Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  At Camp David on the first weekend after the terrorists struck, the president and his war council began planning for the invasion of Afghanistan. But Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz argued that they were better prepared to attack Iraq than Afghanistan. As Bob Woodward has brilliantly documented in Bush at War and Plan of Attack, the president vetoed the suggestion—for the moment. He and Dick Cheney were reluctant to take on too many military challenges at once. There would be plenty of time for Iraq later.

  The CIA was the first to go into Afghanistan, but they had lost a key asset. The only Afghan leader capable of challenging bin Laden or the Taliban had been attacked two days before 9/11 on bin Laden’s orders. Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan opposition’s greatest war hero, died a week later, killed by two suicide bombers posing as a television camera crew. Massoud was legendary, a tribal leader known as the Lion of the Panjshir. He’d been on the CIA’s payroll for a decade, and Bill Richardson had tried to meet him when we traveled to northern Afghanistan in 1998. To the UN ambassador’s considerable disappointment, Massoud hadn’t shown up. His death left Afghanistan, a country carved up by tribal fiefdoms, without any single individual strong enough to command loyalty across groups. In this patchwork quilt of feuding tribes, the Taliban, who were largely ethnic Pushtuns, still controlled most of the country. The rest was divided among ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks, and other minorities. In the resulting power vacuum, the Taliban and bin Laden reigned supreme.

  To build international support for the invasion of Afghanistan, Colin Powell began putting together an unlikely coalition—not only moderate Arab states, but Sudan, Yemen, and Syria. Even Libya’s Khaddafy said the United States had the right to respond to terror. Powell’s strategy was to make temporary alliances with countries that also felt threatened by Islamic extremists. Now it was time to sign up the most important player for achieving victory over the Taliban—Pakistan.

  On September 18, 2001, I started reporting from the United Nations, now barricaded by dump trucks filled with sand to thwart potential suicide bombers. It was the perfect metaphor for the fear and isolation that would poison the Iraq debate to come. France was already questioning whether action against Afghanistan had to rise to the level of war. That night, Powell launched a long, complicated negotiating strategy that succeeded in the short run in building alliances, but ultimately left the U.S. isolated when it came time to attack Iraq. In the final analysis, his diplomacy was a tragedy of crossed signals and missed opportunities.

  The UN is one of the most frustrating institutions I cover. As a child, I visited it on Girl Scout field trips and wrote school essays about its lessons of peace and internationalism. The reality is very different. Although often maligned, unfortunately it gives its critics plenty of ammunition. Despite repeated efforts at reform, it is far too bureaucratic. Its global assistance projects are often the only lifeline for people suffering from hunger or disease. But in Rwanda, with American complicity, it utterly failed to prevent the slaughter of millions. And in the Balkans, only NATO’s belated intervention saved the UN from complete disgrace.

  The UN now became the fulcrum for American diplomacy, but that set up an inevitable conflict with a White House more used to going it alone than asking for help from lesser powers who had votes on the Security Council. (Or even cooperating with more traditional allies like France and Germany, as evidenced by Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissive reference to them a year later as “old Europe.”) Immediately after 9/11, the United States had enormous sympathy from around the world for military operations against the Taliban. But only three weeks into the operation, critics on the left and right began questioning whether we had gotten ourselves into a quagmire. The operation was being judged by unreasonably high expectations for rapid military victories, fixed in the public’s mind by the success of the first Gulf War. Eventually, the Pentagon strategy disproved the networks’ armchair commentators, or “Rolodex generals,” as Powell and Richard Armitage called them, dismissively. The combination of CIA paramilitary units, inserted covertly prior to the invasion, and indigenous Afghan forces in the Northern Alliance, succeeded in wresting control of the country from the Taliban.

  By November, the Taliban were in retreat. They were officially replaced in Kabul a month later by an interim regime, 102 days after 9/11. But Afghanistan, even without the Taliban, was still a feudal state ruled by warlords. Its nominal leader, Hamid Karzai, had more charisma in the West than real power at home. And Osama bin Laden was nowhere to be found. The CIA believed that he crossed into Pakistan by mule on December 16.

  With Pakistan now critical to the hunt for bin Laden, and tense border disputes between Pakistan and India, both nuclear powers, Colin Powell headed to the region. I went along, describing it at the time as “mission impossible.” The trip was high-risk: the Taliban had infiltrated Pakistan’s security services. So to maintain secrecy for Powell’s arrival time in Islamabad, we were told we could not tell our networks where in Europe we were refueling on the flight over and were not permitted to use our cell phones en route. The night landing in Pakistan was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Cabin lights inside and exterior running lights were turned off. We were told to brace ourselves as though for a crash landing. The military pilots of the secretary’s 757 then dove down to land with almost no glide path on the approach, minimizing the time terrorists could target the plane with stinger missiles.

  Powell didn’t get a very warm welcome. Just as he arrived, India raised the stakes, hinting that its submarines were already armed with nuclear warheads, a threat Pakistan couldn’t match. India was posturing because it still wanted satisfaction for a suicide bombing attack on its parliament a month earlier that most likely had been staged by Pakistani terrorists. It was in this highly charged atmosphere that Powell undertook his mission to get Pakistan’s leader to take on al Qaeda.

  Pakistan is ten hours ahead of New York, so when we landed we had to go right to work. My first challenge was to go to the roof of our hotel and appear on a cable show with the host, Ashleigh Banfield. Ashleigh had moved to Islamabad to cover the war, and achieved some celebrity back home for dyeing her blond hair brown, to better blend in to the Muslim world. Just off the plane, I sat next to her on her set, on the roof of the Marriott in downtown Islamabad, feeling very blond. I didn’t finish my report for Nightly News until 7 a.m., just in time to turn in my bags for the flight to India, our next stop. I longed for a bath, if not a nap, but it didn’t matter. The rundown hotel we’d been billeted at on the Rawalpindi Road—called the Dream Motel—didn’t have running water, and it was time to leave for New Delhi.

  Our departure was similar to our arrival, only in daylight, and was even scarier. This time, the pilots gunned the engines, roared down the runway at full speed, and screeched to a stop. Then, to throw off any would-be attackers, they did a 180 degree turn, accelerated rapidly in the opposite direction, and lifted straight up. I don’t know if it fooled the Taliban, but it certainly made us sick to our stomachs.

  I didn’t have a producer with me, but NBC hired a local stringer to help out in New Delhi. I had to stay up to write a report for Nightly News and then find the satellite transmission point to feed my story to New York in the early hours of the morning. A few hours later, we left for Afghanistan. We flew into Kabul on a cargo plane capable of evasive maneuvers, escorted by F-14 fighter jets and an AWACS early warning radar plane. The visit was brief and largely symbolic. Its aim was strengthening Karzai’s tenuous grasp on power.

  The city, devastated long before the current war by years of uprisings against Soviet and then Taliban rule, was in ruins, but you could see small signs of renewal. I had not been there since my trip three years earlier with Bill Richardson. This time, we went back to the American embassy compound that had been shuttered since 1989, when the United States withdrew. Powell awarded a commendation to an Afghan caretaker, an embassy employee named Ahmed Zai, who had voluntarily guarded the U.S. property during all those years of occup
ation. Zai told me he did not regret the sacrifices he’d made for his service to America. It was a proud moment for the man and his family as Powell saluted him, and the Stars and Stripes were once again raised over the reopened embassy in Kabul.

  All of our attention was still focused on unfinished business in Afghanistan, but the president had another war in mind. He had secretly asked General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, to begin planning for war with Iraq. His hidden agenda became more apparent at his State of the Union speech at the end of January. That night, I was at the Russell rotunda at the Capitol watching the speech and preparing to offer analysis afterward. Heralding successes in Afghanistan four months after 9/11, the president declared that the war on terror was only just beginning.

  None of us was prepared for what came next. Bush accused Iraq of supporting terror, and of having plotted “to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade.” He went on to say that states like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea “constitute an axis of evil” that pose a “grave and growing danger” should they share weapons of mass destruction with terrorists. He added, ominously, “The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

  This was the Bush doctrine of preemptive action, a policy the president spelled out more fully eight months later. He was underscoring that the war against terror was not limited to al Qaeda. My immediate reaction was that he had shut down what some State Department officials thought was a promising attempt to cultivate Iran. Clearly, that overture was dead. But the real signal was Iraq. As Bob Woodward reported in Plan of Attack, the White House had sent drafts of the speech to the State Department three or four days earlier. Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, did not have any problem with the phrase, only questioning whether the speech was too “bleak” and needed more uplifting language at the end. More poetry was added to lighten the prose. George Tenet also raised no objections.

  What is remarkable is not that the phrase “axis of evil” worked its way into a Bush speech, but that the Bush team was so accustomed to the president’s tough thinking no one thought it would be controversial in the rest of the world. It was just another catchy speechwriter’s phrase to please the political team. Even Powell and Armitage were tone deaf to the likely reaction from Europe. There was criticism from some Republicans, like Senator Chuck Hagel of the Foreign Relations Committee, who afterward told me, “Words have meaning, and meaning has consequences.” Hagel believed the “axis of evil” phrase would make it harder for Iranian reformers. But the president had already given up on them. He felt the hard-liners had won, and Iran would not live up to any agreements. A month earlier, an Iranian ship smuggling weapons to Yasser Arafat had been intercepted in the Red Sea. Intelligence showed that Iran was also trying to destabilize Hamid Karzai’s fragile interim government in Afghanistan.

  What is most revealing, however, about the mood at the time was the reaction of the Democratic leader, Tom Daschle. The majority leader said that Congress would back military action against all three of the axis of evil states if the president decided to launch military strikes against them. “If it takes preemptive strikes, (if ) it takes preemptive action, I think Congress is prepared to support it, but obviously we want more details,” he told ABC. In post-9/11 Washington, there would be no strong challenge from the loyal opposition.

  That winter, favorable world opinion of the American effort in Afghanistan began to wane after pictures were released showing al Qaeda suspects bound and kneeling in their prison at Guantánamo, Cuba. In a foreshadowing of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq two years later, a visibly annoyed Donald Rumsfeld shot back at critics: “The treatment of the detainees in Guantánamo Bay is proper, it’s humane, it’s appropriate, and it is fully consistent with international conventions.”

  The subject was still sensitive a week later when we went to a dinner our friends Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn were hosting in honor of Kofi Annan. Also attending were the Rumsfelds, several senators and their wives, and a number of prominent journalists. Given Washington’s “off the record” rules about that kind of social occasion, none of us ever disclosed what happened. But two years later, Al Hunt, who had not attended and so was not bound to keep the secret, wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal. As Al revealed, an argument erupted between Annan and Rumsfeld over whether prisoners at Guantánamo deserved protection under the Geneva Conventions. When one of the guests challenged Rumsfeld, he got up and left in the middle of dessert. It was an early warning of a growing chasm between the administration and the UN.

  The arguments over war and foreign policy began to dominate our lives, in and out of the office. These were not small political debates that could be laughed off over a drink. This was big stuff, and people were passionate. Perhaps Washington was like this during Vietnam, before I’d arrived in town. But this was more serious than anything I’d ever covered. I have repeatedly gone back over our reporting in those years to better understand how we, along with the intelligence community, much of Congress, and leaders in the United States and Great Britain got it so wrong.

  My stories reflected a variety of viewpoints, but many of the people interviewed came to the weapons debate with erroneous assumptions about Saddam Hussein’s motives. From those misunderstandings flowed critical errors about Iraq’s weapons program. In a report I filed for the Today show on April 10, 2002, I interviewed Charles Duelfer, a dedicated former United Nations weapons inspector who had shown singular independence at the UN. Later, Duelfer went back into government and helped the CIA determine that Saddam had not resumed weapons production. But two years earlier, in the debate before the war, he told me, “Right now we would face chemical and biological weapons. Those are bad enough, but they are things that we can deal with. If he gets a nuclear weapon, when he gets a nuclear weapon, then all bets are off.”

  In that same report, former Clinton defense secretary William Cohen, one of the nation’s most thoughtful military experts, said he suspected Iraq started rebuilding weapons of mass destruction almost four years earlier, when it kicked out UN inspectors. “That’s my strong suspicion, that since the time that they have kicked out the inspectors, that they have continued on their program to develop chemical and biological weapons.”

  When I try to recapture my own mind-set by going through notes, scripts, and tapes, I come to the conclusion that some of these assumptions were based on overly simple logic. If Saddam had no weapons, why would he continue to suffer from economic sanctions, when he could so easily come clean and regain control over his country’s economy? There was also Saddam’s history of lying to hide his weapons before the first Gulf War, and using them against Iran and the Kurds. Duelfer, in one of our reports that April, said, “I myself have spent an evening in 1995 listening to them describe how they weaponized a biological agent.”

  At the same time, there were powerful voices of caution. Senator Joe Biden, after a series of exhaustive Foreign Relations Committee hearings in August 2002, said, “One, we don’t want to do this alone if we can avoid it. Number two, when we go, if we go and take down Saddam Hussein, we’re going to have to be there for a while, and it’s going to cost a great deal of money.”

  I had talked to enough senior officials that summer to know that going to war with Iraq was only a matter of time. If anything, the president would accede to appeals from Tony Blair and Colin Powell to go to the UN first as a useful delaying tactic. The military needed more time to get our troops in place and would not be ready for war until early spring.

  Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to the president’s father during the first Gulf War, and Condi Rice’s mentor, clearly read the internal politics the same way. He weighed in with a column in The Wall Street Journal that August, cautioning, “There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the September 11 attacks.” He added that there was virtual consensus in th
e world against attacking Iraq at that time.

  Scowcroft’s column was widely viewed in Washington as a thinly veiled message from Bush’s father, who had decided not to oust Saddam when he had the chance, to the son, who seemed hell-bent on finishing the job. Everyone was playing armchair psychologist and interpreting the president’s decisions through an oedipal lens. To counteract Scowcroft, Cheney gave a major policy speech, rare for late August when official Washington vacations, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The vice president used the speech to challenge the value of UN inspections and declare categorically, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction (and) there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

  In Cheney’s view, the risk of being wrong about Saddam was simply too great to take the chance of letting him get a nuclear weapon. Others in the administration arguing for war were also emboldened by what they viewed as the initial success, and relatively low casualty count, of the military operation in Afghanistan. In going to the UN to satisfy Blair and other key allies, the president was buying into a process for which he had little regard. His and Cheney’s obvious contempt for the UN diplomacy only fueled the continuing debate with Powell over how to proceed.

  The president’s speech to the General Assembly that fall set the stage for the confrontations to come. After a ferocious internal argument, the president committed to ask for a war resolution, but somehow that sentence didn’t appear in the version of the text loaded in the TelePrompTer. Powell, listening from the front row of the audience, was mortified. But, a few lines down, the president realized the sentence was missing and ad-libbed it. Was the omission in the text provided to the president just an accident? I still wonder whether someone in the White House was trying to subvert the policy decision.