America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (35 page)

On both counts, however, the intelligence proved faulty. The missiles did hit their targets. And needless to say, the U.S. forces involved suffered no losses—no Americans were ever in danger. But by any other standard, Infinite Reach must rate as a disappointment. It was simultaneously flawless and deeply flawed, a well-executed but largely pointless expenditure of high-tech weaponry.

At Khost, the Al Qaeda leadership escaped unscathed. To inflict maximum casualties, the Tomahawks scattered cluster munitions across the target area, killing a few dozen Al Qaeda foot soldiers along with officers from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) present at the scene.
¹⁶
But bin Laden was nowhere near the camp, nor were any of his chief lieutenants. Secretary of Defense William Cohen described the Khost facility as “Terrorist University.”
¹⁷
If it was, then classes had adjourned and the faculty was nowhere near campus when the missiles made impact. As General Zinni acknowledged, the attack “did not actually do much damage.”
¹⁸

Cohen later remarked that the purpose of Infinite Reach was to “send a signal that the United States was coming and was not going to tolerate terrorist activity against America.”
¹⁹
The signal, if interpreted as such, neither impressed nor intimidated the Al Qaeda leadership.

At Khartoum, meanwhile, Tomahawks demolished the Al-Shifa plant, killing a night watchman and badly injuring a bystander.
²⁰
Yet a subsequent investigation conducted by American scientists cast serious doubts on U.S. claims of the plant being used for nefarious purposes.
²¹
One thing only appeared certain: The wrecked facility was never going to produce the badly needed antibiotics and antimalarial drugs for which it had been designed.

Back in Washington, senior U.S. officials portrayed the operation as an opening gambit rather than as a decisive stroke. Asked if more attacks were to come, Secretary Cohen assured reporters that “we have contingency plans that we are developing, and there may be more in the future.” Secretary of State Albright wanted Americans to understand that “we are involved here in a long-term struggle,” which she described as “the war of the future.” But it was a war bereft of meaningful context. Albright denounced those “who believe that taking down innocent people is some form of political expression. It is not any form of political expression….It is murder, plain and simple.”
²²
The characterization staked a moral claim but offered little insight into what waging such a war was likely to require.

From being largely oblivious to bin Laden, the American security apparatus now went to the other extreme, seeing him as the mastermind of a plot with existential implications. Within the Clinton administration, “getting” bin Laden—and thereby presumably leaving Al Qaeda leaderless—became a matter of feverish concern.
²³

This reaction proved deeply problematic. In categorizing the threat posed by Al Qaeda as somehow distinct from other developments already occasioning U.S. intervention in the Islamic world, the United States was committing a fundamental error, exaggerating the danger bin Laden’s organization posed even while simultaneously ignoring the circumstances that had produced it. Once again, U.S. policymakers were mistaking symptom (terrorism) for disease (profound political and social dysfunction exacerbated by ill-advised U.S. policies).

It was the equivalent of the British government after the Boston Tea Party fancying that Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty defined the challenge to the Crown’s authority throughout its North American colonies. To imagine that capturing Adams and crushing a gang of rabble-rousing Bostonians would set things right was to indulge in a vast illusion. As in the mid-1770s, so too in the late 1990s: If the “war of the future” was at hand, the world’s reigning superpower was utterly clueless about what it was getting into.

On the home front, Infinite Reach evoked little popular support. Critics disgusted with President Clinton’s personal misconduct charged him with trying to distract attention from the Lewinsky affair.
²⁴
More hawkish types complained that Infinite Reach didn’t go far enough. Reach was one thing, effects were another. They pressed for more robust action. While supporting the attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan,
Washington Post
foreign policy columnist Jim Hoagland detected “troubling signs” that Clinton had once more decided to “stage a pinprick attack [and] announce the problem solved.” For Hoagland, once was not enough. “It is hard to believe,” he complained, “that one night of attacks has exhausted what Clinton could and should do to stop bin Laden’s bloody extremism.”
²⁵
Writing in
The Wall Street Journal,
the journalist Max Boot concurred. It was incumbent upon the United States as “the world’s policeman” to escalate. Boot called on President Clinton to keep his promise “that recent cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan are only the opening salvos in the U.S. campaign against terrorism.”
²⁶
For
The New Republic,
killing bin Laden himself had now emerged as a top priority. Its editors wanted the United States to set aside any qualms about assassination. In its “war on terrorism,” the United States needed greater “tactical flexibility.”
²⁷
Reuel Marc Gerecht, former CIA operative turned foreign policy analyst, went a step further. Americans needed to get over their “civilized desire to minimize the body count,” he wrote. Eliminate bin Laden, he promised, and “we will seriously undermine his entire network.”
²⁸

So in America’s War for the Greater Middle East, the African embassy attacks served as an important accelerant, reinforcing unhelpful policy inclinations. Rather than prompting a reexamination of first-order assumptions, adding Al Qaeda to Washington’s list of antagonists reaffirmed the conviction that military action somehow offered a way to solve the problem.
²⁹
Policy formulation was becoming indistinguishable from targeting.

In fact, Infinite Reach did not become a launching pad for a sustained campaign against Al Qaeda. Even with the CIA now conducting reconnaissance flights over Afghanistan using Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), viable targets based on hard intelligence proved hard to come by. Skeptics raised questions about cost-effectiveness. “So we spend millions of dollars’ worth of cruise missiles and bombs blowing up a buck fifty’s worth of jungle gyms and mud huts again?”
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The diplomatic pain-to-gain ratio also demanded consideration. U.S. missiles had violated Pakistani airspace en route to their targets in Afghanistan, a reminder that unilateral military action almost inevitably meant annoying some American ally. And as always, the uniformed military’s appetite for risk remained low.
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So although the impulse to have another go at bin Laden produced more than a dozen “specific, detailed, fleshed-out” plans and brought the Clinton administration to the brink of action on multiple occasions, the president never pulled the trigger.
³²

In effect, the United States had impulsively and foolishly responded to bin Laden’s declaration of war with a de facto declaration of its own, conferring on Al Qaeda a status it did not deserve. The Clinton administration then compounded the error by refraining from acting on its declaration. Not unlike British and French policy in the fateful winter of 1939–1940, the result, on the American side at least, was a phony war.

The fumbling American response allowed bin Laden to land the next blow. This occurred on October 12, 2000, when the USS
Cole
joined
Stark
and
Samuel B. Roberts
on the list of collateral casualties sustained by the U.S. Navy during America’s War for the Greater Middle East.
³³

A guided-missile destroyer that had just transited the Suez Canal and the Red Sea en route to the Persian Gulf, the
Cole
had paused at Aden for a brief “gas-and-go” stop. Shortly after 11:00
A.M.
, with refueling and other replenishment efforts underway, a small white boat containing two unidentified individuals approached. Crewmen on the
Cole
mistook the craft for a garbage scow, arriving to complete trash removal operations. As the boat neared the destroyer’s port side
,
the two individuals waved and then proceeded to detonate a bomb that ripped open the
Cole
’s hull just above the water line. Engineering spaces flooded with water. Electrical systems failed. Passageways filled with smoke. Seventeen American sailors were killed outright, with another three dozen wounded. Not since World War II had an American warship been lost to enemy action. In an instant, the
Cole
seemed likely to bring that streak to an end.

Valiant efforts by
Cole
’s captain, Commander Kirk Lippold, and his crew of nearly three hundred (including forty-four women), prevented the crippled destroyer from sinking. To save their ship
,
sailors worked past the point of exhaustion in horrific conditions—temperatures reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and 130 below deck. Only after three days of backbreaking labor did they succeed in stabilizing the vessel.
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Theirs was a heroic achievement that stood in sharp contrast to the muddled policies that sent American warships to places like Aden in the first place.

As usual, those responsible for formulating such policies, both in Washington and at CENTCOM headquarters, got off scot-free. When the arrow of accountability stopped spinning, it once more pointed directly at the commander on the scene. Investigators found that “the ship did not fully protect itself from attack because it lacked deliberate planning and execution of an approved Force Protection Plan.” Of the sixty-two required force protection measures,
Cole
’s captain had waived nineteen and failed to accomplish twelve others, several of which “may have prevented the suicide boat attack or mitigated its effects.”
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These findings cost Lippold his career.
³⁶

In the U.S. military, every operation, large or small, gets a name. For the
Cole
recovery effort, CENTCOM settled on Determined Response. What actually ensued, apart from removing the ship from the scene, more closely approximated Muted Response or even No Response at All.

The
Cole
had visited Aden not only because it needed fuel but also because such port calls formed part of a larger policy of “engagement,” stemming from the belief that periodic appearances by U.S. forces in unsettled quarters served to soothe or encourage. According to the Pentagon, engagement meant “helping to shape the international environment…to bring about a more peaceful and stable world.”
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In U.S. national security circles, the conviction that engagement promotes peace and stability is not unlike the Christian belief in the Second Coming—it provides the ultimate rationale for the entire enterprise.

According to this logic, that Yemen was anything but peaceful and stable made it ripe for “engagement.” Through a program of activities of which the
Cole
’s visit offered but one example, CENTCOM’s General Zinni had hoped to keep that country “from becoming another Afghanistan.”
³⁸
No one was so naïve to think that any particular action or event was going to have a decisive impact. Yet the expectation that the cumulative effects of engagement would be transformative reflected its own sort of naïveté, to which U.S. officers remained willfully oblivious. So rather than discrediting the concept of engagement, incidents such as the attack on the
Cole
demonstrated the imperative of doubling down. General Tommy Franks, who succeeded Zinni as CENTCOM commander the month before, stated the matter plainly. “Terrorists have declared war on us. We shouldn’t back away,” he remarked. “I will never recommend disengagement.”
³⁹

For some within the White House, however, the attack on the
Cole
suggested the need for something more than engagement. With U.S. intelligence agencies determining that Al Qaeda had orchestrated the incident, staff members of the National Security Council quickly drafted a multifaceted campaign, “three to five years” in duration, to “roll back” bin Laden’s network “to a point where it will no longer pose a serious threat.” The plan tagged by name nine other terrorist organizations as parts of that network, even while emphasizing that the actual problem was bigger still. With a presence throughout the West, Al Qaeda itself was operating on a “global basis.”

Yet the proposed rollback campaign was anything but global. It focused on Afghanistan, bin Laden’s principal base at the time. Key provisions of the plan included providing covert assistance to the local anti-Taliban resistance along with “overt U.S. military action” to destroy Al Qaeda “command/control and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets.” The plan did not speculate on the scope of the military effort required. It did not consider costs or second-order consequences, despite acknowledging that Al Qaeda itself was “as an outgrowth of the international jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.”
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The previous effort to harness jihadists had produced some unexpected and unintended results. Even so, some within the Clinton White House were keen to give it another go.