Like other Arab fundamentalists driven from their conservative homelands, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi exile living in Yemen and probably only twenty years old in 1978, found a home in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Wealthy from a family construction business, university-educated as an engineer, neither an Islamic scholar nor a soldier, Osama bin Laden advanced within the Pakistan-based mujahideen support system as a patron of the training camps and madrassas that indoctrinated young Muslims for the jihad. His politics found ideological focus in the Egyptian reactionary radicalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, foes of Egypt’s military regimes of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, reviled allies of Israel and the United States. Bin Laden’s mentors were a Palestinian intellectual, Abdullah Assam, and an Egyptian doctor turned radical Islamicist, Ayman al-Zawahiri. As a leader of the Afghan Arabs, bin Laden drew volunteers to Pakistan to fight the Soviets and developed contacts with jihadis from the United States to the Philippines and throughout the Arab world. He understood electronic communications and banking. At six feet five inches, he also had presence, enhanced by his aesthetic thinness, proper beard, and accompanying glower. He had brains, a cause, and a store of hatreds that made him a formidable foe. He was delighted to be the cheerleader, planner, and banker for any terrorists who would target the United States, the true Satan. He and Zawahiri called their network al-Qaeda, “the base” for war on the Zionists and Arab reactionary regimes. After Azzam died in a mysterious bombing, bin Laden left Pakistan for the Sudan, where he could create a base separate from the Pakistani-Afghan battleground. Until proscribed by Saudi Arabia in 1994, he had access to Islamicists without much interference. He was especially impressed when an expatriate Muslim mullah and a Saudi financier managed to plan and organize a car-bomb attack on the parking garage of New York City’s World Trade Center towers in February 1993. The explosion killed six and hurt a thousand passersby, but the building did not collapse. The subsequent investigation and trial of the Arab-American cell connected the attack to al-Qaeda. Along with the Gulf War, this event convinced bin Laden to move his jihad to the Sudan, a friendly host and far from American influence.
Terrorist groups could adopt al-Qaeda just as it embraced them. Attacks on Americans in Somalia, Aden, and Saudi Arabia occurred between 1992 and 1995 and drew al-Qaeda’s endorsement. In June 1996, a truck bomb and suicide bomber blew up a wing of the Khobar Towers, a U.S. Air Force billet in Dharan, killing nineteen and wounding 372 service personnel, but the sponsor was a radical Saudi group funded by Iran through Hezbollah. Osama bin Laden endorsed the attacks and planned more with direct al-Qaeda participation, designed by his operational terrorist planner, Mohammed Atef, an Egyptian. Although he had made threats against Americans since 1995, bin Laden and four other “directors” of al-Qaeda issued a fatwa that called for a jihad against “the crusader-Zionist alliance” and its Arab collaborators on February 28, 1998. To accent the commitment, al-Qaeda cells in Kenya and Tanzania attacked the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998, and killed twelve Americans and 212 Africans while wounding hundreds more. The next dramatic attack came two years later, when boat-bombers blew a hole in the hull of the USS Cole, a USN destroyer docked in the harbor of Aden, Yemen. The attack killed seventeen sailors and wounded forty. Osama bin Laden himself had helped with the detailed planning.
The security agencies of the federal government identified Osama bin Laden as a special threat in 1998 and had targeted terrorists in general as a high-priority security issue in Presidential Decision Directive 39 (June 1995). The enormity of stopping terrorists and their bombs from entering any nation (the worst-case event) confounded the best organized, best informed, most alert nations, which the United States was not. Consider the 4,000-mile border with Canada, a cooperative nation. In 2000 alone, the Canada-to-U.S. crossings numbered 489 million travelers, 127 million cars, 11.7 million maritime containers, 11.5 million truck trips, 2.2 million railroad car-crossings, 829,000 airline trips, and 211,000 maritime voyages. The “system” relied on voluntary, peaceful, rapid, and preregistered notification and inspection for economic efficiency, but not security. The best screening could pick up nuclear material, but not other explosives without inspection. Border protection also required close cooperation among the CIA, FBI, Customs Service, State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Treasury Department, U.S. Coast Guard, Federal Aviation Administration, and Border Patrol as well as state and local authorities. Effective counterterrorism operations—preventing attacks—also required unusual international cooperation and shared national alarm, which the United States, compared with Great Britain and Germany, did not have. The most shocking event of the 1990s inside the United States was the destruction of the Oklahoma City federal building (April 1995) by deranged Americans. Most of the research and planning until 2001 ended at the point where action by law enforcement had to occur. For example, the U.S. Treasury and State Departments knew how terrorists could move and conceal money transfers by electronic means, and the United Nations had prepared a convention signed by forty-one nations (of 189 members) on combating terrorist financing. Only six nations had ratified the treaty by September 2001.
The Clinton administration in 1998 took one major step by moving the midlevel counterterrorism group under the direct control of the National Security Council, which placed its director, Richard Clarke, in close access to the president and the national security adviser. Counterterrorism programs still faced an organizational divide; terrorism abroad was a State Department, CIA, and military concern, but in the U.S., the FBI and Justice Department had the mission. As early as 1996, the Central Intelligence Agency took Osama bin Laden seriously enough to form a bin Laden unit (BLU) within its Counterterrorism Center. The BLU developed a clear picture of Osama bin Laden’s key role in al-Qaeda and tracked him when bin Laden moved back to Afghanistan in 1996 to aid the Taliban and to embed his headquarters in those parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan where the Taliban and ISI could protect him and deter American overt or covert action.
All the plans foundered on the rocks of limited intelligence, uncertain international cooperation, operational complexity like the requirement that bin Laden be taken alive, and U.S. military skepticism. The CIA director, George Tenet, saw more risks than he considered bearable. NSC adviser Sandy Berger and Tenet reviewed the plans and doubted their success. Proposals to subcontract bin Laden’s capture to the Saudis, the Taliban, and the Pakistanis went nowhere. The Nairobi-Dar es Salaam bombings made a direct attack on bin Laden, including his death, more acceptable. The retaliation Clinton approved, however, was the usual token indirect attack on places, in this case an al-Qaeda camp complex in Afghanistan and possible WMD sites (chemicals) in the Sudan. On August 20, 1998, Navy ships in the Arabian Sea fired a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles at these targets, destroying them and killing perhaps twenty to thirty relative innocents. Following good evasion procedures, the al-Qaeda leadership had departed for some other site and kept moving throughout Afghanistan, while Osama bin Laden used electronic means to order more attacks, thus allowing the National Security Agency to track his movements. The CIA and now the Defense Department kept planning, but none of the plans persuaded the senior responsible officials to strike or enlisted foreign allies. The planning did, however, link the future of the Taliban to the destruction of al-Qaeda, a sound analysis but one fraught with greater international complications, such as relations with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The CIA looked to the Northern Alliance as a potential source of operatives who could get inside al-Qaeda and kill bin Laden, an act Clinton approved in December 1998. In the meantime, the staff of Central Command, headed by Marine General Anthony Zinni, planned several variants of a heliborne special operations raid, but it could not station helicopters and special operations aircraft close enough to al-Qaeda’s base network in southern Afghanistan without using Pakistani bases. More missile strikes seemed unrealistic since Osama bin Laden moved often; and when he stopped, it was in h
eavily populated cities like Kandahar. Still a low-success option, the CIA at least established an operational base in Uzbekistan and convinced Special Operations Command and Central Command to think about contacts with the Northern Alliance, especially Ahmad Shah Massoud, who wanted to fight the Taliban but regarded the plans to kill or capture bin Laden as fanciful. The contingency planning continued, a worthwhile educational exercise, but bin Laden as a man and al-Qaeda as a terrorist confederation remained at large and harder to track since an American newspaper revealed that intelligence agencies could trace his cell-phone calls.
In the fall of 2000, the United States had survived a confusing presidential election campaign that placed the governor of Texas, George W. Bush, the son of the former president, in the White House. The Electoral College system and a series of judicial decisions on the outcome of Florida’s vote-counting ensured Bush’s tainted victory. The president-elect, a reformed drinker and born-again Christian, brought little international experience to his new office. From college at Yale and Harvard Business School through his experience as an Air National Guard pilot-lieutenant through his undistinguished business and sports ventures, Bush had not absorbed his father’s international experience and Washington bureaucratic skills. When he made Donald Rumsfeld secretary of defense and Colin Powell secretary of state, he probably thought he had solved that problem. His national security adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, had more university time than Washington experience, and her expertise was Russian security issues. The emerging center of power in Washington became Vice President Dick Cheney, the former White House chief of staff and secretary of defense. Cheney ensured that his loyalists, who shared his urge to finish off Saddam Hussein, filled key positions in the White House, at the State Department, and in the Pentagon. In January 2001, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger counseled the Bush team on the terrorist threat with an emphasis on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Although the FBI and other police agencies had foiled some inept attempts to make the Millennium a terrorist event, the FBI believed that Arab terrorists had created operational units within the United States. The available evidence suggested terrorist planning for some sort of direct attack within the United States. Berger, supported by Richard Clarke, made one point repeatedly: The United States was at war with a new and more deadly breed of Arab terrorists who would stop at nothing to attack the American homeland and thus force the United States out of the Muslim world. The Clinton administration had done little to impress Arab and Iranian terrorists with its retaliatory will. No one knew where al-Qaeda would strike next, but strike it would.
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TWENTY-ONE
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Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001–2011
During the presidential election campaign of 2004, a favorite bumper sticker flaunted by unhappy voters read “Bush! Four more wars!” This characterization was unfair since the George W. Bush administration had initiated only two wars—with Afghanistan and Iraq—and they were only dramatic escalations of unfinished conflicts the new president had inherited from his father and Bill Clinton. These wars of choice, however, took on a dramatic new character after al-Qaeda’s aerial suicide attack on targets in New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. Three hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and killed almost three thousand Americans and citizens of seventy other countries in one morning. Passengers of a fourth hijacked airliner bound for the White House or Capitol building fought back and frightened the terrorists into plunging into a Pennsylvania field. The assault, known as “9/11,” not only surprised and shocked the American public, but it gave the Bush administration a defense focus it did not have and plunged the United States into what President George W. Bush called “the Global War on Terrorism.”
Largely untouched by his father’s experience in national security affairs in the twenty years before his election, Bush became commander in chief without much vision about defense. He did complain about Clinton’s defense policy, which meant the reduction of the armed forces. Clinton had also made too many commitments to misguided UN-sponsored peacekeeping operations. The Republican candidate who spoke about defense was Dick Cheney, whose four years as Secretary of Defense had hardened his prejudices more than they had sharpened his analytic sophistication. He trusted no nation that had ever been Communist, and he loathed the appeasement of any Arab leader but the oil sheikhs. Since the Gulf War, he had concluded that Saddam Hussein was a greater threat than Shi’a Iran, an avowed enemy of the U.S. since 1979. George W. Bush held similar views. Both shared a common interest in a superior nuclear force, an aggressive attack on “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD) proliferation, and punishing terrorists, the instruments of rogue states.
The new secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, age sixty-nine, had similar ideas about defense policy and some very fixed ideas on how to run the Pentagon. Opinionated, pugnacious, an intellectual sponge of data he liked, Rumsfeld saw himself as a great corporate manager, based on twenty-five years as the CEO of a pharmaceutical company in his native Chicago. NutraSweet had made him wealthy and confident that he did not have to court any support for his initiatives, especially that of Congress. At heart he remained captive of the enthusiasms that had first drawn him to politics. Serving as a naval aviator after a university experience noted for his prowess as a wrestler, Rumsfeld went to Washington in 1957 and did not leave for twenty years. His résumé swelled with jobs of increasing power and influence: Congressional aide; congressman; director of the Office of Economic Opportunity; White House counselor; NATO ambassador; White House chief of staff for Gerald Ford. In 1975, Rumsfeld served as secretary of defense for fourteen months, during which time he pressed for more modern nuclear forces and less arms control. During these years, he became close to Dick Cheney. He showed great interest in technological innovation and driving senior officers, including the JCS, to teeth-clenching obedience by challenging their judgment on major weapons programs and strategy.
Rumsfeld maintained ties to the Defense Department as a consultant during the Reagan administration. He became chair of a congressional study of ballistic missile defense and related nuclear issues. He made no friends at the Pentagon by his imperious methods of information control and contempt for service technological conservatism. His experience as a Pentagon gadfly converted him to the latest intellectual rages inside the Beltway: Fourth Generation warfare, “net-centric” warfare, asymmetrical warfare, the “Revolution in Military Affairs,” and the “transformation” of the armed forces, which, to the degree it had definition, meant high-risk investment in target-acquisition technology and precision-guided munitions (PGMs) that destroyed from afar. He regarded anyone who did not embrace these ideas as disloyal and incompetent. As secretary of defense, he readily accepted Cheney disciples as influential appointees: Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, and Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone.
As secretary of defense in early 2001, Rumsfeld made clear that he did not intend to share his role as the president’s defense adviser with the chairman of the JCS. Bypassing the serving CNO for being too independent, Rumsfeld appointed General Richard B. Myers, USAF, then Vice CJCS, to succeed General Henry H. Shelton, USA, as CJCS. Myers’s experience in air warfare and space operations made him an appealing choice, but others suspected that the new CJCS would not challenge Rumsfeld’s crusade to make the Pentagon a model of innovation, whether or not the senior officers cooperated. The secretary proved his point by creating two new offices, one for “force transformation” and the other for “special plans,” to avoid the normal JCS and OSD processes. Rumsfeld proved that personal power outranked innovation by embarrassing a reformist Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki. A Hawaiian nisei who had lost part of a foot in Vietnam, Shinseki wanted to turn the Cold War or “legacy” Army into a more mobile, light, high-tech force that could put a brigade anywhere in the world in ninety-six hours and to follow with fi
ve divisions in a month. High-technology target acquisition and focused, devastating firepower would make this army unchallengeable. For example, the quick-reaction army would have no vehicle heavier than twenty tons. (The M-1 tank weighs seventy tons.) Shinseki’s vision challenged Rumsfeld’s proprietary grip on “transformation.” Rumsfeld opened an attack on Shinseki that eroded his authority. When Shinseki testified to Congress about Rumsfeld’s alteration of Iraq war plans, his replacement had already been named—more than a year in advance. Defense intellectuals thought Rumsfeld wanted to use the war in Afghanistan and a potential war in Iraq as laboratories for innovation without military opposition. Rumsfeld and Cheney had also convinced the president that an immediate increase of fiscal year 2002 defense spending by $43 billion was essential, despite a tax cut of $1.5 trillion for the years ahead. What was transformed was the national debt, which soared.
In its first ten months in office, the Bush administration managed the military commitments it inherited without a crisis. In almost every case, it reduced the commitments by agreement and because circumstances allowed withdrawal. Reporting to Congress “consistent with the War Powers Resolution,” Bush described a drawdown in East Timor in the UN mission to twelve Americans and a force reduction in the Balkans. The only bad news came from the Middle East. Operation DESERT FOX had hurt Iraq’s military infrastructure but improved its image of undeserving victim. The economic sanctions had unraveled with European and Asian countries seeking new business. Although Iraq could make legal oil deals for food and medicine, millions of illegal barrels of Iraqi oil kept pouring out through Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Jordan. When the United States and Great Britain sought more enforceable trade restrictions in the UN, France, Russia, and Egypt opposed the plan. The UN WMD inspectors did not think they would return to their weapons hunt, with or without American and British technicians, whom the Iraqis branded as spies and coup plotters. It even looked as if those great enemies, Iraq and Iran, might be collaborating in nuclear programs. American members of the UNSCOM and the IAEA inspection teams expressed concern about Iraq’s potential WMD threat, positions echoed by knowledgeable Clinton-era CIA officials and former diplomats. Whatever his motives, Saddam Hussein had made himself look like a threat.
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