America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (37 page)

Just a week after September 11, Rumsfeld stated the matter with admirable candor. “We have a choice,” he told reporters, “either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we…chose the latter.”
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No member of the Pentagon press corps pressed Rumsfeld to explain who “they” (not to mention “we”) were. But the implication of Rumsfeld’s diktat was clear: Any state or group or entity actively supporting, inclined to support, or sympathizing with anti-American terrorism was going to have to mend its ways. Rumsfeld’s very first impulse on 9/11 itself was to frame the problem in a broadest possible terms. “Need to move swiftly…go massive—sweep it all up, things related and not.”
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Without bothering to count heads, going massive implied an encounter with many millions of people in at least a couple of dozen countries, most if not all of them in the Islamic world.

Over the previous two decades, U.S. military involvement in those precincts had amounted to little more than dabbling. According to the Carter Doctrine, to sustain the American way of life it was incumbent upon the United States to ensure the security of the Persian Gulf and its environs. Each of the younger Bush’s predecessors going back to Carter himself had accepted this proposition, as did Bush himself. Yet to this point, each of these predecessors had shied away from engaging in large-scale, ongoing military action. America’s War for the Greater Middle East had lacked seriousness. But that phase had now ended. “If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map,” Rumsfeld wrote President Bush that same month, “the U.S. will not achieve its aim.”
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As a military objective, changing the way “they” live possessed a sort of Napoleonic grandeur, either noble or preposterous depending on one’s point of view. Making good on such an ambitious aim, thereby redrawing the world’s political map, implied a willingness to undertake comparably large exertions.

Oddly, however, the Bush administration balked at providing the wherewithal required. In terms of the stakes involved, the global war on terrorism might bear comparison with World War II or the Cold War. But it was not going to resemble those earlier conflicts in terms of national commitment. Undertaking a global war did not prompt President Bush to mobilize the nation.
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The state would not exact new taxes or expect shared sacrifice. It would not impose conscription. Everyday existence was to continue as usual, the president charging Americans to “enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
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The difficulty of imagining Abraham Lincoln during the siege of Fort Sumter or Franklin Roosevelt following the attack on Pearl Harbor expressing comparable sentiments speaks volumes about the Bush administration’s failure to grasp the challenges waiting just ahead. From the outset, in other words, between declared ends and the means available to achieve those ends there yawned a large gap.

In the days and weeks immediately after 9/11, Americans—united in righteous anger—would have done just about anything that Bush as commander in chief asked of them. Apart from passive deference, he asked for next to nothing. While greatly enlarging the scope of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, the Bush administration did not expand the role allotted to the American people. Indeed, it minimized that role, thereby establishing a relationship between state and society destined to persist for the duration of Bush’s term in office and beyond. The effect was comparable to that of a prenuptial agreement—once signed, difficult if not impossible to renegotiate, especially once the romance begins to wear thin.

Two factors explain the Bush administration’s decision to consign the public to the status of spectators. On the one hand, senior U.S. officials, civilian and military alike, assessed public involvement in the war as unnecessary. Properly employed, existing military capabilities would suffice to get the job done. On the other hand, they saw public involvement as inconvenient, more likely to infringe on their own freedom of action than to make any meaningful contribution to victory.

Underpinning these views was a set of expectations about how the contest ahead was going to unfold. Put simply, the capabilities inherent in the Revolution in Military Affairs, if fully exploited and effectively put to use, would determine the war’s outcome. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz all subscribed to the theology of the RMA, now rebranded as “transformation.” Bush himself was at least a semi-believer. In that church, technology was God. Quality mattered more than quantity, agility and precision more than brute force. Modern war was a business best left to professionals. On the twenty-first-century battlefield, soldiers cut from the same cloth as those who had fought World War II or Korea or Vietnam were likely to prove a net liability.

The preliminary results achieved in the first post-9/11 military campaign affirmed such expectations. That campaign initiated a new Afghanistan War, with the United States this time playing a direct rather than covert role. The purpose of Operation Enduring Freedom (to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities, the Pentagon jettisoned the initial name Infinite Justice) was twofold: first, to destroy or at least severely weaken Al Qaeda, and second, to make clear the fate awaiting any regime providing support or sanctuary to anti-American terrorists, as the Taliban had done. Although the president’s advisers briefly toyed with the notion of going after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—Wolfowitz in particular urging that course—Afghanistan’s number-one ranking on the Bush administration hit list was never seriously in doubt. The demands of vengeance alone would not permit otherwise.

The opening phase of Enduring Freedom was as daring an operation as any undertaken in the annals of U.S. military history. It was also astonishingly successful—even if that success proved incomplete, transitory, and misleading.

Mounting any sort of military campaign in Afghanistan—distant, desperately poor, landlocked, and immense—poses enormous challenges. Even so, the events of 9/11 required action sooner rather than later. Especially in Washington, patience was in short supply. Responsibility for responding to that impatience fell to the CENTCOM commander, General Tommy Franks.

In the U.S. Army, a tradition exists of very senior military officers adopting a persona. Douglas MacArthur cultivated the image of a demigod, George S. Patton a warrior, Omar Bradley a modest, self-effacing “G.I.’s general,” Dwight Eisenhower a genial, avuncular, “regular guy.” None of these guises was particularly authentic, but each served a purpose.

Tommy Franks came across as a good ol’ boy from Texas, perhaps not as smooth as those toadies in the Pentagon but twice as savvy. This meant putting up a crude, boorish front, which Franks excelled at doing. He is, to my knowledge, the only retired general to refer in his memoirs to his fellow four-stars as “motherfuckers.”
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Unfortunately, Franks lacked the gifts to pull off the second half of his act. Imagine Stephen Colbert as a world-class buffoon, but without the incisive wit. That was Franks: a thin-skinned lout, but lacking the smarts to grasp the magnitude of the task that was now his.

Although CENTCOM’s AOR included Afghanistan and prior CENTCOM operations had targeted that country, no plan for actually waging war there existed on September 11. Prodded by an impatient Rumsfeld, Franks and his staff quickly corrected that omission, hastily designing a counteroffensive targeting Al Qaeda and the Taliban, although going after the latter first.
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With some forty-five thousand men under arms, perhaps one-quarter of them non-Afghan “foreign fighters,” and a motley collection of leftover Soviet tanks and aircraft, the Taliban did not constitute an especially imposing combat force.
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Getting to them promised to be the hard part, but getting to Al Qaeda promised to be harder still.

The CENTCOM plan relied on readily available assets—American airpower combining with anti-Taliban proxies who might respond favorably to offers of assistance, even from infidels. Or as General Franks put it, the United States “would leverage technology and the courage of the Afghans themselves to liberate their country.”
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Attributing the Soviet failure to pacify Afghanistan in the 1980s to Russian heavy-handedness, Franks proposed to take a different tack. In fact, however, this was making a virtue out of necessity. Moving large numbers of U.S. ground forces to Afghanistan would require many months of preparation. Any near-term action necessarily meant taking a “light footprint” approach.

On October 7, less than a month after 9/11, that operation began, predictably enough, with air strikes conducted in the dead of night.
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In all things military, members of the Bush administration had sought to distinguish themselves from their immediate predecessors. Even so, the intensity of the initial assault did not differ appreciably from the start of the Kosovo campaign two years earlier. Featuring a mix of ship-launched cruise missiles, carrier-based strike aircraft, and long-range bombers operating from bases in the United States, the attack delivered blows that were more than symbolic but fell short of being significant.
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In a humanitarian nod, two U.S. Air Force C-17 transports, flying from Ramstein AFB in Germany, dropped rations and medical supplies near areas subjected to attack. Once begun, the delivery of ordnance and relief supplies continued, albeit without decisive effect. A primitive country like Afghanistan had plenty of people needing to be fed but relatively few targets meriting attack with precision guided munitions. In short order, American warplanes were reduced to “Taliban plinking.”
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An impatient President Bush complained, “We’re pounding sand.”
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In the meantime, contingents of elite U.S. troops were gathering at a former Soviet airbase in Uzbekistan, known to the Americans as K2, to form Task Force Dagger.
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Commanded by Colonel John Mulholland and drawn principally from the U.S. Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, garrisoned at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, TF Dagger consisted of slightly more than three hundred soldiers.
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Mulholland’s mission was as clear-cut as it was daunting: to build a fire under anti-Taliban militants controlling bits of Afghanistan but thus far unable to wrest Kabul and other major Afghan cities from Taliban control. To accomplish this mission, small special operations teams were to link up with Afghan resistance forces and then, employing money, arms, and firepower as blandishments, motivate them to fight.

According to U.S. intelligence estimates, the most promising of such groups was the so-called Northern Alliance located in the Panjshir Valley northeast of the capital. The Northern Alliance qualified as an “alliance” in the same sense that the Republican Party qualifies as a “party.” Like the present-day GOP, the Northern Alliance was a loose coalition of unsavory opportunists, interested chiefly in acquiring power. But the several warlords sitting atop the Northern Alliance commanded something on the order of twenty thousand fighters, most of them ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks. That sufficed to persuade the Bush administration to pursue a marriage of convenience.
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On the night of October 19, two helicopters inserted the first of Mulholland’s special operators into mountainous terrain with elevations reaching up to sixteen thousand feet. A handful of other teams soon followed and offered their services to anti-Taliban warlords of otherwise dubious reputation.
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Their offer accepted, the Americans—traveling by horseback on mounts provided by their Afghan hosts—began calling in air strikes on frontline Taliban positions.
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With the world’s most capable air forces at their beck and call, Northern Alliance commanders launched a major offensive on October 28 toward Mazar-e-Sharif, a Taliban stronghold located on the northern approaches to Kabul. The generous application of American air power fundamentally altered the correlation of forces. Suddenly, thanks to the presence of a handful of Americans wielding laser target designators, the Northern Alliance enjoyed the upper hand. On November 9, Mazar-e-Sharif fell, although intra-Afghan negotiations allowed some Taliban to escape and others to switch sides. As U.S. forces would come to appreciate, the contingent nature of allegiance made it all the more difficult to reach a fixed determination of who was friend and who foe.

These and other realities of the battlefield undermined Bush administration efforts to frame Enduring Freedom as a contest pitting white pakols against black ones. All hats—and hands—were soiled. The vicious nature of the 9/11 attacks had reinforced an American inclination, present from the very outset of its War for the Greater Middle East, to cast the United States in the role of either innocent victim or exponent of righteousness or both.
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The course of events in Afghanistan made such claims difficult to sustain.

After a battle that ended with Taliban forces surrendering the city of Kunduz, for example, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a senior Northern Alliance commander, ordered prisoners confined to metal shipping containers. There they remained for days, without food or water. In what became known as the Dasht-i-Leili massacre, large numbers died, estimates ranging from the hundreds to the thousands. Other prisoners were simply shot. But U.S. officials, considering General Dostum to be an exceptionally valuable asset, looked the other way. Then and later, they protected him, suppressing knowledge of the event or minimizing its significance.
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