Throughout the campaign in Afghanistan, officials at the State Department and the CIA deliberated over who they thought might best run the eventual post-Taliban government. I had doubts about the ability of Americans to make that kind of a decision. We did not want to repeat the Soviet mistake of installing a government that would be widely seen as a puppet regime. I favored putting in motion a process that would allow Afghans to select their own leadership.
I was pleased when our administration worked with the United Nations to help enable Afghanistan’s various ethnic and political groups to deliberate on their path ahead. Over eight days of negotiations in Bonn, Germany, assisted by Zalmay Khalilzad (a future U.S. ambassador to the country), the Afghans came to agreement.19 They named Hamid Karzai as the head of an interim administration. Karzai had been seen as a likely candidate in part because he did not have a large military force and seemed willing to work across tribal and ethnic lines. The interim administration would oversee the convening of something that I, and I suspect most Americans, had never heard of: a loya jirga, or a traditional Afghan tribal council. The first loya jirga would establish a transitional governing authority. A second loya jirga would lead to the drafting of a constitution. The Afghans followed through with these agreements and implemented a form of representative rule in a part of the world that had little tradition of democracy.
On December 16, 2001, I made my first visit of many to a liberated Afghanistan. It was also the first visit to the country by a senior American official in a quarter of a century. We landed at Bagram Airfield, a decaying facility built by the Soviet Union. Our plane was parked on a runway surrounded by land mines. MiG fighter jets, battered and unusable, lay scattered across the tarmac, vestiges of the Soviet occupation. Parked alongside them were American C-130 transport planes, AC-130 gunships, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, and rows and rows of supplies. I was struck at seeing symbols of these two different eras side-by-side—one of failed conquest, the other of a successful liberation, at least thus far.
As I stepped off the military aircraft, I was greeted by an Afghan honor guard of Northern Alliance fighters standing along the side of the taxiway. American special operators stood with them, sun-drenched and bearded. One of the Americans came forward to greet me, with pride in his voice. “Welcome to Afghanistan, sir,” he said.
“No air of triumphalism marked [Rumsfeld’s] visit,” the New York Times noted.20 That was deliberate on my part. I made a conscious decision to arrive in the country in a manner that acknowledged a coalition victory but also that our work was far from done. It was certainly true that al-Qaida terrorists no longer enjoyed the support of a host government in the country, but they still posed a lethal threat. The Taliban had been driven from power, but they were not likely to give up altogether. “It’s going to take time and energy and effort and people will be killed in the process of trying to find them and capture them,” I cautioned.21
I met with the incoming leaders of Afghanistan, including Karzai and General Fahim Khan, in a battle-scarred hangar at Bagram. The windows had been blown out. Camouflage netting adorned the walls while Afghan carpets covered the floor—a juxtaposition with which I suspected these hardened leaders of the resistance against the Taliban were familiar.
Karzai wore the lambskin hat that would become a trademark for him. As we sat on folding chairs drinking tea, we began a conversation that would continue for years. From the outset Karzai demonstrated political savvy. One of his first comments referred to the slain Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Massoud, as “our very fine commander” and a “martyred man.”22 It suggested that Karzai wanted to be seen as an Afghan, not a Pashtun, and he wanted us to know that. He praised the United States military. “You liberated Afghanistan,” he declared warmly, calling this an opportunity Afghans had long awaited.23
One of my final meetings that day—one that was particularly memorable—was with a group of war-worn Americans. The men were part of the special forces teams that had been among the first troops to arrive on the ground in Afghanistan. The commanding officer of ODA 555, “Triple Nickel,” presented me with a faded and tattered Taliban flag that had been flying over Kabul when they arrived. Their A-Team had linked up with Northern Alliance commander Fahim Khan and was the first U.S. Special Forces team to enter the Afghan capital.24
The approach that Franks, Myers, Wolfowitz, Tenet, and I had favored, putting special operations teams in the thick of the fighting with the Northern Alliance, had worked well. I listened as the team recounted their operations—the stuff of heroic literature but told in a plainspoken manner. Some had taken part in raids against senior al-Qaida and Taliban personnel. It was as admirable a group of young men as any I had ever met.
Their work was a demonstration of the kind of defense transformation that the President envisioned—a mentality of eyes-wide-open situational awareness, can-do determination, and creative adaptability. The U.S. military had not undertaken cavalry charges on horses for many decades, but during the campaign fifty-year-old B-52 bombers were dropping bombs guided by GPS and lasers directed by a small team of Americans on horseback. Some had helped guide one-ton bombs to hit targets a long touchdown’s throw from their positions. They were working alongside Afghans who they had never met before, let alone trained with, but along with our Naval and Air Force precision bombing, they had toppled the Taliban in a matter of weeks. Through trial and error, these men tailored tactics, techniques, and procedures to fit the unusual circumstance they faced—bringing devastating force to bear with relatively little American manpower on the ground.
As we talked about their cavalry charge, I asked how many had ever ridden a horse before they arrived in Afghanistan. Only a few hands went up. The rest had had to learn in the most dangerous circumstances imaginable—and, at first, on uncomfortable wooden saddles.*
“Tell me what else you need,” I asked them. They had all they needed, they responded. It was the make do with what you have attitude that permeated their ranks.
I appreciated their toughness, but I pressed them. “Tell me what we could do better in the future,” I asked.
Looking ahead, they said they needed to be on the ground sooner, before combat operations began. They needed more time to get into towns and villages and get to know the local populations. They were convinced of the value of enlisting local populations in the fight.
For his first several months as chairman of Afghanistan’s interim government, Karzai was widely viewed as exercising little real authority, and only within a severely restricted sphere. He was deprecated by some as the “mayor of Kabul.”25 Early on, Pacha Khan Zadran, a Pashtun warlord from the eastern city of Gardez, decided to test the new Afghan leader’s mettle. Demanding recognition as a provincial governor, Pacha Khan threatened to ignite a civil war against Karzai’s fledgling government with his militia forces. It was a crucial moment for Karzai, and a test of his ability to lead.
In April 2002, Karzai told Pacha Khan to surrender or be annihilated. This was a rather bold ultimatum, since Karzai originally had no large militia of his own that he could rely on. Karzai expressed a desire to have American forces available to him if his new government’s military, amassed from the militias of other allied warlords, could not defeat Pacha Khan’s militia. He believed he wouldn’t actually need the assistance, since he was confident Pacha Khan would back down if he merely threatened that American forces would intervene. I told Karzai I’d get back to him after I consulted with my colleagues.
This led to animated discussions in the National Security Council over whether Karzai should be allowed, in effect, to threaten the use of the United States military against an uncooperative and potentially threatening Afghan leader. Powell and Rice seemed to support Karzai’s position, as did Vice President Cheney. They argued accurately that Karzai was vulnerable and might need American assistance if Afghanistan were to remain under the control of a central government. I felt a bigger principle was at stake. As I pointed out in a M
ay 10, 2002, memo to the President, the current moment was “of unusual importance” and perhaps “the most significant war-related call to be made since forces were sent into Afghanistan in October 2001.” “The issue,” I wrote, “is whether the Afghan government will be required to take responsibility for its actions—political and military—or whether it will be allowed to become dependent on US forces to stay in power.”26
I was concerned that giving Karzai the ability to threaten the use of American military force could make him seem to be exactly what some of his rivals said he was—a pawn of the United States. If Karzai could not prevail against local forces without American military assistance, I felt he could not survive politically anyway. A second point, I told the President, was that “it is not in the interest of the US or Karzai for us to make it easier for Karzai to rely on force, rather than political methods, to resolve [his] problems with regional leaders.”
It was not a perfect analogy, but I was convinced Karzai needed to learn to govern the Chicago way. In the 1960s, Mayor Richard J. Daley ruled Chicago—a city of many diverse and powerful elements—using maneuver, guile, money, patronage, and services to keep the city’s fractious leaders from rebelling against his authority. In parts of Chicago, where officials threatened the mayor’s authority, potholes were left untended and other services were neglected. In areas where local officials cooperated with the mayor, Daley brought the services of the city government to bear and was generous in his patronage. My point was that instead of giving Karzai the freedom to throw around the weight of the U.S. military, he should learn to use patronage and political incentives and disincentives to get the local Afghan warlords, governors, and cabinet officials in line. “A Karzai tempted to overreach could drag us into re-living the British and Soviet experiences of trying to use outside force to impose centralized rule on the fractious people of Afghanistan,” I concluded in my memo to President Bush.27
Even if it meant getting some things wrong in his first months in office, Karzai would need to learn the tough lessons of governing. I knew Karzai would be unlikely to develop those skills if all he needed to do to settle the inevitable differences was to invoke American military power.
President Bush agreed with my recommendation, and I told Karzai he would have to resolve the dispute without the promise of rescue by the American military. In short, Karzai was not authorized to threaten the use of American military force. It was a gamble, but in the end, Karzai and Pacha Khan resolved their differences as I had hoped, through negotiation. Pacha Khan eventually sought a role in the Afghan parliament, and Karzai did not stand in his way.28
Our military was justly proud of what it had accomplished in Afghanistan. The creative and constructive way the CIA and the Defense Department worked together showed that America was not a superpower capable of only massive applications of brute force. The United States, still a young nation, had operated strategically and skillfully in Afghanistan, an ancient land in which many great empires had stumbled badly over the millennia. Our country, at least for the moment, had avoided becoming the latest corpse in Afghanistan’s graveyard.
At the outset, expectations were low, but when major military operations in Afghanistan ended in five weeks, expectations heightened dramatically. Typical was the well-meaning comment of a 10th Mountain Division soldier reported in the Washington Post: “We got hit three months ago and in less than three months we’ve toppled this regime. And within a week from now, we’ve got an interim government that’s stepping in. What more can you ask for than a splendid little war over here?”29
The sentiment was understandable, but I did not think the long struggle against terrorism could or should be viewed as a series of quick, relatively painless, “splendid little wars.” I was convinced that that was not going to be the case. Though the deep-seated pessimism at the outset of the war proved to be misplaced, I knew too that the buoyant optimism after the Taliban was toppled would prove to be just as mistaken. Ending the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan would be only the opening of a long, sustained campaign that would require patience and grit. Taking the fight to the terrorists would mean our military men and women would have to be deployed elsewhere. To keep the pressure on, we would need to continue to pursue the terrorists wherever they took refuge and isolate the regimes that harbored them and could give them the weapons of mass destruction they desperately sought. The President had told me privately what he had in mind.
PART X
Saddam’s Miscalculation
Washington, D.C.
JANUARY 16, 1991
In a televised address from the Oval Office, President Bush announced the start of military operations in Iraq. He set forth the reasons for his decision to go to war. It was a long list. He and the national security officials in his administration—Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz among them—believed that the United States and its allies had exhausted all reasonable diplomatic efforts to force Saddam Hussein’s regime to comply with its obligations to the UN Security Council and, further, the UN’s economic sanctions were not accomplishing their objectives. According to American intelligence officials, Saddam was working to add a nuclear bomb to Iraq’s arsenal, which the CIA judged already contained chemical weapons.1 “Saddam Hussein started this cruel war,” the President said. “Tonight, the battle has been joined.”2
The date was January 16, 1991. And the president was George Herbert Walker Bush.
During that first Gulf War, I had been out of government for nearly fifteen years and living back home in Chicago. I watched the war from afar. I was impressed with the combination of air power and tank warfare in the southern Iraqi desert that decimated Saddam’s army. Television images showed the wreckage of Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks littering what became known as the highway of death.
With Saddam’s forces on the run, the Bush team faced a crucial decision, one that would have lasting consequences. The war’s initial goal had been achieved: Saddam’s forces had been driven from Kuwait. The question then was whether the United States should end the conflict or move to Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“I remember very clearly Colin Powell saying that this thing was turning into a massacre,” Robert Gates, then the deputy national security adviser, later recalled. “And that to continue it beyond a certain point would be un-American, and he even used the word unchivalrous.”3 Others in the administration, including Secretary of State James Baker, said they believed Saddam had suffered such a thorough defeat that he would not be able to retain power.4 Bush agreed, and drew the war to a quick close. After the war ended, President Bush urged Iraqis to “take matters into their own hands” when it came to the supposedly defeated dictator. With the administration’s encouragement, pro-democracy elements in Iraq twice rose up in an effort to topple Saddam’s regime.*
As part of the U.S.-Iraqi cease-fire agreement, General Norman Schwarzkopf allowed the Iraqis to operate helicopters, supposedly for the purpose of withdrawing their troops. Saddam proceeded to use his helicopter gunships to put down both of the revolts against his regime, massacring tens of thousands of Shia in the south and Kurdish Iraqis in the north. In Washington, some in the administration, including Wolfowitz, urged the Bush national security team to intervene and stop the massacres. The President decided otherwise. “[I]t was not clear what purpose would have been achieved by getting ourselves mixed up in the middle of that,” said Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.5 The rebels were quickly crushed by Saddam’s forces in the spring of 1991, creating among many Iraqi dissidents a lasting sense of betrayal and distrust.
For his part, Saddam Hussein came to believe that the United States lacked the commitment to follow through on its rhetoric. He saw America as unwilling to take the risks necessary for an invasion of Iraq. As he would explain to his interrogators after his capture in December 2003, Saddam had concluded that America was a paper tiger. He interpreted the first Bush administration’s decision
not to march into Baghdad as proof that he had triumphed in what he called the “mother of all battles” against the mightiest military power in world history. Looking back, an opportunity to take care of the problem before it turned into a larger crisis was missed and the tyrant was emboldened.
By 1992, a U.S. presidential election year, Bill Clinton, the politically astute young governor of Arkansas, accused President George H. W. Bush and his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, of being “soft” on Iraq. I was interested in this debate, as I had played a role in the drama when I met with Saddam Hussein as President Ronald Reagan’s Middle East envoy. Clinton may have been looking to burnish his national security credentials by trying to appear tougher in foreign policy than the Bush administration. Clinton’s running mate, Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Jr., went even further than Clinton, accusing President George H. W. Bush of deliberately concealing the extent of Saddam’s ties to terrorism, his attacks on U.S. interests, and his efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.6 Clinton and Gore pledged that their administration would be under no illusions when it came to dealing with Saddam. Supporters of the 1992 Democratic presidential ticket exploited the poor economic news of the day by distributing a bumper sticker that read: saddam hussein still has his job. do you?
A campaign to take Baghdad and oust Saddam was a daunting notion. Saddam had options if U.S. forces had marched to Baghdad in 1991, including the use of chemical or biological weapons against our forces. The senior Bush also pointed out that regime change in Baghdad had not been among the U.S. goals when the pledge to liberate Kuwait was first made. The administration felt it would not have full coalition support if it decided to continue on to Baghdad.
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