Descent Into Chaos (17 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

Attack!
Retaliation and Invasion

The Bush administration was staggered by the attacks of September 11, and was initially at a loss as to what to do. The easy option of launching a blitz of cruise missiles, as Clinton had done in 1998, was ruled out, as al Qaeda personnel had abandoned their camps. In a prearranged plan, bin Laden had quickly sent many of his top managers out of Afghanistan. He himself left his home in Kandahar and disappeared. Al Qaeda was virtually dismantled, except for the fighters belonging to Brigade 555, some of whom remained on the front lines outside Kabul, while others retreated east into the mountains to await the U.S. attack.

There was enormous reluctance on the part of the U.S. military to invade Afghanistan, given the fate of the British and Soviet land armies in that country during the past two centuries. The U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which had responsibility for the Middle East region, had no ready-made plan to invade Afghanistan, and it would take weeks before it could prepare one. And how would U.S. troops arrive in the landlocked country? Iran and Pakistan, the two most critical neighbors of Afghanistan, were hostile to the United States, while the Central Asian neighbors were tied to Russia and did not have the necessary facilities or access to the Taliban-controlled south. “CENTCOM had not developed a plan for conventional ground operations in Afghanistan. Nor had diplomatic arrangements for basing, staging, overflight and access been made with Afghanistan’s neighbors,” admitted CENTCOM chief Gen. Tommy Franks.
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The ease with which the nineteen suicide bombers arrived in the United States undetected was a massive intelligence failure that was swiftly laid at the feet of CIA director George Tenet. With his agency demoralized, Tenet realized that he had better make himself indispensable in the run-up to the war in Afghanistan. If the Pentagon had no plans for an invasion, he would preempt Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. CIA planners quickly came up with an audacious plan, putting together a package that would see NA troops on the ground linking up with teams of CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces, who would combine NA ground operations with U.S. air power using sophisticated technology. The aim was to avoid a major deployment of American troops, although the CIA was taking an enormous risk by presuming that the Taliban could thus be defeated.

On September 15, Tenet and his aides presented the hypothesis at a meeting at Camp David. With no other options on the table and the Pentagon having no plans to mount a full-scale invasion, his idea was accepted. The CIA now liaised with the Pentagon to send joint teams into Afghanistan. On September 17, Bush signed an order giving enormous powers to the CIA, allowing it to conduct the war in Afghanistan and make foreign policy decisions using the help of foreign intelligence agencies, in order to capture or kill members of al Qaeda. Up to $900 million and perhaps more than $1 billion was allocated to the CIA for covert operations.
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Tenet insists in his autobiography that the CIA was ready for this moment because it had been preparing such a plan for years.
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The facts would suggest otherwise. For over a decade, CIA officers had made only five trips to the Panjsher Valley to meet with Masud, but Masud was now dead and the CIA had only a sketchy relationship with his successor, Gen. Mohammed Fahim. The CIA had provided only pocket money to Masud and had had nothing to do with the recent return of exiled warlords Rashid Dostum, Ismael Khan, and Karim Khalili, a leader of the Hazara ethnic group who had opened new fronts against the Taliban after reconciling their differences with Masud. They had returned with the help of Turkey, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Iran—countries that before 9/11 were far more worried about a Taliban victory than the United States ever was.

Moreover, the CIA had shown no sense of urgency in supporting the Northern Alliance when many feared that the Taliban offensives in the summer of 2001 could wipe out Masud’s forces. Washington’s decision to arm Masud’s forces was made only one week before 9/11. Most critically, despite what Tenet and journalist Bob Woodward present in their books, the CIA had very few contacts with the Pashtun tribes in the south and had to go through the ISI every time they needed Pashtuns to monitor bin Laden.
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When the time came for the CIA to unleash anti-Taliban Pashtuns in October, the agency found it had none and fell back on Britain’s MI6 and the ISI to provide them. When Dick Cheney, frustrated by the CIA’s slowness in opening a southern front against the Taliban, visited the CIA, he found it had few contacts among the Pashtun.

MI6 reverted to what its forefathers had done a century earlier during the British Raj—passing out large sums of money to Pashtun exiles living in Pakistan with the aim of persuading them to move into Afghanistan. Much of this initial funding ended up in the purchase of fancy cars and new houses in Peshawar. Few Pashtun leaders in Peshawar believed that the Taliban could be defeated on its home turf in the south.

Apart from a handful of CIA officers, no U.S. officials had been inside Afghanistan for a decade. Few CIA officers spoke Persian or its Afghan dialect, Dari, and nobody spoke Pushtu, the language of the Pashtuns. CIA and Special Operations Forces personnel who entered Afghanistan spoke either Russian or Arabic. This lack of language skills in every department of the U.S. government was exposed as being a critical problem. I was flooded with e-mail appeals from American companies hired by the U.S. government to find U.S. citizens who could speak “Farsi, Pushtu, Dari, Turkmen, Urdu or Uzbek.”
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The Dari-speaking CIA veteran Gary Schroen, fifty-nine, was pulled out of retirement to head the first ten-man Afghanistan Liaison Team, code-named Jawbreaker, that flew to Tashkent and landed in the Panjsher Valley just two weeks after 9/11. They brought with them $3 million, which was immediately dished out to NA leaders—Fahim received $1 million as goodwill money. Another $10 million was quickly flown in so that the CIA could pay off other warlords, such as Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Rashid Dostum.
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When Gen. Tommy Franks met with Fahim on October 30 in the back of his giant C-17 cargo aircraft parked at Dushanbe Airport, there was some haggling before Franks handed him $5 million for the NA’s military operation to take the north but to promise to stop short of Kabul.
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It was the cheapest war America was ever to fight. Yet on the back of its easy success and the laxity given to the CIA by Bush, for the next two years the agency was to run Afghanistan not by democratization or nation building but by paying off warlords to keep the peace, determining what was to be rebuilt and at what pace, running the Karzai administration, and slowing down everything else with the excuse that it was pursuing bin Laden. The attaché cases full of dollar bills they received would allow the warlords to build huge houses in Kabul and the Panjsher Valley after the war, set themselves up in business as suppliers of goods and local manpower to U.S. bases, ply the drug trade, and play the region’s currency markets. General Fahim would become one of the richest men in Afghanistan, buying up property and an entire gold market in Kabul, while Abdul Rasul Sayyaf would buy up most of Paghman. When the CIA money ran out, the same warlords would turn back to the drug trade.

Even as Cheney and Rumsfeld were preparing to fight the war in Afghanistan, they were already thinking of fighting the next war in Iraq. The distraction of Iraq, which materialized just hours after the 9 /11 attacks and continued indefinitely, was first to undermine and then defeat both U.S. policy in Afghanistan and the struggle to capture al Qaeda leaders. From insider accounts, we now know that even as the Pentagon building was still burning on the morning of September 11, the neocons were trying to blame Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for the attacks. Donald Rumsfeld told his aide Stephen Cambone to look for evidence of Iraqi involvement: “Hard to get good case. Need to move swiftly. Near term target needs—go massive—sweep it all up, things related and not,” Cambone’s notes read.
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Richard Clarke attended meetings on Iraq on September 12. He later wrote, “At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.”
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I visited Washington several times in early 2002, sincerely believing that now the United States would do the right thing by Afghanistan and rebuild the country. I came up with suggestions for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development as to how they could speed up nation building. By the early summer of 2002, when it became clear that the United States had no intentions of rebuilding Afghanistan, disillusionment set in as I saw that Iraq was the real target.

Despite the total absence of evidence, the neocons wanted to believe that bin Laden had pulled off 9/11 with help from Iraq. On September 15, at Camp David, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued for a simultaneous attack on Iraq and Afghanistan.
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On November 21, the day before Thanksgiving and just as the Northern Alliance was trying to negotiate the Taliban surrender of Kunduz and Kandahar, Bush asked Rumsfeld to draw up new plans for attacking Iraq. “What kind of a war plan do you have for Iraq?” Bush asked him.
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Rumsfeld then ordered an incredulous Franks to draw up the plans. “Son of a bitch,” Franks muttered under his breath.
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For decades the neocons had pushed for promoting big ideas on how to get Saddam Hussein, secure Iraq’s oil supplies, and secure Israel.
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Their idea for Iraq could immediately be translated into a military strategy, but there were no such plans for Afghanistan, even though bin Laden had been living there since 1996 and had directly attacked American power several times. The neocons had assiduously avoided any serious discussion of the real threat from Afghanistan.

The first U.S. failure was to snub potential allies. Two days after the 9/11 attacks, NATO invoked Article 5 of its constitution, declaring that the attack on the United States had been an attack on NATO, which was now obliged to respond. NATO and Russia issued an unprecedented joint statement of support. European countries primed their militaries, expecting to be called upon by the United States on the lines of the grand alliance the elder Bush had created for the first Gulf War, in 1991. They were totally unprepared for the policy of unilateralism Washington now followed. The message to NATO from Rumsfeld was essentially, “Thank you, but no thank you—we don’t need you.” When NATO secretary-general George Robertson arrived in Washington, he was first abused and then badly snubbed by an arrogant Wolfowitz. Senior German, French, and Scandinavian diplomats complained to me bitterly about the attitude of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. The bitterness it created was to linger until the United States asked for European help for the war in Iraq.

Only British prime minister Tony Blair seemed oblivious to the damage being done to the Atlantic alliance as he accepted America’s unilateralism without question. Blair became obsessed with his role as an interlocutor between the international community and Bush, who in fact wanted no international help. Blair was convinced that as the world’s great charmer and persuader, he could get people to do things by the sheer weight of his personality.
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European pique at Blair was somewhat tempered by the hope that British input into planning the war would be beneficial, since the Americans were so ignorant about Afghanistan. After Blair and his aides read my Taliban book, I was invited to meet the prime minister when he came to Islamabad. I was impressed by his knowledge and charmed by the interest he showed in Afghanistan and the perceptive questions he asked me. But even in his asking them there was an element of showmanship, as one question followed another without his waiting for an answer—as though he wanted to perform rather than learn.

Blair was the only European leader whom Colin Powell asked for help in bringing Afghanistan’s neighbors on board. Pakistan was on board within the first forty-eight hours of 9/11. The sensitive task of wooing Iran was handled by British foreign secretary Jack Straw. The Iranian leader, President Mohammed Khatami, was amenable to a war that would see Iran’s hated enemy, the Taliban, destroyed, and he sent Bush a message to that effect through the Canadian government. On September 20, U.S. officials met with Iranian diplomats as part of the Geneva Group, after which Straw visited Tehran. Iran promised to provide search-and-rescue help if U.S. pilots were shot down, and deployed its military to seal its 560-mile-long border with Afghanistan. Turkey, which had opened a secret supply route to General Dostum through Uzbekistan even before 9/11, was asked for further help. On September 22, Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit declared that Turkey would join with Russia and Iran and step up aid to the Northern Alliance.

Muslim nations urged the United States to go to the UN Security Council for a clear mandate for war. On September 28, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1373, authorizing the use of force against terrorists. The resolution demanded that all 189 member states of the UN shut down financing, support, and safe havens for terrorists. President Bush ordered a freeze on all assets in the United States held by twenty-seven terrorist entities and asked all countries and banks to follow suit or risk jeopardizing their relations with Washington.

The next challenge was the complex task of wooing Central Asia. Although the five states—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan—were ruled by dictators who could say yes or no to U.S. demands, they all had a supreme adviser in the shape of Russia. Ten years after achieving independence, it was still inconceivable that the five states would take a major foreign policy decision without Moscow’s go-ahead, and President Vladimir Putin was determined to extract the maximum concessions from Washington. Both the United States and Russia had had a complex relationship with Central Asia in the past decade.