heroin trade. Michael Boyce ‘stitched together’ a NATO peacekeeping force almost from scratch using his personal relationships with other military commanders in Europe and the English-speaking world.100 The British ‘volunteered’ to provide the command of the force in the belief that ‘you get political clout by having one of your nationals as commander.’101 For all Boyce’s efforts, even he regarded the force as ‘not enough’ to do the job properly.102