Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq by Fallows James

Author:Fallows, James [Fallows, James]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

THE PRELUDE: LATE 2001

Success in war requires an understanding of who the enemy is, what resources can be used against him, and how victory will be defined. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 America’s expert agencies concluded that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were almost certainly responsible for the attacks— and that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was providing them with sanctuary. Within the government there was almost no dispute, then or later, about the legitimacy and importance of destroying that stronghold. Indeed, the main criticism of the initial anti-Taliban campaign was that it took so long to start.

In his book Against All Enemies the former terrorism adviser Richard Clarke says it was “plainly obvious” after September 11 that “al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Taliban-run Afghanistan had to be occupied by U.S. forces and the al Qaeda leaders killed.” It was therefore unfortunate that the move against the Taliban was “slow and small.” Soon after the attacks President Bush created an interagency Campaign Coordination Committee to devise responses to al-Qaeda, and named Clarke its cochairman. Clarke told me that this group urged a “rapid, no-holds-barred” retaliation in Afghanistan—including an immediate dispatch of troops to Afghanistan’s borders to cut off al-Qaeda escape routes.

But the administration was unwilling to use overwhelming power in Afghanistan. The only authorized account of how the “principals”—the big shots of the administration— felt and thought at this time is in Bob Woodward’s books Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004), both based on interviews with the president and his senior advisers. To judge by Bush at War, Woodward’s more laudatory account, a major reason for delay in attacking the Taliban had to do with “CSAR”—combat search and rescue teams. These were meant to be in place before the first aerial missions, so that they could go to the aid of any American pilot who might be downed. Preparations took weeks. They involved negotiations with the governments of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for basing rights, the slow process of creating and equipping support airstrips in remote mountainous regions, and the redeployment of far-flung aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf.

“The slowness was in part because the military weren’t ready and they needed to move in the logistics support, the refueling aircraft, all of that,” Richard Clarke told me. “But through this time the president kept saying to the Taliban, ‘You still have an opportunity to come clean with us.’ Which I thought—and the State Department thought—was silly. We’d already told them in advance that if this happened we were going to hold them personally responsible.” Laurence Pope, a former ambassador to Chad, made a similar point when I spoke with him. Through the late 1990s Pope was the political adviser to General Zinni, who as the head of U.S. Central Command was responsible for Iraq and Afghanistan. Pope had run war games concerning assaults on both countries. “We had warned the Taliban repeatedly about Osama bin Laden,” he told me, referring to the late Clinton years. “There was no question [after 9/11] that we had to take them on and deny that sanctuary to al-Qaeda.

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