My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  But not always. On the late morning of August 7, 1998, trucks bulging with explosives tore into the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The twin attacks killed 224 people and wounded 4,500—mostly Kenyans. Shattering glass blinded one hundred fifty people. Commanding the Ranger Regiment at the time, I remember the horror of the attacks, but even more I remember thinking that it was perpetrated by a faceless, amorphous foe that would be difficult to defeat.

  The U.S. government immediately suspected Osama bin Laden. A decade after forming Al Qaeda, the forty-one-year-old Saudi financier, whose anti-American tirades had increased in the previous two years, was still unknown to most Americans. But he had been busy.

  After Saudi Arabia forced bin Laden to leave in 1991, he had lived in Sudan. During his years there, he ran military training camps, kept apace as a businessman, and through his money was connected with terrorists across Africa and Asia. A guesthouse he ran in Pakistan sheltered the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef.

  Under American pressure, Sudan evicted bin Laden in 1996 and he flew to Afghanistan, where the Taliban would take Kabul a few months later and begin their five-year reign. That August, purportedly by fax machine from the Hindu Kush, bin Laden sent a letter to Arab newspapers. His long epistle addressed Muslims worldwide, calling on them to wage jihad against the United States in order to expel its troops that still “occupied” Saudi Arabia, the “cradle” of Islam. Bin Laden, still considered primarily a financier, decried the Saudi government but directed to the United States his now-famous taunt, which sounded as giddy then as it does ominous now. “I’m telling you,” he said, “these young men love death as much as you love life.”

  The embassy attacks put teeth on these taunts. And two years after bin Laden’s declaration of war by fax, the bombings showed worrisome operational reach and sophistication. For a group hanging its reputation on its violent theater, the simultaneous, deadly attack was a coup—and a name-making moment.

  On August 20, 1998, thirteen days after the embassies were bombed, U.S. naval ships in the Arabian Sea unleashed a volley of cruise missiles. Thirteen of them, fired toward Khartoum, hit what American intelligence believed was a factory connected to bin Laden and producing chemical weapons—including nerve gas. The intelligence was later judged to be wrong; the building had in fact produced pharmaceuticals. A Sudanese worker was killed, and to the ire of many, the destruction of the factory deprived thousands of Sudanese of medicine. The true owner of the factory—who was not connected to bin Laden’s murky business holdings, as was once believed—later filed suit against the United States.

  The same day, sixty-six Tomahawk cruise missiles sailed toward Al Qaeda training camps in eastern Afghanistan, where the United States thought bin Laden would be; he was instead on the road to Kabul, ninety miles to the north. In the aftermath of the explosions, Al Qaeda observers counted five or six dead Arabs, while the Taliban accused Americans of killing twenty-two Afghans and wounding twice that number. The Clinton administration estimated up to thirty militants were killed.

  There were other casualties of the strike, largely unaccounted for at the time. Prior to the strike, U.S. officials feared the Pakistanis would think the U.S. missiles crossing over their country were from India. But they worried more that members of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment would tip off the Taliban or bin Laden about the impending strike. So they gave the Pakistanis notice, but just barely: Over a late-night chicken tikka dinner in Islamabad on the night of August 20, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Ralston told the head of the Pakistani army, General Jehangir Karamat, that in ten minutes, missiles would be entering Pakistani airspace.

  Not only were the Pakistanis kept in the dark, but they also lost men. Some of the buildings blown apart by the missiles were in fact used by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), killing, by some accounts, five of its intelligence officers and twenty of its trainees. The event left the Pakistani leadership irate and the Americans ever more skeptical, asking why Pakistani officers were near bin Laden’s camps in the first place.

  The relationship continued to degrade. After bin Laden disappeared into the snow-tracked Afghan mountains, the United States increasingly pressured the government of Pakistan to intervene with bin Laden’s hosts—the Taliban, who received significant patronage from Pakistan—to turn him over. These demands were met with indignant replies.

  “Quite honestly,” one Pakistani official complained in a New Yorker article printed during the winter I spent at CFR, “what would Pakistan gain by going into Afghanistan and snatching bin Laden for you? We are the most heavily sanctioned United States ally. We helped you capture Ramzi Yousef . . . and all we got were thank-you notes. You lobbed missiles across our territory with no advance warning! You humiliated our government! You killed Pakistani intelligence officers!”

  So started, long before we knew how much it would matter, an unhealthy tradition of American administrations, skeptical of Pakistan’s allegiance, demanding that the Pakistanis bring them bin Laden, all the while leaving the Pakistanis feeling less and less like an ally—and feeling less inclined to act that way.

  * * *

  Sometime that winter, my old friend and mentor John Vines from 3rd Rangers called me and asked whether, if he were fortunate enough to be selected to command the 82nd Airborne Division the following year, I’d be interested in being his assistant division commander for operations. I said yes immediately.

  In June 2000, two months before my forty-sixth birthday, I began my third tour as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne. I replaced Dave Petraeus as the assistant division command for operations. Vines commanded some sixteen thousand 82nd paratroopers through seven capable brigade commanders and his experienced chief of staff. That left the two ADCs, one each for operations and support, with tremendous freedom and authority but little bureaucratic responsibility. The position gave us time to focus on training, mentoring subordinate leaders, and serving, along with the division’s command sergeant major, as additional eyes and ears for the commander. Being an understudy to Vines was also a great opportunity to learn how to be a general officer.

  Some of that education came by watching. John Vines was a charismatic leader, known in the Army for taking care of subordinates and putting tremendous thought into the leadership climate of his commands. Looking to overcome the common problem of getting candor from subordinates in a hierarchical organization like the military, Vines came to my office near the end of a long day with a plan. We were known to be close, and he calculated that if I strongly and openly disagreed with him in a large meeting, it would encourage others to do so. The appropriate venue came several days later in a meeting of about twenty-five commanders and staff. I waited for the right moment in the meeting and executed John’s guidance by speaking out strongly against his plan of action.

  “Sir, doing it that way will be a serious mistake,” I said, looking at Vines, forthrightly proud of my candor.

  Nicknamed “the Viper” earlier in his career and feared as well as loved, Vines appeared to be furious. Had he been wearing his combat equipment, his hand would have been slowly pulling his 9-mm pistol from its holster, his long bladed knife from its sheath, or both. He seemed to have forgotten our plan.

  In an instant, albeit a very long instant, John smiled. He thanked me for my honesty and signaled to everyone that that was the kind of feedback most helpful to a commander. He reinforced the fact that good leaders defined the environment and created opportunity for candid discussion at the right moments.

  I spent June 2001 in Camp Doha, Kuwait, in an army program that rotated brigadier generals there for monthlong tours as forward commanders for CENTCOM. At the time, this seemed absurd, guaranteed to cause turmoil through constant turnover of leadership. But the month I spent in the region—which included exploring Kuwait
up to the Iraq border, touring the critical port facilities, and traveling to Qatar to visit prepositioned equipment sites—was a lesser version of Eisenhower’s mapping of World War I battlefields in 1929 or Patton’s tours of France. The month allowed me to look at ground that I would later tread.

  A key theme of the month there was Osama bin Laden–related intelligence reporting that included threats of attacks against U.S. facilities in Kuwait. At the time, Al Qaeda’s 1998 embassy attacks in East Africa had once again been on the front page. On May 29, a jury in Manhattan had convicted four men for their role in the 1998 attacks, following a four-month trial that included ninety-two witnesses, 1,300 exhibits, and 302 counts against the accused. Two of those witnesses were former members of Al Qaeda, and the trial provided a window into the largely opaque organization. The next day, the Taliban, who were hosting bin Laden in Afghanistan, announced they would not send him to the American courts.

  Prior to my trip, terror had seemed more an amorphous danger with countless sources, like air pollution, than a threat from a specific group with a charismatic leader. Being in the region and reviewing intelligence every day made me more aware of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and gave the threat new meaning and urgency.

  | CHAPTER 6 |

  The Fight Begins

  July 2001–October 2003

  My world changed suddenly on a warm Tuesday morning in September. I’d again replaced Dave Petraeus, this time as chief of staff of XVIII Airborne Corps, and, along with my boss, Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, I went to conduct a daylight parachute jump from a C-130J aircraft, a new variant of the old workhorse with which we’d all grown up. After an orientation at Pope Air Force Base, we donned parachutes. As on every jump, the jumpmaster inspected us. His commands and steady movements followed a pattern I’d experienced hundreds of times before. He checked our helmets and the edges of our packs, then tugged and cinched our straps tightly across our shoulders and thighs.

  That same morning, a group of men had instructions to do the same before they boarded an airplane in Boston. “Tighten your clothes well,” the man in charge, named Mohammad Atta, had instructed them in a set of guidelines. “And tighten your shoes well, and wear socks that hold in the shoes and do not come out of them.” The commands were meant to help make what they were about to do that morning—something they’d never done before and never would again—feel routine. They were liable to be nervous about getting into the air.

  At Bragg, we took off for the short flight that would carry us over Sicily Drop Zone. In my career I’d probably jumped seventy-five or more times on Sicily’s large, sandy expanse, but none would be like this. Inside the airplane, we listened as the jumpmasters barked out their well-worn recitations. “Stand up!” We stood and faced the back of the plane.

  Atta’s men had their own recitations to say to themselves, silently, as they too prepared to get up from their seats in their plane. “When you board the airplane,” he had advised them, “proceed with the invocations, and consider this is a raid on a path.” If all was going to plan, they too were standing now and repeating the commands to themselves.

  After the jumpers had stood up, we “hooked up,” snapping our static lines onto the anchor line cable. Starting at the back of the plane, each paratrooper gave a firm tap on the shoulder of the man in front of him, cascading down the plane until the man at the front felt his shoulder tapped.

  “All okay, jumpmaster,” first jumper Dan McNeill yelled, indicating that the “stick” of jumpers was ready. The loadmaster turned a steel handle and slid the aircraft door up until it was fully open.

  “Each of you is to hold the shoulder of his brother.” Atta and his men had since moved into the cabin of their plane, which now crossed the sky at more than four hundred miles per hour, pointed toward Manhattan’s southern tip. Hold your brother’s shoulders, he said, in “the plane, and the cabin, reminding him that this action is for the sake of God.”

  As the warm wind blew into the open door of our aircraft, the air force loadmaster leaned close to my boss. I overheard him say that an airplane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. I had a few seconds to ponder the obviously terrible accident. Then the green light came on. We jumped.

  We’d left Pope that morning with America enjoying an imperfect but relatively stable era of peace; our feet landed on a nation at war. Soon after retrieving my parachute, my driver informed me that a second aircraft had hit the other tower and, mistakenly, that a bomb had gone off at the Pentagon.

  “I think this changes everything,” he said presciently.

  I didn’t immediately respond. I was lost in thought, trying to process the information, as we drove back to headquarters. We went directly to the office, where my secretary had the unfolding events on television. We watched together, helplessly, as one, then the other, tower collapsed. Only a year earlier I’d seen those towers every morning as I ran across the Brooklyn Bridge. Now the iconic structures were piles of smoke and wreckage, shrouding almost three thousand perished souls. Much later, as accounts captured the horror of the morning and the courage of common people and the fallen and their families, I felt the sadness of loss. But that Tuesday, like most Americans, I felt the urgent need to do something. My first reaction, as it had been after the Pope accident, was to get organized.

  Dan McNeill was an unflappable leader, which was good, because barely controlled bedlam ruled Bragg the first days and weeks after 9/11. We instituted security procedures that had been planned but insufficiently tested. The morning of September 12, lines of cars attempting to enter the base found checkpoints quickly overwhelmed with the volume. On some roads, the wait extended to hours; many people simply turned around and went home. Nurses and doctors were considered essential personnel during high-threat periods, but child-care specialists were not. Many with kids couldn’t come to work. At higher levels, Army Forces Command, headquartered in Atlanta, hosted hourslong video teleconferences that simulated effective coordination more than they actually achieved such synergy. Everyone meant well, but like all of America, we were navigating uncharted waters.

  Reactions that now seem ridiculous felt prudent at the time. Someone called in a potentially serious threat of an anthrax attack on the area of Bragg where we processed the flood of reservists called to duty to meet a variety of requirements—some of the fifty thousand reserve troops President Bush activated three days after 9/11. Military police did indeed find suspicious white powder on the floor of one of the World War II–era buildings we still used but quickly determined its origin: a nearby box of doughnuts.

  As such silly issues arose, Dan McNeill used rural North Carolina wisdom to remind us to maintain perspective. “Sometimes the dogs are going to run us up into a tree,” he’d counsel. “But let’s not get treed by Chihuahuas.” Over time, Bragg settled into a more sustainable pattern.

  Six days later, in the House of Representatives, President Bush announced the start of what he called the global war on terror. To the Taliban he issued a set of demands, including delivering Al Qaeda’s leaders and dismantling all terrorist camps in the country. To other nations on the periphery of this new war, he delivered an ultimatum whose simplicity earned applause that evening but controversy later: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

  Far away, in Kandahar, the reaction to these demands was less than urgent. In the days that followed, Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, met with his ambassador to Pakistan. For the past seven years, Omar, an elusive, one-eyed former mujahideen commander, had led the Taliban in Afghanistan’s grinding civil war, and controlled all but a small enclave in the north. His group’s relationship with Al Qaeda was more complicated than we understood, but after Omar wrapped himself in the Cloak of the Prophet in front of a large crowd in 1996, bin Laden had sworn allegiance to him. Now Omar’s ambassador, just back from Pa
kistan, explained nervously what he knew of the impending American assault—including air strikes and coordination with opposition groups to unseat the Taliban. To the ambassador’s dismay, Omar was unmoved. He thought America was full of bluster and “there was less than a 10 per cent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats.”

  He was wrong. On October 7, military operations against the Taliban began with a torrent of strikes against training camps and Taliban leadership. The ground invasion started twelve days later with the insertion of Green Berets into northern Afghanistan. The same night, Rangers executed a dramatic parachute drop onto an airstrip in southern Afghanistan, while Army commandos raided Mullah Omar’s compound outside Kandahar.

  Back at Bragg, in the XVIII Airborne Corps, noted for its ability to deploy rapidly, we mostly waited for something to do.

  * * *

  Most of us still knew relatively little about bin Laden or the threat he represented. At first we tended to simplify Al Qaeda, assuming it was a tightly bound terrorist band like many we’d faced in the previous three decades. But over time we began to understand that the enemy was really three things in one: an organization, an idea, and most recently a brand. September 11, 2001, represented the confluence of all three—and the culmination of the last.

  After sporadic attacks that Al Qaeda claimed to support throughout the early 1990s and bin Laden’s forced departure from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, the East Africa embassy bombings in August 1998 made Al Qaeda’s name. While Al Qaeda had until then been an organization—the base—and an idea, its attacks in Africa in 1998 and two years later against the USS Cole began to make it recognizable as the Islamic group landing blows against the United States.

  The emergence of this brand coincided with, and was inseparable from, a significant change in the group’s organization and outlook. Three years before 9/11 and a few months before the embassy attacks, bin Laden had issued a joint statement with Ayman al-Zawahiri and four other terrorist leaders. Since he was fourteen, Zawahiri had been obsessively focused on the Egyptian regime, which later tortured him in prison until he informed on his comrades. But now he accepted a turn in strategy. The jihadists could not defeat the apostate Arab regimes—the “near enemy” that stood in the way of a restored caliphate—directly. Instead, they had to attack Israel and the United States, the “far enemy,” whose indispensible backing of the Arab regimes made them impossible to take down head on. The “crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims,” bin Laden wrote. In the face of this aggression, bin Laden issued a fatwa, or “finding,” endorsed by his cosigners. It was the duty, he declared, of all Muslims to kill Americans “wherever they find them.” Al Qaeda would wage a global struggle in order to achieve regional results.