Against All Enemies (42 page)

The firing of the army and de-Baathification apparently came as a surprise to the American who had been charged with planning the postwar occupation, retired General Jay Gardner. Months after his replacement by Bremer, Gardner admitted publicly that his plans had included recalling the Iraqi army to their posts, vetting them, and reassigning most of them to duty doing the kinds of jobs that American forces have been required to perform.

In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, one had to join the Baath Party to gain promotion to managerial positions throughout the economy. By dismissing them all (and canceling their retirement), there were suddenly no experienced managers. Russians and others who suffered under the Communist Party would be familiar with the party membership requirement. After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, former Communist Party members were permitted to continue in some positions. Indeed, the first two presidents of Russia (Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin) were former members of the Communist Party. After protests, riots, and attacks, the U.S. occupation authority said it would pay Iraqi army officers' retirement and permit some to be involved in the new army or at least be trainers for it. By then, no doubt, some Iraqi army officers were plotting attacks on U.S. forces.

It is difficult for the world's sole superpower to be popular, but it is not impossible. A superpower has different responsibilities and perspectives than other nations, but many other nations' governments and peoples will understand and sympathize if they believe that the superpower is a good global citizen that respects the rights and opinions of other nations. I thought this was the concept behind candidate Bush's call for a “more humble” U.S. foreign policy (presumably one more humble than the Clinton foreign policy). That thought seemed to be lost quickly after candidate Bush became President Bush. It was not just that the United States objected to the Kyoto Treaty on the environment, or the International Criminal Court (both things to which we should object), it was the arrogance in the way we objected. At a meeting with my staff in the summer of 2001, I suggested, “If these guys in this Administration are going to want an international coalition to invade Iraq next year, they are sure not making a lot of friends.”

The invasion, when it came in 2003, lost us many friends. Polling data had already suggested that the U.S. was not trusted or liked by majorities in Islamic countries. After the invasion, those numbers hit all-time highs not only in Muslim countries but around the world. In Muslim countries, the U.S. invasion of Iraq increased support for al Qaeda and radical anti-Americanism. Elsewhere, we were now seen as a super-bully more than a superpower, not just for what we did but for the way we did it, disdaining international mechanisms that we would later need.

When the United States next needs international support, when we need people around the world to believe that action is required to deal with Iranian or Korean nuclear weapons, who will join us, who will believe us? When prime ministers wonder in the future if they should risk domestic opposition to support us, they will reflect on Tony Blair in the U.K. and how he lost popularity and credibility by allying himself so closely to the U.S. administration and its claims.

Even more damaging is the loss of credibility the national security institutions have suffered among our own people. Americans now know that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with September 11, that there was no imminent threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, that there was a secret sticker shock about the costs of the war in lives and dollars. It is important that the trust in America's word be re-stored, essential that we return to dealing with the real threats, because there are real threats still out there and real vulnerabilities here at home. Unless we address these real problems, we will suffer again.

As an analysis by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, written by Jeffrey Record, argues, the Iraq war was “a strategic error of the first magnitude.” Instead of energetically pursuing the priority of creating an ideological counterweight for al Qaeda, we invaded Iraq and gave al Qaeda exactly the propaganda fuel it needed. So much for the second of the three priorities that we should have been pursuing after September 11. Our third priority should have been to strengthen several key governments that are at risk to al Qaeda or, in the case of Iran, are already in the hands of terrorists that have supported al Qaeda.

T
HE FIRST COUNTRY
to require our attention would have been, and was, Afghanistan, the al Qaeda sanctuary then run by the Taliban. Following the al Qaeda attacks on America, the Bush administration adopted the goal that had been written months before and had sat waiting for Deputies meetings, Principals meetings, Presidential review: to eliminate al Qaeda. The nation demanded it. No longer could the U.S. military leadership recommend against sending troops into Afghanistan to eliminate the sanctuary. No longer could CIA quibble about aiding the “feckless” Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Yet right from the start, we made crucial mistakes. The war that the U.S. fought in Afghanistan was not the rapid, no-holds-barred operation that one might have expected. We did not immediately send U.S. forces to capture al Qaeda and Taliban leadership. The Bush administration decided to continue appeals to the Taliban to turn over bin Laden and his followers, and then, when we attacked, we treated the war as a regime change rather than a search-and-destroy against terrorists.

In the Clinton administration the State Department had argued that the Taliban faction ruling most of Afghanistan could perhaps be separated from their al Qaeda allies. State Department officers had tried to negotiate with the Taliban, to no avail. The Clinton administration did, however, put the Taliban on notice that it would hold it responsible for further al Qaeda terrorism. In a role reversal, the State Department leadership in the Bush administration, notably Deputy Secretary Rich Armitage, argued before and after September 11 that al Qaeda and the Taliban were inseparable and should be seen as one entity. Oddly, it was the White House and Pentagon that sought to give the Taliban another chance after September 11. Even four days after initiating bombing of al Qaeda facilities on October 7, 2001, President Bush again publicly appealed to the Taliban to cooperate and turn over bin Laden. When they did not, he later said the U.S. would get bin Laden “dead or alive.”

The U.S. military campaign against Afghanistan began on October 7 by implementing the bombing plans of al Qaeda camps and Taliban military facilities that had been prepared but unused during the Clinton administration. Usama bin Laden, unscathed by the bombing and not snatched by any CIA or Special Forces operation, released a videotape condemning the bombing.

Except for a Ranger raid lasting a few hours on an airstrip and camp well outside Kandahar, U.S. ground force units were not initially inserted into Afghanistan. (The Rangers were ordered not to hold the airfield and were helicoptered back out to an aircraft carrier.) On the ground, the U.S. relied upon the Afghan Northern Alliance to attack the Taliban. Joined by a handful of U.S. and British Special Forces who called in air support, the Northern Alliance advanced. The United States appealed to the Northern Alliance to slow down, not to take the capital of Kabul. They kept going anyway.

More than a month after the U.S. opened the military operation, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, still alive and well, ordered his forces to pull out of Kabul and move to the mountains. No U.S. troops gave chase.

Not until November 25, seven weeks after starting the operation, did the United States insert a ground force unit (Marines) to take and hold a former al Qaeda and Taliban facility, near Kandahar. The Taliban kept control of the city, however, until December 7. Not surprisingly, when the Marines entered the city, they found neither bin Laden nor Mullah Omar. The late-November operation did not include any effort by U.S. forces to seal the border with Pakistan, snatch the al Qaeda leadership, or cut off the al Qaeda escape.

The Northern Alliance continued to bear most of the burden of the fighting for the U.S. in November. While they attempted for two weeks to capture al Qaeda forces in Kunduz, aircraft reportedly slipped in and out with escaping al Qaeda personnel. Other al Qaeda and Taliban units withdrew into the high valley at Tora Bora, near the Pakistani border. Not until mid-December did the U.S. persuade its new Afghan allies to venture into Tora Bora, with U.S. Special Forces advisors and close air support. They soon withdrew, empty-handed. Under growing criticism that the Pentagon was bungling the job of getting bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership, Secretary Rumsfeld said just before Christmas that in the future U.S. forces would do the job, rather than continuing to rely upon Afghans.

By March 2002, U.S. ground forces had arrived in unit strength and, almost five months after the U.S. initiated combat, began a sweep of mountainous areas to capture al Qaeda personnel. Although Operation Anaconda ran into serious resistance, it too failed to capture al Qaeda leaders.

Two years after the U.S. began military operations against Afghanistan, U.S. forces, CIA officers, and pro-U.S. Afghans had still not found Usama bin Laden or his deputy Ayman Zawahiri. Nor had they found Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Indeed, long before the two-year mark the U.S. military had shifted its focus to Iraq. The U.S. Special Forces who were trained to speak Arabic, the language of al Qaeda, had been pulled out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq. Intelligence platforms supporting the military were also redirected. American forces and those of its NATO allies still controlled a limited area of Afghanistan. In fact, of the combined U.S. forces fighting the “war on terrorism” in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters, only about 5 percent were in Afghanistan.

CIA was less tentative. As then CIA Counterterrorism Director Cofer Black explained to a Senate committee, “After September 11, the gloves came off.” He did not explain why they were on before then. It could be argued that they were waiting for the Bush administration to determine its policy on al Qaeda and the priority it would give to that policy. What CIA did so readily after September 11, however, was what the Clinton White House had been pressing them to do for years, certainly since the African embassy bombings in 1998: insert CIA personnel into Afghanistan, aid the Northern Alliance, fly the Predator, and work with other security services to identify and break up cells in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. There was no reputational risk to the Agency of acting in Afghanistan after the alQaeda attacks in America. The only risk to the U.S. intelligence institution after September 11 was if it did not act, if questions were asked of why it had not acted before, why they did not know the attacks on New York and Washington were coming.

CIA had not acted before because the career managers of its Directorate of Operations were risk-averse. The risks they sought to avoid were risks to them, to the reputation of the CIA, and, more important, to the DO itself. Inserting CIA personnel into Afghanistan might have resulted in their becoming prisoners of al Qaeda, with all the attendant embarrassing publicity. Helping the Northern Alliance might have ended up with the managers of the DO hauled before congressional oversight committees having to answer whether the money had been used for heroin traffic or for the abuse of Taliban prisoners. CIA had been subject to criticism before when past White House staffs had gotten them involved in the civil war in Lebanon, in trading arms for hostages with Iran, in supporting Latin American militaries fighting Communists and trampling human rights. Secretary Albright, reflecting on the history of the CIA, said to me that it was easy to understand why it was risk-averse: it acts in a passive-aggressive way, she said, as if “it has battered child syndrome.”

George Tenet was as much concerned with the threat from al Qaeda as anyone in the government prior to September 11, but he was also trying to rebuild the CIA and in particular the Directorate of Operations. First on the Senate Intelligence Committee staff and then in the White House, he had watched as a series of CIA Directors had quickly come and gone. He knew that the revolving door of ineffective Directors had hurt morale at CIA and had failed to address the CIA's major weakness, its inability to put spies in critical positions. Tenet was reluctant to disagree with the DO on major intelligence policy issues.

What should the Administration have done about Afghanistan after September 11? The United States should have inserted forces into Afghanistan to cut off bin Laden's escape routes and to find and arrest or kill him and his deputies. After the U.S. finally introduced ground force units into Afghanistan and began sweep operations looking for al Qaeda and the Taliban, America and its coalition partners (including France and Germany) should have established a security presence throughout the country. They did not. As a result, the new Afghan government of President Hamid Kharzi was given little authority outside the capital city of Kabul. There was an opportunity to end the factional fighting and impose an integrated national government. Yet after initial efforts to unite the country, American interest waned and the warlords returned to their old ways. Afghanistan was a nation raped by war and factional fighting for twenty years. It needed everything rebuilt, but in contrast to funds sought for Iraq, U.S. economic and development aid to Afghanistan was inadequate and slowly delivered.