The phenomenon we were up against was not easily delineated in a few words. Sometime later, I tried out the phrase “struggle against violent extremists” in place of war on terror. A struggle suggested that military action alone would not be sufficient. Violent extremists seemed to be more accurate than terror or terrorism, but it was not quite right either, in that it stopped short of noting the central fact that our enemies were Islamists. My attempts to calibrate our administration’s terminology eventually gave rise to a minor brouhaha in the press.8 Ultimately, President Bush settled the issue and decided against my suggestions by reaffirming that we were fighting a global war on terror. I was not able to come up with a perfect alternative.
From the beginning, members of the administration worked gingerly around the obvious truth that our main enemies were Islamic extremists. I didn’t think we could fight the crucial ideological aspect of the war if we were too wedded to political correctness to acknowledge the facts honestly. While we certainly were not at war against Islam, we did intend to fight and defeat those distorting their religious beliefs—their Islamic religious beliefs—to murder innocent people. I thought the best term was Islamist extremists, which made clear we were not including all Muslims. Islamism is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology that seeks the destruction of all liberal democratic governments, of our individual rights, and of Western civilization. The ideology not only excuses but commands violence against the United States, our allies, and other free people. It exalts death and martyrdom. And it is rooted in a radical, minority interpretation of Islam.
The war declared on us was not about any particular policy dispute. Though bin Laden and others referenced their opposition to the U.S. forces based in Saudi Arabia or our policies with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, those were more excuses to rally support, recruits, and financing. The intractable Arab-Israeli dispute in particular was a frequently referenced source of irritation to Arab leaders and was used as an excuse for nearly every setback in the region. But in fact the extremists sought a return to an ancient caliphate that would require blurring boundaries in the Middle East and North Africa and part of Spain, putting the territory all under the rule of one pan-Islamic state, much like the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan.
One of the more complex strategic challenges we faced was how to fight an enemy that was present in numerous countries with which we were not at war. Unlike conventional conflicts, where the enemies were nations and the United States could attack the enemy wherever our forces could find him, we knew that our current enemies, the terrorists, were not just in Afghanistan but could also be in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a number of other countries. These were sovereign countries—and in some cases friends and partners—and there were delicate legal and diplomatic issues involved in sending intelligence operatives or special operations forces, even if we discovered that al-Qaida or another terrorist group might have a cell there. If we asked permission, there was a risk that a country would say no or that the information might leak. If they offered to go after them, we knew they did not have the same capabilities as our forces. Senior Bush administration officials understood that to meet the terrorist challenge, we generally would have to reach an understanding with these countries on the nature of the threat—and on the actions that we could take in response.
Eleven days after 9/11, I sent a note to the President suggesting a way to think about working with our friends and allies in response to the attack. “The mission must determine the coalition,” I wrote. “The coalition ought not determine the mission.”9 The memo stemmed from a conversation I had in my office the day before with israel’s resolute former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He cautioned against building any permanent alliance that would restrict our flexibility in the future.
Though I understood the great value of having friends and allies in support of our efforts, I knew that not every country was likely to be willing or able to be helpful in all of the activities. As a result, not every operation would benefit from being tied to the largest coalition possible. I wanted the administration to think through carefully the activities we needed to undertake and then fashion the largest coalition possible for each of the necessary missions.10
I respected the well-considered views of America’s friends, even when they might differ in some respects from our own. In fact, the several coalitions we would eventually assemble to go after terrorists and their sponsors would evolve over time. Each country had its own perspectives and concerns, I understood also that some nations would want to keep private or downplay their cooperation with a particular mission. I saw that as a fact to be accepted.
No senior administration official ever suggested that the United States would be better off responding to 9/11 alone. To this day I find it surprising that Bush administration critics were so successful in claiming that that was the President’s view. The truth was that we solicited and eventually gained the assistance of more than ninety countries in the global coalition against terrorism. An even greater number took part in our Proliferation Security Initiative, a multilateral program designed to interdict the spread of weapons of mass destruction.11 The unilateralism accusation against Bush was a preposterous charge. That we were so ineffective in countering it was a harbinger of other communication problems to come.
A key element of the administration’s policy was that the primary purpose of America’s reaction to 9/11 should be prevention of attacks and the defense of the American people, not punishment or retaliation. The only way to protect ourselves is to go after the terrorists wherever they may be.12 This was a more ambitious goal than the approaches previous presidents had set. It reflected Bush’s view, which I shared, that 9/11 was a seminal event, not simply another typical terrorist outrage to which the world had become accustomed. The 9/11 attack showed that our enemies wanted to cause as much harm as possible to the United States—to terrorize our population and to alter the behavior of the American people. No one in the administration, as far as I know, doubted that the men who destroyed the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon would have gladly killed ten or a hundred times the number they killed on 9/11. They were not constrained by compunction, only by the means to escalate their carnage. This meant that their potential acquisition of weapons of mass destruction—biological, chemical, or nuclear—represented a major strategic danger.
This danger was highlighted dramatically by a Johns Hopkins University simulation of a biological attack on the United States. The report on that work, called “Dark Winter,” was published just three months before 9/11. The researchers concluded that an outbreak of smallpox in three cities in the American interior could, within two months, result in approximately three million Americans infected, with one million dead. Such an epidemic could lead governors to try to insulate their states from the disease by shutting down interstate commerce, and lead to the imposition of martial law nationwide.13 The report, drafted mainly by former officials of Democratic administrations, was widely read and much commented upon within the Bush administration. No responsible president could allow a scenario like that to materialize if there were reasonable steps he could take to avert it.
In the months after 9/11, I urged our Pentagon team and the combatant commanders to go through a mental exercise: I asked that they imagine that three or six months from now a major terrorist attack occurs in the United States. What would you regret not having done in the interim to prevent that attack? I urged them to head off regret. “Ask yourself what it is we must do every day between now and then to prevent that attack if possible, and if not to prevent it, at least to reduce the damage and save American lives. We must get up every morning and know that that is our job.”
The President knew that a series of 9/11-type attacks—in conjunction with biological toxins, or suitcase nuclear weapons, or other nightmare combinations—could drastically alter the free and open nature of our society. It wouldn’t be enough to rely on the FBI to investigate, indict, and
prosecute terrorists in absentia as earlier administrations had done. Nor could we rely on precision air strikes to punish those we suspected were involved. Nor was this struggle simply about apprehending one man—Osama bin Laden—or one organization—al-Qaida. The task we faced was about systematically pressuring, attacking, and disrupting terrorist networks worldwide.
Terrorists had an easier time indoctrinating, recruiting, training, equipping, raising funds, and planning their attacks when they enjoyed a stable base of operations. So I argued that our strategy should be to put them on the defensive—indirectly (through the states that gave them safe havens) and directly (whenever we had actionable intelligence). The emphasis on a global campaign was important, I believed, because striking only al-Qaida in Afghanistan would result in little more than causing the terrorists to shift their base to Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, or elsewhere. To deny them safe havens, we needed to take action so that terrorists would feel unsafe wherever they tried to flee. So, for example, if the United States acted as a hammer against al-Qaida in Afghanistan, our diplomacy should try to ensure that Pakistan would function as the anvil. Also, the United States should conduct maritime interdiction operations to catch al-Qaida and other terrorists who might try to flee from Pakistan to the Arabian Peninsula or East Africa. There would be what I called secondary effects—terrorists would move to wherever there was the least pressure on them.14 Denied safe havens, terrorist groups would have to scatter, creating inconveniences and vulnerabilities we could capitalize on. If they were continually on the run, worried about detection and capture, they would have less time, less energy, and less ability to plan attacks. Our goal had to be nothing less than making everything hard for them—raising money, traveling, communicating, recruiting, transferring funds, finding safe havens—in short, complicating everything they needed to do to be successful in their attacks.
Aware of the public’s impatience, I urged the President to try to adjust the American people’s expectations away from quick, decisive results. I stressed that the war on terrorism would be “a marathon, not a sprint.”15
People commonly talk about the campaign in Afghanistan as if it were the inevitable response to 9/11. Events can often seem to have been obvious in retrospect. But the administration had a range of possible responses, none very attractive. One of the approaches the President considered was to focus on a tailored, retaliatory strike against al-Qaida and its operatives in Afghanistan. That approach would have been similar to our country’s earlier responses to terrorist attacks: arrest the terrorists and bring them to justice and launch cruise missiles or drop bombs on their crude training facilities. But that was not going to be good enough this time.
Led by its supreme ruler, Mullah Muhammed Omar, Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was one of the most isolated governments in the world. At the time of the 9/11 attack it had diplomatic relations with only three nations: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Taliban had broad and longstanding ties to terrorism. Our intelligence agencies were certain that bin Laden was hiding and operating under their hospitality. Bin Laden had been the Taliban’s “guest” since 1996.16 After he masterminded the 1998 bombings of United States embassies in East Africa, the Clinton administration launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan. He escaped injury and, as a result, al-Qaida continued to do its work—up to and including killing thousands of Americans on 9/11.
Even though the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had refused a Clinton administration request to hand bin Laden over to the United States, President Bush decided to give them an additional opportunity. That seemed reasonable to me. After 9/11, the Taliban might have recalculated, deciding that it would be prudent to accommodate this new American president who was backed by an angry, united American people, a large and growing international coalition, and the most powerful military on earth.
Responding to news reporting that the Taliban had aided the 9/11 plotters, Taliban leaders issued a cynical statement. “Mullah Omar condemns this act,” it said. “Mullah Omar says Osama is not responsible. We have brought peace to this country and we want peace in all countries.”17 Every sentence was untrue.
On the morning of Saturday, September 15, President Bush assembled his National Security Council at Camp David. The famous presidential retreat was no longer the cluster of rustic log cabins I had known in the early 1970s; Camp David had become a more modern facility, with many of the comforts of the White House, and for me, at least, had lost some of its appeal.
Autumn had arrived in western Maryland, and even as we gathered inside the wood-paneled conference room of Camp David’s Laurel Lodge, most of us wore fleece jackets against the chill. The discussions that day began with a briefing from Tenet. He laid out an interesting first cut of a plan that proposed sending small CIA teams to Afghanistan to begin gathering on-site intelligence on al-Qaida and Taliban targets.
General Shelton followed with a presentation on what his staff suggested might be accomplished militarily. Six foot five and built like a tree trunk, Shelton had an unmistakable presence in the halls of the Pentagon. He had been an Army special operations officer who had spent most of his adult life in uniform. He was disappointed that his four-year term as chairman was coming to a close at the end of the month, just as America was entering a conflict in which special operations forces would play a larger role than ever before.
The shock of 9/11 had not provoked much originality or imagination from the Chairman or his staff. It was true that in the ninety-six hours since the attack, Shelton had not had time for substantive discussions with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command (CENTCOM), or the senior civilian leadership, much less with the CIA, whose support and intelligence would be critical. I alerted Bush that what Shelton would be presenting was not a satisfactory recommendation of the Defense Department but simply some of his preliminary ideas to begin the discussions.
The first option Shelton presented was a cruise missile strike, similar to what the prior administration had executed in response to earlier terrorist attacks during the 1990s. It was obviously inadequate. President Bush made clear he was in no mood for more of the same ineffective half-measures. He told Shelton we needed to “unleash holy hell.” “We’re not just going to pound sand,” he added.
Shelton’s second option was a somewhat more muscular version of the first: cruise missile strikes accompanied by American aircraft bombing Afghan targets for several days. To Bush this represented pounding sand a little harder.
A third option was a combination of cruise missile strikes and stealth bomber runs plus what Shelton called “boots on the ground.” It was not clear precisely what the missions would be for those troops. There were not many good targets for conventional American ground forces to engage. And, in any case, it would take considerable time to deploy a large force to that remote, landlocked country.
The President said he wanted American military forces on the ground in some fashion as soon as an effective response could be prepared and mounted. Shelton responded that a buildup of conventional ground troops could take months. I was concerned that during those months of preparation al-Qaida could scatter, and that the American people would be at risk of another attack. I decided we would spend the next several days working around-the-clock to develop a more appropriate plan.
Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz helped conceptualize the global war on terrorism as being broader than just Afghanistan. At that Camp David discussion Wolfowitz raised the question of Iraq, but Bush wanted to keep the focus on Afghanistan. Wolfowitz also suggested that wherever we struck first, our special forces should be a part of the military strategy. He had been impressed by the use of special forces to locate and destroy Iraqi Scud missiles during the 1991 Gulf War. Two weeks after 9/11, he wrote in a memo that “In addition to using Special Forces to attack targets associated with Al Qaida or the Taliban, we should consider using those [Special Forces] as a kind of arme
d liaison with anti-Al-Qaida or anti-Taliban elements in Afghanistan.”18 We believed our special operations forces could establish links with potential allies in Afghanistan, providing us with better intelligence and demonstrating that we were willing to help those who helped us. It was also a way of emphasizing the point that we were not fighting the Afghan people but only those who were supporting terrorism. The various suggestions from those in attendance and others became the nucleus of an audacious military campaign.
Looking back now on 9/11 and the early U.S. response, I see things we should have done differently and things that we might have done better. The administration, for example, should have focused more effectively and earlier on the ideological nature of the Islamist extremist enemies instead of describing the enemy vaguely as terrorism. We should not have shrunk from labeling the challenge Islamist while still properly making clear that we did not view Islam—the religion, as opposed to the totalitarian political ideology—as an enemy.
By the same token, we should have avoided personalizing the war around particular individuals—such as Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Though I was eager to see them in American custody or dead, I knew the war would not end with their capture or their deaths. We needed to go after their networks and their means of operating. Nonetheless, the war’s progress was frequently measured by whether bin Laden was at large or not. He became the face of the enemy, which was likely exactly what he wanted.
We also could have engaged and asked more of the American public in the war effort. One of the common criticisms by Democrats and Republicans was that President Bush did not encourage the American people to make sacrifices in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. A myth arose that Bush simply encouraged citizens to “go shopping.” That is not what he said—he was actually urging people to get on with their lives—and I understood his logic. Nonetheless, I sensed that Americans were anxious to do something—to be involved, to help—just as so many did their part for the war effort during World War II, with Victory Gardens, war bonds, and rationing. But the twenty-first century versions of those public contributions were not clear.
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