The Longest War (9 page)

Finally, the Pentagon demanded high-quality “actionable intelligence” before launching an operation, which simply didn’t exist in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Special Operations boss Schoomaker recalled: “Special Operations were never given the mission. It was very, very frustrating. It was like having a
brand-new Ferrari
in the garage and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender.”

Given the reluctance of the Pentagon to send in Special Operations Forces, and the generally imperfect intelligence about bin Laden’s location, what other options were available to policy makers? One option was to tighten the diplomatic noose around the Taliban and so increase their costs for sheltering al-Qaeda. After the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, Michael Sheehan, the U.S. ambassador for counterterrorism, an intense, wiry former Special
Forces officer given wide latitude by his boss Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, put the Taliban on notice that they would be held responsible for future al-Qaeda attacks. And in 1999 the Clinton administration slapped
sanctions on the Taliban
and the United Nations followed suit.

As concerns about a possible terrorist attack during the turn of the millennium were gripping Clinton’s national security team, Sheehan dispatched a strongly worded cable to Taliban leaders that said they would “be held fully accountable” for another attack by al-Qaeda. Sometime in January 2000, Sheehan
followed that up
with a forty-five-minute phone call with the Taliban foreign minister Wakil Muttawakil in which he read him an unambiguous statement from Clinton: “We will hold the Taliban leadership
responsible for any attacks
against US interests by al-Qaeda or any of its affiliated groups.” Muttawakil, who was privately one of bin Laden’s most bitter critics inside the Taliban movement, stuck to his talking points that the al-Qaeda leader was under the control of the Taliban and there was no proof that he was involved in terrorism.

The international community’s pressure and sanctions on the Taliban did ratchet up the pressure on them, according to al-Qaeda insider Abu Walid al-Masri, who later wrote that a “
nucleus of opposition
” to bin Laden developed among senior leaders of the Taliban who urged that bin Laden be expelled. Taliban officials also told bin Laden to cease his international terrorist plotting in early 1999. Obviously, the al-Qaeda leader did not pay much heed to any of this.

The deeper problem the United States had in attacking al-Qaeda in Afghanistan before 9/11 was not simply the result of imperfect intelligence about the country, the reluctance of the military to take action, and the lack of political will to go to war against terrorists that had characterized American administrations for decades; rather, it was that policy makers in the Clinton and Bush administrations didn’t have any overarching strategy for Afghanistan. This was the legacy of many years of American neglect of the festering problems in the country. After the brilliant success of the covert U.S. operation to arm the Afghan mujahideen that had helped to destroy the Soviet Union, the George H. W. Bush administration closed the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 1989. This turned out to be a grave error, as from that day forward the United States was largely flying blind in Afghanistan (the embassy only
reopened after the fall of the Taliban
). And as the Cold War receded into history, aid to Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on
the planet, was effectively zeroed out, dropping to
only $2 million a year
in Clinton’s first term.

Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush failed to see bin Laden as
a political challenge
. They both had hoped to end the al-Qaeda problem by decapitating its leader through cruise missile strikes or by using CIA assets on the ground. Of course, that would have left the training camps and al-Qaeda’s organization in place even if the decapitation effort
had succeeded
. And instead of using the leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud, as a strategic partner to defeat both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, he was seen only as someone who might be helpful in eliminating bin Laden.

There were some American officials who did see the larger strategic picture. Five days into the new Bush administration, on January 25, 2001, Richard Clarke wrote National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that a cabinet-level review of al-Qaeda policy was “
urgently
” needed. Attached to the memo was a paper titled “
Strategy for Eliminating
the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al Qida.”
In the memo
Clarke suggested arming Predator drones with Hellfire missiles to take out the group’s leaders, giving “massive” support to Massoud’s Northern Alliance, destroying terrorist training camps and Taliban command-and-control facilities using U.S. Special Forces, and expanding a deal with Afghanistan’s northern neighbor, Uzbekistan, to allow U.S. assets like the Predator drones to be based there. But Rice seemed content to let her deputy Stephen Hadley move ahead at a
businesslike but not urgent pace
with an al-Qaeda policy review and otherwise do nothing. (The strategy that Clarke had outlined in the memo to Rice was essentially
the same one
that President Bush finally adopted after 9/11.)

With the exception of Clarke and CIA director George Tenet and the latter’s deputy John McLaughlin, senior Bush administration officials consistently underestimated the urgent threat posed by bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who simply did not fit their worldview of what constituted a serious threat. A Nexis database search of all the newspapers, magazines, and TV transcripts of Rice’s statements and writings from the mid-1990s until 9/11 shows that she never mentioned al-Qaeda publicly, and only referred to the threat from bin Laden
during a 2000 interview
with a Detroit radio station. Perhaps sensitive to this fact, when Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, she said, “I, myself, had written for an introduction to a volume on bioterrorism done at Stanford that I thought that we wanted not to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden had succeeded on our soil.”

The book that Rice referred to her in her testimony,
The New Terror: Facing the Threat of Biological and Chemical Weapons
, was published by Stanford in 1999.
The New Terror
has no mention of al-Qaeda or bin Laden either by Rice or any of its other contributors. It’s no wonder that when Clarke first briefed Rice on al-Qaeda, “
her facial expression
gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before.”

For other key members of Bush’s national security team, the al-Qaeda threat also barely registered. A Nexis database search of all of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s pre-9/11 statements and writings shows he never mentioned al-Qaeda, and referred to bin Laden only once, in the context of the Saudi exile’s supposed links to Saddam Hussein, testifying before a congressional committee in 1998 that there were “
suspect connections
between the Iraqis and this Osama bin Laden fellow.” Indeed, during the summer of 2001, Wolfowitz enraged CIA officials, some of whom were frantic with worry, by pooh-poohing the flood of warnings pouring in by asking whether bin Laden was simply “
trying to study
U.S. reactions.”

A Nexis search for anything that President Bush or Vice President Cheney might have written or said about the threat posed by al-Qaeda and bin Laden similarly comes up empty before 9/11. Of the
thirty-three “principals” meetings
of cabinet members held by the Bush administration before the attacks on Washington and New York, only one was about terrorism, although almost immediately after assuming office Bush convened his cabinet on
February 5
, 2001, to discuss the supposedly pressing issue of Iraq. The
first cabinet-level meeting
about the threat posed by al-Qaeda took place on September 4, 2001.

The fact that the Bush administration was strangely somnambulant about the al-Qaeda threat is puzzling. It was not as if they did not have enough information or warning about the threat posed by al-Qaeda; quite the opposite; President Bush was being
regularly briefed
about the terrorist group. Bush administration officials, of course, deny that they didn’t take the threat urgently enough, but there is no debating that in their public utterances, private meetings, and actions, the al-Qaeda threat barely registered. The real question then, in the face of all this information about the threat, is why did the most experienced national security team in memory underestimate the problem?

The short answer: They just didn’t get it. Key members of the Bush team had cut their teeth during the Cold War. Rice was a Soviet specialist at the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush. Wolfowitz
had worked on the “
Team B
” efforts at the Pentagon in the 1970s which concluded,
wrongly
, that the Soviet military threat was much larger than supposed. And Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had served as White House chief of staff and secretary of defense during the Ford administration. Their views about the importance of state-based threats remained frozen in a Cold War mind-set. The quip that after the French Revolution the restored Bourbon monarchs came back to power having “learned nothing and forgotten nothing” applied equally well to the Bush national security team, who assumed office as if the 1990s and the gathering threat from al-Qaeda simply hadn’t happened.

This was compounded by a self-confidence bordering on arrogance typified by the nickname Bush’s foreign policy advisers accorded themselves during the 2000 election campaign. They dubbed themselves “
the Vulcans
,” after the Roman god of fire and metal. Initially this was something of a joke, but as the campaign went on the Bush national security team became known in all seriousness as the Vulcans. The Vulcans, who prided themselves on their hard-nosed appreciation of the harsh realities of the national security realm, would go on to preside over the most devastating national security failure in American history.

To admit that al-Qaeda was the number-one threat to American security would then make it difficult, if not impossible, to argue that missile defense ought to be, as it was for the pre-9/11 Bush administration, a key national security imperative. Antiballistic missile systems, of course, do nothing to stop terrorists. To admit that nonstate terrorists were the primary danger to the nation, it then became impossible to argue, as many in the administration did, that a rogue state, Iraq, was the number-one danger. In a nutshell, bin Laden and al-Qaeda were politically and ideologically inconvenient to square with the Bush worldview.

The inattention of the Bush administration to the al-Qaeda threat had results: Bush
stood down
the force of submarines and ships stationed in the Arabian Sea that were capable of launching cruise missile strikes into Afghanistan and had been put in place by Clinton. And shortly before 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft
turned down
FBI requests for some four hundred additional counterterrorism personnel. Ashcroft also released a statement about the Justice Department’s
top ten priorities
in May 2001. Terrorism wasn’t one of them. Neither Rice nor her deputy Hadley got the squabbling Pentagon and CIA to fly Predator drones equipped with Hellfire missiles over Afghanistan.
An unarmed Predator
had filmed bin Laden
at his farm near Kandahar late in the Clinton administration. The issue between the Agency and the Pentagon was, in part, cost: Predator drones cost
$3 million each
.

Ambassador for Counterterrorism Michael Sheehan recalls that Richard Clarke “
was pounding on the [CIA and Department of Defense]
to more quickly develop—and use—the armed Predator, which was being tested, in Nevada, at the time. And both of them were dragging their feet in terms of money, and they also were uncomfortable with the use of the armed Predator. Can you imagine that now? Back then they were very slow to develop the capability, very slow in testing, they had lawyers wrapping them up in knots, and Clarke was apoplectic over it, because he wanted to introduce this asset into the Afghan theater.”

In Nevada in June 2001 the CIA had built a replica of bin Laden’s four-room villa at Tarnak Farms where he was living outside of Kandahar. A Predator drone equipped with a missile obliterated the replica house in tests that the Agency conducted with the Air Force. National Security Council official Roger Cressey recalls that even this wasn’t enough to get the CIA and Pentagon to move forward with the armed Predator. “
I was at the meeting at the Agency
afterwards, the data they got they said was inconclusive as to whether or not there was enough lethality in the explosion or the shrapnel to ensure that everybody inside would have been killed. Now, I’m looking at the video, this big fucking explosion packed in there, and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe anybody would have survived that.’ … And that played into the Agency’s real fear of—There’s only one thing worse than not being allowed to do it; it’s doing it and fucking it up. And then it becomes exposed, they get the shit kicked out of them on the Hill, and then they get the shit kicked out of them in the international community.”

The armed Predator would fly only after 9/11.

The Bush administration’s handling of the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS
Cole
in the Yemeni port city of Aden by al-Qaeda suicide bombers, an operation that killed seventeen American sailors and threatened to sink the billion-dollar destroyer, was especially puzzling. Following the
Cole
attack, the Clinton administration, in office for only three more months, sat on its hands. This was despite the fact that according to Ali Soufan, the lead FBI agent on the
Cole
case, within three weeks, “
We knew one hundred percent
that it was bin Laden.” On December 21 the CIA made a presentation to the key national security officials in the Clinton cabinet that there was a “
preliminary
judgment”
that al-Qaeda aided the
Cole
attack. In not responding to the
Cole
bombing in the waning days of his presidency, Clinton may not have wanted to complicate his legacy-building attempt to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians with an attack on a Muslim country. And the inaction on the
Cole
may have also reflected
simple exhaustion
at the end of the second term of the lame-duck Clinton administration.