Known and Unknown (47 page)

Before I returned to Washington, a videotape from Osama bin Laden was aired on the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera, the Arabic TV station that would regularly provide a platform for terrorist propaganda over the coming years. In this tape, his first since 9/11, bin Laden prophesied that the United States would fail to oust al-Qaida from Afghanistan and renewed his call for jihad against the West.

We did not help our cause against al-Qaida's propaganda machine when CENTCOM announced that Infinite Justice would be the name for combat operations in Afghanistan. The phrase provoked immediate criticism from Muslims who asserted that infinite justice is reserved for God alone. In light of that early error, I joked with the President that Operation Unilateral Hegemony would have been about as well received. Bush was sympathetic. He had created a similar flap when he referred to the war on terror as a crusade. Christendom's Crusades, of course, hardly symbolized the kind of cooperation with Muslim partners that we knew we needed.

Such missteps focused attention on the pitfalls of waging war against a global network of Muslim extremists whose history, culture, and practices were unfamiliar to most Westerners, myself included. There was an enormous amount about Muslim communities we had to learn if we were to reduce the influence of the extremist ideology that was motivating the terrorists. Soon thereafter, at one of my regular morning meetings in late September, General Dick Myers told us CENTCOM's replacement for the name of the Afghanistan campaign: Operation Enduring Freedom.

 

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s the sun was setting in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, giving way to a moonless sky, morning broke in Washington, D.C. That Sunday I stood with General Myers in the Pentagon's National Military Command Center awaiting the start of America's operations in Afghanistan. Through Myers, I had sent Franks the execute order signed by the President for Operation Enduring Freedom.

In the command center, the same place where we had worked in the smoke after the Pentagon came under attack, the senior civilian and military leadership gathered to ensure everything was on track. Myers and I sat at the head of a V-shaped, dark wooden table with senior team members arrayed to our left and right. On television monitors in front of us, Franks appeared from CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa; on other screens were several of his senior officers who were deployed across the Middle East. The video feed was grainy, but we could hear Franks and his officers clearly. Franks informed us that bombs and missiles would begin to strike their targets at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time, or 9:00 p.m. in Kabul.
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Oddly, Afghanistan's local time zone differed by thirty minutes from the on-the-hour time zones used by most of the rest of the world. This peculiarity seemed apt for a nation run by men who wanted to turn the clock back to the seventh century.

Each senior officer leading a major component proceeded to report on the readiness of his forces. Each had previously assured the President that he had what was needed to begin and complete the mission. All indicators were green—ready to go.

After the teleconference ended, I called Franks. “General,” I said, “the President asked me to extend to you his respect and best wishes, and that we're going to finish what began on September 11.”

“God bless America,” Franks replied.

That first Sunday of October was less than a month after 9/11. The Pentagon remained scarred, and rubble from the World Trade Center still smoldered. But America was now on the offense. The young Americans who would be risking their lives to defend our country were very much on my mind. Each was a volunteer. In the years that followed I had the privilege of meeting with large numbers of them. Many had signed up for military duty after 9/11 knowing they would likely be sent abroad to fight for their country. I thought about America's last extended military campaign in Vietnam. Large number of casualties had increased the pressure on American military and political leaders to bring the war to an early and unsuccessful end. There was, of course, the possibility that the fighting in Afghanistan could produce a similar heartbreaking outcome. Our strategy of putting American forces on the ground—and not conducting the campaign entirely by means of high-altitude bombing, as in the 1999 Kosovo campaign—increased the likelihood of U.S. casualties.
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We had planned as best we could and prayed for the safety and success of our troops.

An hour after President Bush addressed the nation to announce the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, General Myers and I went to the Pentagon press room to brief on the start of military operations. We outlined the President's goals, which while challenging, were limited: to make absolutely clear to the Taliban and to the world that harboring terrorists carried a price; to acquire intelligence for future operations against al-Qaida and against the Taliban; to develop relationships with the key groups in Afghanistan that opposed the Taliban and al-Qaida; to make it increasingly difficult for the terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base of operations; to alter the military balance over time by denying the Taliban the offensive systems that hamper the progress of opposition forces; and to provide humanitarian relief to Afghan people suffering under the Taliban.
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In the early hours of the Afghan war, I watched video links from aircraft dropping munitions. Among the first targets were the al-Qaida training camps at Tarnak Farms and Duranta. B-52s dropped two-thousand-pound bombs on the tunneled caves of Tora Bora near the Pakistani border. All known Taliban tanks were targeted. Fuel depots, training camps, radars, run-ways, and the few dubious aircraft in the Taliban air force were hit. Over the course of five nights, every fixed enemy target that American intelligence had identified in Afghanistan was attacked.

Bombs weren't the only things we were dropping on Afghanistan, however. The country had long been suffering from drought and in a number of areas food was in short supply. In the first forty-eight hours alone, American aircraft dropped some 210,000 individual food rations.
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After the first wave of air sorties was complete, unmanned Predator aircraft outfitted with high-resolution cameras remained, loitering silently and unobserved above Afghanistan and feeding back images of additional targets. Early on the evening of October 7, Franks called me with urgent information. A Predator drone flown remotely was following a convoy believed to be carrying the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar. Franks told me the convoy fit the profile of that used by the Taliban's leadership. It had stopped at what appeared to be a mosque.

In the weeks leading up to the war, Franks briefed me on various targeting categories and the risks of unintended, or, as it is also called, collateral damage to mosques, schools, hospitals, and urban areas. Franks had developed a detailed template for assessing the risk of collateral damage. Each of his target files included a photo and several metrics that gauged the likelihood of injuring civilians at various times of the day, his level of confidence in the intelligence sources, and the various angles at which munitions could be directed at the target. The experts at CENTCOM calibrated the type of weapon, the size, fuse, trajectory, and time of the attack to the circumstances of each target, with the goal of limiting collateral damage. Without question, more effort was devoted to avoiding collateral damage in Afghanistan than in any previous conflict in America's history.

Before making a targeting decision, CENTCOM consulted their legion of lawyers for advice. The concern for civilian casualties was understandable for humanitarian as well as strategic reasons. Every time a civilian was accidentally killed or injured, the loss of innocent life was lamented—and our cause suffered. The United States was held to a much higher standard than the enemy, who did not seek legal counsel before they struck purposefully at civilians.

Still, I wanted commanders making go or no-go decisions on targeting with the advice of lawyers—not the other way around. The legal impulse by nature was to be restrictive and risk averse, which was not always compatible with waging an effective war against vicious fanatics. I had seen how the rules of engagement issued by President Reagan during the Lebanon crisis of the 1980s had been diminished at each layer of command until the result bore little resemblance to what the President had intended. Though I wanted commanders like Franks to benefit from legal advice, he needed to make the calls himself.

I had told the combatant commanders even before 9/11 that I expected them to lean forward. I said that I would be too, and that they could be certain I would back them up on tough calls, even if they did not work out. I was concerned that America's risk aversion in prior years had emboldened terrorists and rogue regimes worldwide.

Immediately after Franks called to inform us of the plan to attack the convoy, I placed a secure call to Bush to inform him of the sketchy facts as we knew them: a likely high-value target, possibly Mullah Omar, was in a building that looked like a mosque. The President gave the green light. I told Franks he was authorized to hit the target. I did not say I had received Bush's authorization, however. If something went awry, I thought it would be better if those down the chain of command believed that only I was responsible for what turned out to be a poor decision.

In the end, the operation was, as Franks put it, “no joy”—meaning that it was unsuccessful. And I got no joy from learning why it failed. To avoid damaging the building, those who controlled the armed Predator decided to fire a Hellfire missile at a vehicle outside the suspected mosque instead of into the compound itself. The vehicle explosion sent men pouring out of the building, scattering for the hills. Presented with a chance to hit a target that might have been the top Taliban leader, we had failed.

In the days after that operation, Franks and I discussed how to accelerate the speed at which he could decide on whether to attack a high-value target. Figures like Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, or al-Qaida's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, could disappear from our intelligence picture as quickly as they appeared, often keeping themselves in the vicinity of civilians both to deter an attack and to increase the likelihood of civilian casualties if we were to strike.

“The payoff for getting a key leader is high,” I said. “Look for a new process—anything to speed it up.” We couldn't let precious seconds pass as dozens of people offered their views on whether to hit the target or not.

Franks understood. “I will make the hard calls on collateral damage and not use the need to call you as a reason to slow it up,” he said. “I'll take the hit on that.”

“I'll be right there with you when you make the call,” I assured him.

“We're going to catch these bastards sooner or later,” Franks added. “It's just going to take time.”
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s Air Force bombers and Navy strike aircraft destroyed Afghanistan's limited air defenses, the Taliban offered little effective resistance. We worried that the enemy might have obtained U.S.-built Stinger antiaircraft missiles that had been used to shoot down Soviet helicopters fifteen years earlier. As it turned out, the Taliban had little antiaircraft weaponry. Not a single American aircraft was lost to enemy fire in those early days. Only the hazards of weather, dust, and geography posed a serious threat to our pilots and crews.

Despite the heavy bombing, Taliban forces were holding their lines against the Northern Alliance, which, two weeks into the campaign, still had not achieved a single significant battlefield success. They were not moving forward aggressively to liberate Afghanistan's northern cities.

Meanwhile, allies of the Taliban from the tribal regions of Pakistan poured into Afghanistan, reinforcing the enemy lines. The international news media broadcast images of white pickups with men in black turbans roaming the streets of major cities, sending the message that the Taliban was still in control. Bombs dropped from aircraft could inflict damage to be sure, but they could not liberate a people.

Still, there were some bright spots. In those first days of combat in Afghanistan, the Predator and other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) conclusively proved their value to our military and intelligence personnel.
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The information UAVs sent to our commanders about troop locations, at no risk to American lives, was invaluable. But as with all technology, it had to be used for its proper purpose. At some point in the months after 9/11, I was asked whether I wanted to have the video links from Predator drones and other live video images piped directly to my office in the Pentagon. Feeds were being sent to the White House Situation Room and to the operations centers of the military services. Recalling how LBJ picked out bombing targets from the White House, I was uncomfortable with people all over Washington congregating around the screens and second-guessing the decisions of commanders in the field—second-guessing that I suspected would eventually find its way into the press. Those making the life-and-death decisions on whether to destroy a target did not need a raft of onlookers outside the chain of command constantly looking over their shoulders. Nor did I want people treating the feeds as an object of curiosity. War was not a spectator sport or a video game. I declined to have the feeds piped into my office and asked that they be turned off in any offices that had no compelling reason to receive them.

By mid-October, with the air war well underway, some of the many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Afghanistan were complaining about U.S. military actions. Some were quoted in press reports saying that the American bombing campaign was limiting their ability to provide food for needy people and putting their workers at risk. Most of the food aid from the NGOs was coming through Pakistan to southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban was in control. The NGOs, often supported by the American taxpayer through programs run by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, wanted the United States to help them distribute food in towns and villages that were held by the Taliban. When the Department of Defense declined to help feed the enemy, some NGOs accused us of using food as a weapon.