After the break, the President asked each member of the War Council for a recommendation. Colin said that we would, of course, have to go to war. He suggested that the Taliban be given an ultimatum because no decent country goes to war without warning the other side. Indeed, there was a lot of discussion of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and a desire to avoid a “sneak attack.” We needed to deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban and then issue a declaration of war. Colin took on the task of giving the Pakistanis a choice: would they be with us or against us? There was no middle ground. Colin was fundamentally opposed to action in Iraq. He warned that the time was not right and that it would fracture the very strong coalition against the Taliban.
Don never really made a recommendation. He just asked rhetorical questions that made it clear that he believed in the war option. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hugh Shelton, reassured the President that the military could develop a plan for boots on the ground but emphasized the importance of regional cooperation. George Tenet, appropriately for the CIA director, did not express an opinion. Andy Card said that the American people would expect us to go to war against Afghanistan, not Iraq.
The President turned to the Vice President, who also affirmed the war option and the need for an ultimatum. Then, gently rebuking Paul, he joined Colin and Andy in dismissing the idea of war against Iraq as a part of the response to 9/11. Despite all that has been written about the Vice President and his claims concerning Iraq and 9/11, he was resolute at Camp David in his belief that Iraq would be a distraction in the aftermath of the attacks.
The President said that he would let everyone know on Monday morning what he’d decided. He needed some time to mull over what he’d heard. The United States had been grievously injured, but he would not just lash out. The response had to be considered, and this time al Qaeda had to be defeated.
That night before dinner, Attorney General John Ashcroft played spirituals on the piano and we all sang. Contrary to type, John plays wonderful gospel piano, while I play Brahms and Mozart. So John provided the accompaniment and I sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” The comforting song proclaims that God’s eye is on the sparrow and “I know He watches me.” It was a deep, mournful moment. At dinner, the President asked me to say the prayer. “We have seen the face of evil but we are not afraid,” I prayed. “For you, O Lord, are faithful to us.”
The church service at Camp David was, of course, devoted to 9/11. There were prayers for the victims and for the country. The Camp David chapel is very special, completed during George H. W. Bush’s presidency as a place of worship for the President during stays at Camp David. The congregation is made up of the military people and their families stationed there. Thus the President and his family and aides worship side by side with the officers and enlisted personnel and their families. It is a beautiful expression of American democracy and its egalitarian character. That day, the commander in chief worshipped with those whom he would soon order to defend our wounded country in a most distant land.
After church we returned to the White House. The President asked me to accompany him to his office in the residence. He returned a call to Vicente Fox and said he needed to get some exercise. He asked me to come back at about 6:00 P.M. so that we could talk about what to do. At the agreed hour, I arrived and went back up to the office.
The President asked what I thought. I told him that we obviously had to go to war in Afghanistan but expressed my concern about the difficulty of getting Central Asian leaders to give us the basing rights we needed. When I had finished, the President talked for about thirty minutes without a break. The country had been deeply wounded, he repeated from the Saturday session, but we could not engage in a spasm attack. He needed boots on the ground, but he was worried about fighting in Afghanistan. We couldn’t fail. This was different from any other war in our history. Using a sports analogy (he was fond of doing so), he said that he just didn’t know how many more punches al Qaeda could throw.
As he talked, I felt that he was carrying a weight heavier than any other President, at least since Abraham Lincoln. There had been war presidents since then, but they had not experienced a devastating attack in Washington and New York. It is easy to forget that in those dark days we assumed that another attack was imminent. We had been talking in the Treaty Room, which had for a time been the U.S. Presidents’ office before the Oval Office was built in the West Wing. It is dark, with heavy furniture and gloomy paintings, including Lincoln with his generals during the Civil War. I had never seen George W. Bush so somber.
The President asked me to record formally his decisions that night. He said that he’d distribute the paper at the meeting the next morning. I left him sitting alone and went back to my office about 9:00 P.M. to prepare the document. And then I went home feeling very much the weight of what we were about to do.
7
WAR PLANNING BEGINS
OUR DAILY ROUTINE, post 9/11, started the next day. We began each morning with the President’s Daily Briefing. The session was now more operational, with both the CIA and the FBI reporting on threats and efforts to disrupt them. This in fact complicated decision making, because the President had a tendency to ask policy questions that were prompted by intelligence information. With neither the secretary of state nor the secretary of defense present, it fell to me to keep the conversation focused on what intelligence professionals are supposed to deliver: a policy-neutral assessment of various situations. I found myself constantly reminding the President that it would be up to his national security team to give him answers to the policy dilemmas raised by what he was hearing.
After the intelligence briefing, the President took several phone calls from other heads of state, largely expressions of solidarity that had been stacking up over the hectic days in the aftermath of 9/11. Among the calls, though, was another call with Putin. The two men had a remarkable conversation in which the Russian pledged assistance, particularly in securing the cooperation of the Central Asian states. The advantages were immediately clear: we needed the kind of help that we expected Russian intelligence to be able to deliver from its vast networks throughout South and Central Asia.
After the call, the National Security Council gathered for the first in-depth consideration of how to prepare for war in Afghanistan. The President distributed the document that I’d prepared the night before, making it clear that our primary consideration was to protect the country from further attack. That meant dealing with the al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan.
Moreover, we quickly established a few principles for our outreach to the people of Afghanistan. We felt an obligation to leave them better off than when we had come. Thus freeing Afghan women emerged early as a policy goal. The women of Afghanistan had been brutally oppressed under the Taliban. They were prohibited from getting an education, working outside the home, and appearing in public without a male escort. In a stadium renovated by the United Nations, the Taliban would gather crowds to witness the execution of women who were accused of committing crimes against the regime’s extreme interpretations of Islamic law. The regime’s bizarre nature was evident in the sarcastic request of one Taliban leader for the United Nations to build a separate facility for their executions so that their stadium could be used for soccer. First Lady Laura Bush delivered the President’s radio address on November 17, placing the fate of women at the center of the Afghanistan agenda.
We then turned to the diplomatic strategy, which, though obvious, was difficult to execute. Pakistan had to be convinced to end its long-standing support for the Taliban. Rich Armitage was dispatched with a message for President Musharraf. The United States would not tolerate shades of gray any longer: Pakistan must be with us or against us. President Musharraf responded forcefully that he would join us.
At that first meeting, the President said that he wanted to show the Afghan people a different face than the Soviet Union had at the beginning of its war. He asked early on whether the first “bombs” could be f
ood drops to deal with the impending famine in much of the country. Andrew Natsios, who headed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), was able to coordinate a huge international relief effort to complement military action.
Meanwhile, we prepared an ultimatum to the Taliban and reviewed the initial plans for the war. The President repeated the view that Colin had expressed at Camp David: decent countries don’t launch surprise attacks, as Japan had done at Pearl Harbor.
As we considered our options, it was clear that the CIA was well prepared for operations in Afghanistan. But as we’d become aware well before 9/11, the Agency’s contacts were better with the Northern Alliance than with the Pashtuns in the South.
The President rejected any strategy based on a large U.S. ground presence, deciding instead to have the Afghans take the lead in the ground campaign, with U.S. intelligence and special operations forces and U.S. airpower supporting them. This required an unprecedented level of integration of intelligence capability and military power, leading to some uncertainty about who was in charge.
As the planning progressed, there was an uncomfortable moment several days later when the President, frustrated by the lack of clarity in the chain of command, asked pointedly, “Who has the lead?” John McLaughlin, George Tenet’s deputy at the CIA, was sitting in for George that day. John pointed at Don, and Don pointed at John. The President turned to me and said, “Fix this!” He ended the meeting somewhat abruptly, and I asked the Principals to stay behind. I didn’t have to say much. Don and the CIA got the message. They worked out a flexible arrangement that largely shifted responsibility to the Pentagon after the invasion began.
That was one of several indications that the national security structures, dating as they did from the Cold War, were not a very good fit for the new kind of war that we were facing. To their credit, after that embarrassing moment, George and Don worked through the issues, and though military and intelligence coordination was not always seamless, it grew increasingly more effective. The enhanced cooperation would culminate in the successful operation to track and kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, but it found its origins in this early work among the agencies as we approached the war in Afghanistan.
Early on, collaboration was accomplished largely through personal relationships and daily attention from the highest levels of both organizations and the White House. That is often the way that institutions adapt in the early stages of a new challenge. In fact, the widely admired structures authorized by the National Security Act of 1947, including the NSC and the CIA, were at first ad hoc arrangements, whose predecessors were referred to as the War Council and the Office of Strategic Services. They had been created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to improve wartime planning during World War II.
Despite the new challenges, on balance the machinery of the NSC functioned smoothly. Colin and Don worked well together, with State both willing and capable of carrying out the diplomacy to support the military mission. The most important task was to obtain basing rights in and around Afghanistan from the hardnosed leaders in Central Asia, most especially Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. After many sessions that apparently resembled a bazaar, the bargaining was done and we had the access we needed—and Karimov had a big financial package to show for his support.
THE RUSSIANS maintain to this day that they gave the “green light” to Karimov and to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to work with us. Undoubtedly, Russia’s support for a “temporary” U.S. presence in the region removed any anxiety that the leaders of Central Asia might have had about Moscow’s reaction.
Ironically, the same cooperation created the conditions that would later lead to some of our most contentious issues with the Kremlin. As the U.S. presence in the region matured over the years, resulting in larger and more permanent military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Moscow became wary. When, in 2003, the “color revolutions” began to sweep through former Soviet satellite states, prompting the removal of corrupt officials and the ascension of pro-Western, democratically elected leaders in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, Putin clearly regretted his early posture. He began speaking not of cooperation but of the “encirclement” of Russia by the aggressive United States.
I am convinced that after 9/11 Putin saw the struggle against terrorism as the new epicenter of Russia’s relationship with the United States, one in which there would be shared principles, strategy, and tactics. He moved quickly to associate the attacks on the United States with the terrorism of Chechen fighters. Though we did not fully support that view or Russia’s brutal tactics in Chechnya, it was true that the Chechens were increasingly in league with al Qaeda. Throughout the years of the Bush administration, counterterrorism cooperation with Russia was indeed good. When a school in Beslan, Russia, was attacked in 2004, President Bush was one of the first leaders to unequivocally call it terrorism and equate it with what we had experienced. The Russians appreciated that clarity.
But Putin’s larger vision of a shared mission would run headlong into the United States’ emphasis on democracy and the Freedom Agenda as the ultimate answer to terrorism. Further complicating that shared mission was Russia’s turn toward authoritarianism at home. But that clash would come later. The Russians were focused and effective in providing assistance as we prepared for war in Afghanistan. They had long-standing ties with the Northern Alliance and agreed to provide it with equipment.
George Tenet mentioned one day that the fighters of Muhammad Fahim Khan and Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Northern Alliance commanders who would lead the Afghan forces, hadn’t received the provisions they needed. “Call Sergei Ivanov,” the President told me. I did. Ivanov said that he was doing all that he could to fulfill their requests. “But it’s not easy to find donkeys,” he said.
“Donkeys?” I repeated.
“Yes. Donkeys. That’s how they move on those narrow paths in the mountains,” he told me. Later we would all chuckle at the photographs of twenty-first-century U.S. fighter planes providing air cover for our “cavalry”—men on donkeys.
“When Am I Going to Have a Battle Plan?”
THE MILITARY PLANNING was proceeding smoothly but slowly, and the President was getting frustrated. It seemed that every NSC meeting ended inconclusively, with the military not quite ready to present a final plan to the President. The President had told me that he felt no need to rush to war. We needed to be fully prepared. Yet he knew that there would come a time—soon—when the American people and the world would expect a response. Moreover, he did not want to wait too long, allowing al Qaeda to perhaps launch another attack from its sanctuary in Afghanistan.
Finally the President’s patience ran out. I’d gone to the CIA for a briefing on the afternoon of September 27. I was called out of the meeting to take a call from the President. He was clearly agitated. “I want a plan tomorrow,” he said. “Call Don, and make sure I have one.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered and decided to depart from the CIA immediately and return to the White House. My car was barely rounding onto George Washington Parkway from the Langley gate when the phone in the car rang. The President was on the secure line, which never seemed to work, especially in an emergency. I could never figure it out. The United States is one of the most technologically sophisticated countries in the world, but government communications—even national security ones—were often bedeviled by malfunctions. I can’t tell you how many times my morning conference call with Don at the Pentagon and Colin at the State Department suddenly dropped; that was still the case for Steve Hadley, Defense Secretary Bob Gates, and me years later. There were multiple efforts to fix the problem, and I suspect a good deal of money was thrown at it—but somehow the government just couldn’t get it done.
The problem was never as annoying as on that day, however. The President was saying something about wanting a plan, but the phone kept breaking up. “I’m on my way to the White House, sir,” I said. “I’ll meet you in the residence.”
When I got to my office, he was on the phon
e again. “You don’t need to come over here,” he said. “Just call Don.”
I called Don immediately and told him about my discussions with the President. “Don, he’s had it,” I said. “There really needs to be a final plan tomorrow.”
“Got it,” Don answered.
That evening I met with Frank Miller, who served as senior director for defense policy at the NSC and was a twenty-year Pentagon veteran. “Use your contacts to make sure the military is getting the message,” I told him. Then I went home, praying that we’d have a plan at the NSC meeting the next morning.
Don delivered the next morning with a very good presentation of a final plan for the President’s approval. I was relieved, though already the tendency of the Pentagon to give military briefings that were lacking in detail was evident. After the meeting I followed the President into the Oval and said that he needed to insist on a review of the plans by the full Principals Committee. “They will ask more detailed and candid questions than you can,” I told him. “People don’t like to admit that they don’t understand something—or to critique their colleagues—with you in the room.” The Vice President resisted, saying that the military briefings of the President were enough. He was a former secretary of defense, personally close to Don Rumsfeld and very protective of the Pentagon’s prerogatives.
“Mr. President,” I said, “you need political-military plans, not just military plans, and that requires all of the expertise of the NSC.” The President nodded in agreement and did insist on full vetting for issues such as collateral damage. But Don was resistant to a review of the actual battle plan with the NSC Principals, relying instead on briefings with the President that were sometimes short on operational detail. The President had read many histories of Vietnam, and he did not want to be Lyndon Johnson, picking targets from the basement of the White House. He tended to accept the military’s representations—not unquestioningly, but with fewer probes than he would make later in his presidency.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 12
