Bush At War

by Bob Woodward

  In Powell's analysis, military operations were only a part of the three phases - 2B - and the operations had to be designed to avoid diplomatic problems with the Arabs or Europeans.

  Rumsfeld could have exploded. He said nothing.

  Whether the others agreed with Powell's framework, what he said had a certain realism to it. Hadley saw the process as makeshift, "Come as you are." They were making it up as they went.

  Tenet said, "We have to avoid looking like a U.S. invasion. That message is even more important in the south, to get the Pashtuns to rise. The northerners are getting a lot already - they're getting a lot of money." He knew the critical importance of money.

  "Do we have enough weapons in the north?" Rice asked.

  "We got an assessment from the field," Tenet replied. "We have to look at it."

  "How do we deal with actions by al Qaeda? We need to think about the unconventional, how they will respond to what we are doing," Card said.

  None of them really had any idea, neither conventional nor unconventional. They were underprepared for what had happened on September 11, and uncertain about the path ahead.

  Rice said that the president needed more information. He was also hanging out there, just like they were. "What's the first 24, 48, 72 hours of this operation going to look like? We need to get back to the president on that. It needs to be briefed to this group." The military plan needed to be briefed. But first they had to figure out what it was going to be.

  After the meeting, Rice spoke to Powell.

  Is it not, she asked smiling, the secretary of state's concern to arrange for the allies to assist? I'm just doing your job.

  Powell laughed.

  RICE BRIEFED THE president. It's coming along, she told him, but we aren't there.

  What's the problem?

  She summarized, focusing especially on the Combat Search and Rescue. "You might want to press about that on Monday."

  Rice was sympathetic to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. It was a tough nut. The military could not just show up and start bombing. They had to have bases. After September 11, all the necessary countries had given permission for overflight rights. That was the easy part. When it got down to can we run elite commando Special Operations Forces out of your territory, it got hard. There was also the absence of good targets, and a president who was determined that bombing not just be for show faced a bit of a catch-22. The Pentagon could not say what the first 24 or 48 hours would look like until they had the basing rights lined up. It didn't just look dreary, Rice thought, it was dreary.

  IN THE NORTHEASTERN corner of Afghanistan, CIA team leader Gary dispatched several of his men to the Takar region, the front between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban forces. They went north, a good 60 miles to the east of Konduz. They found the Northern Alliance forces disciplined, their clothing and weapons clean. But the safeties were on the rifles, a signal that this was not a hot combat zone. The troops lined up in formations and conducted drills. There was a command structure. But there were not enough troops or heavy weapons to move against the Taliban, who were dug in on the other side. Like World War I trench warfare, the military situation was static.

  Gary knew that CIA headquarters believed that the Taliban would be a tenacious enemy in a fight and that any U.S. strike would bring out its sympathizers in Afghanistan and in the region, especially Pakistan. They would rally around Mullah Omar.

  Gary saw it differently. He believed that massive, heavy bombing of the Taliban front lines - "really good stuff," as he called it - would cause the Taliban to break and would change the picture. On October 1, he sent a SECRET appraisal to headquarters. "In this case," he wrote, "a Taliban collapse could be rapid, with the enemy shrinking to a small number of hard-core Mullah Omar supporters in the early days or weeks of a military campaign."

  That's horseshit!" could almost be heard off the Directorate of Operations walls as the old hands and experts openly disparaged the appraisal. But Tenet took the cable to Bush.

  "I want more of this," said the president.

  AT 9:30 A.M., Monday, October 1, Bush met with the NSC.

  Tenet reported that Jawbreaker was on the ground with the Northern Alliance and he hoped to have a second team in soon. "In the south they're not going well, they're not doing that much." The south was still a bridge too far. The Afghan strategy was still in limbo.

  It was General Myers's first day as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He gave a detailed status report on the airfield in Uzbekistan. "They can do five flights a day, only in daylight, only in C-17s. Think they can handle two aircraft at once but they can't do C-5s. It'll be 12 days before we're fully ready up there in Uzbekistan. It would be six to eight days if we could go 12 hours a day. But you'd get further if we go 24 hours a day. And we're taking in a deployable staff to try and make it 24-hour-capable. We need 67 flights in order to have enough flights giving us a CSAR capability."

  It would take 67 deliveries from the C-17s to ferry in the personnel, equipment and helicopters to get up and fully ready with the search and rescue.

  "So that's going to delay our special operations?" the president asked.

  Yes, and it could delay bombing in the north because they would have no search and rescue.

  "In the south we're ready to go with bombers and cruise missiles," Myers said. "We'll do special operations later in the month. "We'll do lily pads with carriers as our operating base, but we need Oman as a base to load up the carrier."

  The British exercise in Oman was still crowding out U.S. basing Powell said he would see if they could encourage Oman to rearrange things. Maybe the British would be willing to cut short their exercise and allow us to get in there earlier, he said.

  The president said he would talk to Tony Blair.

  "But if we get the British exercise out of the way, we still need Omani approval," Powell noted. That did not figure to be a major hurdle, since the U.S. military had staged activities from Oman for over two decades, going back to the aborted 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran. But each extra step took precious time.

  "Look," Bush said, "we need to look at alternative ways to do this thing. Couldn't we load up a carrier with our Special Operations Forces someplace else? Why does it have to be Oman?"

  "We'll look at that," Myers promised.

  "Your people think we need to do something militarily at this point?" Bush asked Tenet.

  "Yes. We can work the south, look at B-52s heading up to the north. It would complement the guerrilla war."

  "We're going to review it every day," the president said. "I think we need something by the weekend or shortly thereafter. The targets in the north could be a second phase." There was a discussion of how far up north into Afghanistan they could bomb without the CSAR. The answer was that some targets would not be covered.

  "It's not perfect," he said, "but it's time to get moving. Are we going to talk to Tommy today?"

  Rice said General Franks would be coming Wednesday afternoon.

  "We're going to do it by video on Wednesday," Rumsfeld corrected her.

  "It is impossible in war to get everything perfect," the president later recalled, "and therefore you try to get as much perfect as possible." He felt they should have been bombing already. "The moment had been there as far as I was concerned. I was fully prepared to tell the nation through body language, and if need be, word, that our troops will be as protected as they can be, but it is time to take the action to the enemy."

  THAT AFTERNOON TENET and his special operations chief for counterterrorism, Hank, went to the Pentagon to meet with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Myers. Tenet's chief of station in Islamabad, Bob, was going to come up on the secure video.

  Bob said he expected that the shock and awe of bombing would open up negotiations with moderate Taliban. A bombing pause might be desirable for such negotiations. He was concerned about civil war between the north and south. Hard bombing in the north might allow the Northern Alliance, General Fahim and the others, the ethnic
Tajiks and Uzbeks, to make a lot of progress. In the south, the Pashtuns would look on this unfavorably. The Pashtuns would eventually see progress in the north as an attack against them. Again, a bombing pause might give the Pashtun tribes in the south some time to gain traction on the ground.

  Rumsfeld said that as far as he was concerned there were not going to be any bombing pauses - especially for some kind of negotiations. Period. Bombing pauses smacked of Vietnam. No way.

  "GOT ANYTHING YOU'RE doing today?" Rumsfeld said to Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke in a phone call to her home at about 6 A.M., Tuesday, October 2. Later that day, he said, they - she included - were going to the Middle East and South Asia to visit Saudi Arabia, Oman, Uzbekistan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar. They would be back Friday night or Saturday morning.

  That morning at the NSC meeting, Rumsfeld said, "I want to give the final briefing at 2:30 P.M. today, and then I want to button it up." He meant it literally. No one else was supposed to speak publicly.

  The president asked, "Is CSAR going to be ready in the south?"

  "It will be ready," Myers answered.

  Rumsfeld said they had a solution to bomb in the north. "We can hit targets in the north without CSAR using B-2s and cruise missiles." The B-2s are Stealth bombers that cannot be picked up by any Taliban radar so they could not be attacked. The pilots and crew would only be in jeopardy if their bombers had an accident or malfunctioned - a risk he was willing to take. The unmanned cruise missiles were not a problem.

  "It's going after it without the optimal weapon," he said, "but if we do that we can get all the targets over the first five days."

  Tactical bombers would be the optimal weapons because they flew lower and could visually sight targets. Without laser target designators from Special Forces on the ground, the high-flying bombers would be at a disadvantage.

  The plan had just ever so much a ring of how Clinton might do it - safe, less than optimal, a compromise. No one raised the point, but there was some discomfort.

  "We'll use the cruise missiles, B-1s, B-2s, B-52s, TAG Air in the south," Rumsfeld said. And, just to be clear, he added, "All targets will get the preferred weapons in the south. North, we'll get all targets but without the preferred weapons.

  "We're not going to be able to do Special Forces in the north. In the south it's a question mark on special operations. The issue is with Oman, and we'll have to work it out."

  The president liked the idea of using the USS Kitty Hawk as a platform for special operations. "Psychologically it shows it's a different kind of war, and we're going to be doing things differently."

  "Once we get an okay on Oman for the special operations," Rumsfeld told them, "it'll still take 10 days. But you know the targets are not impressive for special ops at this point. But it's still unfortunate that we can't be doing special operations contemporaneous with the air operations."

  He planned to keep such a clamp on operational details that the press and the public would not have to know what was less than optimal, not preferred, even unfortunate.

  Tenet said the CIA was expanding in the north and looking for ways in the south.

  "We have sent Special Forces in from the north, they'll arrive today. We're looking for ways to get them into the south," Rumsfeld said. His Special Forces teams were at staging areas outside Afghanistan, not yet in-country. It was a source of mounting frustration.

  "The first targets will be air defense, some military targets and camps. We'll hope to have emerging targets in the days after the first couple of days. The first day there'll be humanitarian airdrops, all of them in the south, C-17s. They'll be from about 18,000 feet." That could put them out of the reach of any Taliban air defense that survived the first strike, though there seemed to remain some worry a plane could be shot down.

  The president, focused as always on the public relations component, asked Defense to work with Hughes on the "themes" that were going to be used in the announcement of military action.

  RUMSFELD DISPATCHED A 15-page TOP SECRET order that day to the service chiefs, the combatant commands and the undersecretaries: "Campaign Against Terrorism: Strategic Guidance for the U.S. Department of Defense."

  If there was waffling in other departments about what the president wanted, he was going to make sure there was none in his. The guidance paper, which had the force of an order, said that the president had ordered a global war on terrorism. That meant just that, not only the al Qaeda network or Afghanistan. In a section on "means," Rumsfeld said "All tools of national power" would be utilized in the war on global terrorism. The department should anticipate multiple military operations in multiple theaters.

  The focus was terrorist organizations, state sponsors of terrorism and nonstate sponsors including terrorist funding organizations. Another focus was directed at weapons of mass destruction.

  It said specifically that the department would be targeting "organizations, states that harbor, sponsor, finance, sanction, or otherwise support those organizations or their state supporters to acquire or produce weapons of mass destruction."

  ARMITAGE, POWELL'S DEPUTY, had little interest in appearing on television talk shows. When the White House called early that week asking him to make the rounds, he politely declined. They pressed.

  The White House wanted to counter charges that the U.S. was not getting everything it wanted from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because of political pressures in those countries.

  Armitage went to Powell and explained about the White House request. "Look, that's not my deal," he told his boss.

  "Nah, I'm in the icebox again," Powell replied. Maybe because he was pushing to release a white paper detailing evidence against bin Laden. "We've got to get the story out, so go do it," he told Armitage.

  On October 3, Armitage appeared on ABC's Good Morning America and CNN's Live This Morning. Asked on CNN if there was a degree of disagreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia, he said, "Well, every nation has a home political audience, but I'm unaware of any major difficulties with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia." He told ABC that the administration was "quite heartened that the anti-American activity in Pakistan has been relatively low."

  The message had been dutifully delivered: the Saudis were cooperating, Pakistan was under control.

  ON WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, inside Afghanistan, Gary went in search of an airfield to bring supplies into Northern Alliance territory. The team found one airfield in an area called Golbahar that had been used by the British in 1919. He asked the Alliance's intelligence chief Arif to grade out an area and turn it into an airstrip, and handed out another $200,000. He bought three jeeps for $19,000 and forked over another $22,000 for a tanker truck and helicopter fuel. Arif promised they would buy the truck in Dushanbe and drive it over the mountains to the CIA team, but it never arrived.

  Gary's team did front line surveys of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces, getting exact geographic coordinates - precise GPS (Global Positioning System) readings. Many Pakistani fundamentalists had come over and joined the Taliban. Gary got exact GPS readings on their locations.

  U.S. bombing with precision weapons would be coming. He was confident, but he had lived through the five-and-a-half-month buildup for the Gulf War, and he knew careful preparation took a long time. Bombing seemed a long way off, maybe months, and no advance warning had come in on their secure communications system from CIA headquarters. So his cables began asking for humanitarian supplies for the Afghan people - food, blankets, medicine.

  THE PRINCIPALS MET at 9:30 A.M. on Wednesday.

  Wolfowitz, sitting in for Rumsfeld, said, "We've got permission to do CSAR, search and rescue, from the Uzbeks today and it could be up in time."

  General Myers reported that they were still trying to find a role for the key allies.

  Powell said there had to be leadership in Kabul after a Taliban defeat that represented all the Afghan people. Richard Haass, his policy planning director, would go to Rome to visit with the fo
rmer king, who said he would help the transition to a post-Taliban government but wanted no formal role in a new regime.

  "Even Musharraf wants to talk about post-Taliban Afghanistan," Rice said. "We need to exploit that."

  "In the short term it would be useful to be obscure on the future of the Taliban," Cheney suggested, "to exploit fissures in the Taliban." There was, at this point, still hope of winning over some moderate Taliban. "But the long term - we need the Taliban to be gone."

  Tenet was pleased. Since September 11 he had held that the Taliban and al Qaeda were bound together, that they had to be treated as one enemy and eliminated. The United States was embarked on regime change in Afghanistan. The transition to that policy - or their realization of it - had occurred at this meeting. Lashing the leadership in the north to the south would be essential to future stability. The problem was that he hadn't yet figured out how to do it.

  "The president won't want to use troops to rebuild Afghanistan," Card cautioned. Bush had said repeatedly during the presidential campaign: No combat troops for nation building, the American military did not exist for that purpose. In the second of the three presidential debates, he had declared, "Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war." He had eased off slightly in the third debate, "There may be some moments when we use our troops as peacekeepers, but not often."

  Everyone in the room knew they were entering a phase of peacekeeping and nation building. The overriding lesson from the 1990s in Afghanistan was: Don't leave a vacuum. The abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviets were ousted in 1989 had created the conditions for the rise of the Taliban and the virtual takeover of the country by bin Laden and al Qaeda.

  Now it looked like the main U.S. presence in Afghanistan if and when the Taliban was ousted was going to be thousands of combat troops, perhaps most of them American. Rumsfeld knew it. Powell knew it. On this issue, they had at times been almost glaring at each other across the table. Rumsfeld wanted to minimize it, Powell wanted them to face the reality of it.