by Jim Proser
Philosophically, the new deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, is a near perfect match for Mattis. Wolfowitz has followed Mattis’s career since Desert Shield and Desert Storm, when Wolfowitz was undersecretary of defense to Dick Cheney. In Cheney’s office, Wolfowitz’s team raised $50 billion in allied financial support for the operation.10 Wolfowitz was in the room with Cheney, Colin Powell, and President George H. W. Bush when they decided on February 27, 1991, to destroy Saddam’s army on Highway 80 but leave Saddam alive in Baghdad. Wolfowitz later publicly regretted that decision, testifying before a congressional committee that “the best opportunity to overthrow Saddam was, unfortunately, lost in the month right after the war.”11
In that month after the war, Wolfowitz was horrified when “Saddam Hussein flew helicopters that slaughtered the people in the south and in the north who were rising up against him, while American fighter pilots flew overhead, desperately eager to shoot down those helicopters, and not allowed to do so.” He went on, “Some people might say—and I think I would sympathize with this view—that perhaps if we had delayed the cease-fire by a few more days, we might have got rid of Saddam Hussein.”12
Wolfowitz and Mattis see eye to eye, generally, on matters of warfare. Through dedicated study, they both have come to appreciate Eastern culture and empathize with the ordinary people in those regions. Wolfowitz, as ambassador to Indonesia under George H. W. Bush, a Jew in a majority Muslim country, fully embraced the culture, even learning the language. He was a highly effective and well-liked envoy with a “keen personal interest in development, including health care, agriculture and private sector expansion,” according to a Washington Post interview.13
During George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, Wolfowitz helped produce an influential ninety-page report called Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century.14 Although he is uncredited in the report, Mattis, with his intimate knowledge of current defense manpower and resources, may have been a significant contributor to Wolfowitz’s thinking. Echoing the recommendations in The Macedonian Conundrum, the report states, “At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”
The report’s concepts find their way into Bush’s campaign speeches and begin to form the Bush Doctrine, an aggressive national defense policy eventually including the concept of preemption, the justification of a first strike against perceived threats.
Through April 2001 Mattis helps Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld detail the emerging policy. Finally, the rebuilding of America’s defenses is set into motion after years of the Clinton “procurement holiday,” billed publicly as the “peace dividend” and credited to the president’s economic and diplomatic successes. The truth is that Mattis, working behind the scenes at the highest levels of political power, helps pull the lever to dismantle and reverse Clinton’s defense policy.
Now that he is actually working the controls of military power, Mattis is required to complete a mandatory course of instruction called Capstone for all new generals and admirals, taught over one month at the National Defense University. Through Capstone, Mattis is armed with the knowledge of how all the elements of national power are integrated. He learns the protocols for executing military strategies with interagency and multinational operations. At the age of fifty, he has been given the keys to America’s armory and the operating instructions.
Perhaps this achievement of power in 2001 is just one more instance of Jim Mattis being lucky, as Napoleon would have seen it. Or maybe, if you believe in such things, it is something closer to his destiny.
0846 Hours—11 September 2001
On this day 2,605 Americans—along with 372 foreign nationals from over 50 countries—are burned or crushed to death in Osama’s attacks against the Pentagon in Washington, DC, the World Trade Center towers in New York City, and United Airlines Flight 93. The victims include a group of children on a school trip and elderly grandparents returning from a family reunion.
It has been ten years since Desert Storm, but Mattis makes it plain to his superiors that he is a combat commander. Given command of the First Marine Expeditionary Brigade15 and assigned to conduct exercises with Egyptian forces, he forms up his command staff, starting with Marine lieutenant colonel Clarke Lethin.
As a young lieutenant, Lethin helped Mattis rejuvenate the failing recruiting station in Portland, Oregon. Working together, they maintained a vision and offered themselves as living examples of what a young man could make of himself as a Marine. They inspired their junior officers to exceptional efforts and turned the station around from barely adequate to remarkable success. But that was fifteen years ago, and Lethin is now looking forward to retirement from the Marine Corps. Mattis calls his old friend to recruit him for a new difficult and dangerous assignment with absolutely no upside that is beginning to percolate up through channels. At first, Mattis doesn’t even tell Lethin where they are going. “I don’t know where it is,” he says, “but we are going to do something, and I want you to come along.”16
Later, when Mattis is briefed on the coming expedition, he asks to have a private conversation with Lethin’s wife, Wendy, both to take some of the weight of explanation off his friend and to make sure Wendy and their young boys are on board. In his talk with Wendy, Mattis says, “We are going to go to Afghanistan and we’re going to kill those guys. This is going to be a long war and a lot of people are going to die. Are you ready?”17
All Mattis has to offer the family in return for Lethin’s hazardous duty and at least one year away from home is gratitude. The Lethin family once again answers the call to duty, agreeing to postpone Clarke’s return to civilian life.
With Lethin as his chief of staff, Mattis begins to form his core group of leaders, who will take a task force halfway around the world to fight in primitive, unforgiving Afghanistan. The force will include Mattis’s Marine Expeditionary Brigade and two amphibious ready groups of the Navy, organized around the warships USS Peleliu and USS Bataan.
Mattis tells his group, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to get over there and form a very small team . . . and we’re going to start thinking about what we are going to do to go kick some ass.”18 Typically, he insists on “a small staff comprised of aggressive officers who [are] able to act with initiative, make rapid decisions and recommendations, and exercise good judgment.” Because of the small staff, he makes it clear that everyone is expected to fill sandbags.19
In Washington, the creators of the emerging Bush Doctrine begin to grapple with the complexities of responding to an enemy without a state or even uniforms to identify them. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld starts sketching in the United States’ response on September 12 in a note to President Bush, that will later be reported by David Martin of CBS News. Rumsfeld writes, “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at the same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. Go massive, sweep it all up. Things related and not.”20
By September 30, Rumsfeld expands on his recommendations in a memo titled “Strategic Thoughts.”21 The Bush Doctrine is now to include the Global War on Terrorism as official US policy:
The US strategic theme should be aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism. US Special Operations Forces and intelligence personnel should make allies of Afghanis, Iraqis, Lebanese, Sudanese and others who would use US equipment, training, financial, military and humanitarian support to root out and attack the common enemies . . .
. . . It would instead be surprising and impressive if we built our forces up patiently, took some early action outside of Afghanistan, perhaps in multiple locations, and began not exclusively or primarily with military targets but with equip-and-train activities with local opposition forces coupled with humanitarian aid and intense information operations . . .
. .
. A key war aim would be to persuade or compel states to stop supporting terrorism . . .
. . . If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map, the US will not achieve its aim. There is value in being clear on the order of magnitude of the necessary change. The USG [US government] should envision a goal along these lines:
New regimes in Afghanistan and another key State (or two) that supports terrorism (to strengthen political and military efforts to change policies elsewhere).
Syria out of Lebanon.
Dismantlement or destruction of WMD capabilities in [redacted].
End of [redacted] support for terrorism.
End of many other countries’ support or tolerance of terrorism.
* * *
For reasons known only to the gods of war, Mattis is once again at the tip of the spear as a front-line commander leading America against a Middle Eastern enemy. Everything he has ever studied and worked for seems to have prepared him for this moment commanding America’s powerful war machine. What he is unaware of at the time is the extent of Rumsfeld’s intentions with the Global War on Terrorism, as revealed in Rumsfeld’s first private note to President Bush the day after 9/11. Saddam Hussein was included at the top of the enemies list, along with Osama.
Saddam has earned his top spot on Rumsfeld’s list. Since his defeat at the hands of Mattis and other “crusaders” in 1991, he has been supporting a wide variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations and investing heavily in training camps for foreign “fighters,” particularly Palestinians. Documents captured after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 reveal meticulous accounts written just after 1991 of development, construction, certification, and training for car bombs and suicide vests. Along with Osama, Saddam had been actively hunting Americans for over a decade when 9/11 happened.
Although Saddam and Osama do not agree on the ultimate goals of jihad, they have each promoted it for their own purposes. Both want Europeans out of Arab lands, but Osama wants an Islamic caliphate ruled by theocrats, and Saddam wants a pan-Arab state ruled, presumably, by himself. In America they’ve found a common enemy. For his part, Saddam has financed, equipped, and trained groups that are either associated directly with al-Qaeda, such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by Osama’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, or generally share al-Qaeda’s vision. The popular claim by Bush Administration opponents that Saddam had nothing to do with Osama and 9/11 is technically true but, in practical terms, naive. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bush have not been fooled by Saddam’s front groups or Osama’s denials of responsibility. They expanded the Bush Doctrine to attack both enemies, and then went looking for a gunfighter like Mattis to track them down and kill them both.
9
Graveyard of Empires
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Young British Soldier”
May God keep you away from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the revenge of the Afghans.
—Alexander the Great
The Marines’ invasion of Afghanistan is a task only one of a very few, like Mattis, could have managed. Extending that campaign into a second long war with Saddam Hussein is a task that almost none but Mattis, a bachelor with few commitments at home, could have completed. Even with Mattis’s unique qualities of leadership, neither of these goals are good bets in 2001.
The distance from the sea that Marines can travel inland and still be effective, according to decades-old Marine doctrine, is 200 miles. Just to get to the border of landlocked Afghanistan from the Arabian Sea is 350. Mattis considers this first problem of existing Marine doctrine and eventually concludes, “Doctrine is the refuge of the unimaginative.”1
He has to get access to critical seaports and airfields from America’s unsteady ally Pakistan to transport his task force north into Afghanistan. He flies northwest 700 miles from the USS Peleliu to Islamabad, Pakistan, with Lieutenant Colonels Broadmeadow and Carl, paying a surprise visit to Wendy Chamberlin, the new US ambassador to Pakistan. Only a few weeks earlier, Chamberlin presented her credentials to Pakistani president Mussharaf. Now, surprised and annoyed to see Mattis and his Marines standing in front of her without an appointment, she asks sharply what they are doing in her office. In his gentlemanly and respectful way, Mattis introduces himself and his officers, then answers her question with a grin: “Me and about a thousand of my best friends are going to go up north to Afghanistan to kill some people.”2
Chamberlin, apparently relieved or amused by Mattis’s straight talk, a rarity in her line of work, invites him and his men to sit down. In what will become a fast friendship and close working partnership, the relatively new general and new ambassador talk for a long while about the general’s concept of operations and limited military intelligence and basing resources, as well as the intent of the Bush Administration after 9/11. In spite of her relative inexperience in Pakistan, Mattis will later comment that Chamberlin was “magnificent,” going on, “Frankly, we couldn’t have done the job without her leadership and assistance and her guts in taking risks. I hid nothing from her, held nothing back on the details of our coordination with the Pakistanis and the ConOps [concept of operations] for our attack.”3
A few weeks before the attacks, Chamberlin had a private dinner with President Pervez Musharraf at the Pakistani ambassador’s house, where Musharraf said, “My vision of the country hinges on increasing foreign investment in Pakistan and economic growth, but the level of domestic terrorism is currently too high. Pakistan needs strategic depth in Afghanistan to ensure that there is a friendly regime on Pakistan’s western border.”4
Musharraf was speaking of the Taliban. This was the friendly regime on the Pakistani border ensuring the strategic depth he needed. His intelligence service, the ISI, had painstakingly developed and encouraged the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan over the past decade. It was about to become Chamberlin’s job to persuade Musharraf to betray the Taliban and risk not only his strategic depth in Afghanistan but his own survival at the hands of his notoriously bad-tempered intelligence service.
In Washington at that time, the negotiations were almost as difficult. President George W. Bush and his National Security Council were struggling with the strategy to topple the Taliban and seize northeastern Afghanistan. At this point Mattis and the Marine Corps were not even considered a possible option. As Historian Benjamin Lambeth notes, “The decision-making process for Enduring Freedom was very much the opposite of that of the Gulf War, in which General Norman Schwarzkopf led from his forward headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, issuing broad guidance to his component commanders and expecting them to develop and execute specific operational-level plans. Instead, decision making for Afghanistan was closer in character to Operation Allied Force [in Yugoslavia], in which top civilians and the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] chairman in Washington kept General Wesley Clark on a short leash.”5
In short, it is a tug-of-war between the administration and the military for control of the coming war in Afghanistan. Even within the military, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seem at odds with each other and with General Tommy Franks, commander in chief at US Central Command. Franks is a flinty, mercurial dictator with a soft spot for his subordinates and a hard edge for his superiors. He met with Pakistani ISI chief General Mahmoud Ahmed the day before the 9/11 attacks, when Franks had already targeted al-Qaeda for punishment and wanted Pakistan’s cooperation. He said of the meeting, “I had informed General Mahmoud that cooperation was a two-way street. Pakistan needed parts for its military aircraft and America needed targeting information on al-Qaeda. Mahmoud ‘got the message’ and promised to brief President Musharraf.”6
But that meeting was too late. While Franks and Mahmoud were meeting, Osama’s men, m
asquerading as journalists, assassinated Ahmad Shah Masood, the one real leader among Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance and America’s only ally in the region. Two days later, Osama launched the attacks on 9/11. America reeled in disbelief, having ignored several unspecific warnings of a terrorist attack. It was a massive failure of military intelligence, and General Franks seemed to have been outplayed by a ragtag band of terrorists. It didn’t help the tone of negotiations with the Joint Chiefs.
The day after the attacks, Franks is already deep into strategizing the killing of Osama and destruction of al-Qaeda. After reviewing maps of the region, he comes to the early conclusion that the Marines won’t be playing a part in the operation. “We can’t make use of the Marines’ amphibious capabilities,” he says. “Whatever the final shape of the operation, it’ll depend on airlift.”7
It appears that Franks, lacking Mattis’s disregard for doctrine and reliance on creative problem-solving, is referring to the doctrinal limits of Marines to operate within two hundred miles of the seacoast. The arc of history bends back toward Mattis’s leadership in the war with further high-level talks.
On September 11, just hours after the attacks, Pakistani General Ahmed receives America’s demands from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who explains to the general without diplomatic niceties, “No American will want to have anything to do with Pakistan in our moment of peril if you’re not with us. It’s black or white.”
Ahmed begins to waver, pleading that Armitage has to understand history. Armitage cuts him off: “No. History begins today.”
The next day, September 12, in Islamabad, Ambassador Chamberlin receives State Department instructions and goes to see President Musharraf to ask him a simple question: Are you with us or against us?