“I hear you went to high school with Laura,” I added.
“Yes, sir, graduated one year before her,” he answered. “But don’t worry, Mr. President, I never dated her.”
I let out a big laugh. That was an interesting thing to say to your new commander in chief. I had a feeling Tommy and I were going to get along just fine.
At the ranch with Tommy Franks.
Tommy made clear the mission in Afghanistan would not be easy. Everything about the country screamed trouble. It is remote, rugged, and primitive. Its northern half is home to ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Turkmen, and others. The southern half is dominated by Pashtuns. Tribal, ethnic, and religious rivalries date back centuries. Yet for all their differences, the people of Afghanistan have a way of banding together against foreigners. They drove out the British in the nineteenth century. They drove out the Soviets in the twentieth century. Even Alexander the Great failed to conquer the country. Afghanistan had earned a foreboding nickname: Graveyard of Empires.
Tommy’s war plan, later code-named Operation Enduring Freedom, included four phases. The first was to connect the Special Forces with the CIA teams to clear the way for conventional troops to follow. Next we would mount a massive air campaign to take out al Qaeda and Taliban targets, and conduct humanitarian airdrops to deliver relief to the Afghan people. The third phase called for ground troops from both America and coalition partners to enter the country and hunt down remaining Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. Finally, we would stabilize the country and help the Afghan people build a free society.
I viewed my role as making sure the plan was comprehensive and consistent with the strategic vision—in this case, removing the Taliban, denying sanctuary to al Qaeda, and helping a democratic government emerge. I asked Tommy a lot of questions: How many troops would we need? What kind of basing would be available? How long would it take to move everyone? What level of enemy resistance did he expect?
I did not try to manage the logistics or the tactical decisions. My instinct was to trust the judgment of the military leadership. They were the trained professionals; I was a new commander in chief. I remembered the Vietnam-era photos of Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara poring over maps to pick bombing targets for routine missions. Their micromanagement had an impact throughout the chain of command. When I was in flight school, one of my instructors who had flown in Vietnam complained that the Air Force was so restricted that the enemy could figure out exactly when and where they would be flying. The reason, as he put it, was that “the politicians did not want to piss people off.”
One area where Tommy needed help was in lining up support from Afghanistan’s neighbors. Without logistical cooperation from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, we would not be able to move our troops into Afghanistan. I didn’t know the leaders of these former Soviet republics. But Russia still had tremendous influence in the region, and I knew Vladimir Putin.
Putin and I had met for the first time that June in a Slovenian palace once used by the communist leader Tito. My goal at the summit had been to cut through any tension and forge a connection with Putin. I placed a high priority on personal diplomacy. Getting to know a fellow world leader’s personality, character, and concerns made it easier to find common ground and deal with contentious issues. That was a lesson I had picked up from Dad, who was one of the great practitioners of personal diplomacy. Another was Abraham Lincoln. “If you would win a man to your cause,” Lincoln once said, “first convince him that you are his friend.”
At Camp David with Vladimir Putin.
The summit with Putin started with a small meeting—just Vladimir and me, our national security advisers, and the interpreters. He seemed a little tense. He opened by speaking from a stack of note cards. The first topic was the Soviet-era debt of the Russian Federation.
After a few minutes, I interrupted his presentation with a question: “Is it true your mother gave you a cross that you had blessed in Jerusalem?”
A look of shock washed over Putin’s face as Peter, the interpreter, delivered the line in Russian. I explained that the story had caught my attention in some background reading—I didn’t tell him it was an intelligence briefing—and I was curious to learn more. Putin recovered quickly and told the story. His face and his voice softened as he explained that he had hung the cross in his dacha, which subsequently caught on fire. When the firefighters arrived, he told them all he cared about was the cross. He dramatically re-created the moment when a worker unfolded his hand and revealed the cross. It was, he said, “as if it was meant to be.”
“Vladimir,” I said, “that is the story of the cross. Things are meant to be.” I felt the tension drain from the meeting room.
After the meeting, a reporter asked if Putin was “a man that Americans can trust.” I said yes. I thought of the emotion in Vladimir’s voice when he shared the story of the cross. “I looked the man in the eye,” I said, “… I was able to get a sense of his soul.” In the years ahead, Putin would give me reasons to revise my opinion.
Three months after our meeting in Slovenia, Putin was the first foreign leader to call the White House on September 11. He couldn’t reach me on Air Force One, so Condi spoke to him from the PEOC. He assured her that Russia would not increase its military readiness in response to our move to DefCon Three, as the Soviet Union would have done automatically during the Cold War. When I talked to Vladimir the next day, he told me he had signed a decree declaring a minute of silence to show solidarity with the United States. He ended by saying, “Good will triumph over evil. I want you to know that in this struggle, we will stand together.”
On September 22, I called Putin from Camp David. In a long Saturday-morning conversation, he agreed to open Russian airspace to American military planes and use his influence with the former Soviet republics to help get our troops into Afghanistan. I suspected he would be worried about Russia being encircled, but he was more concerned about the terrorist problem in his neighborhood. He even ordered Russian generals to brief their American counterparts on their experience during their Afghanistan invasion in the 1980s.
It was an amazing conversation. I told Vladimir I appreciated his willingness to move beyond the suspicions of the past. Before long, we had our agreements with the former Soviet republics.
In late September, George Tenet reported that the first of the CIA teams had entered Afghanistan and linked up with the Northern Alliance. Tommy Franks told me he would be ready to deploy our Special Forces soon. I threw out a question to the team that had been on my mind: “So who’s going to run the country?”
There was silence.
I wanted to make sure the team had thought through the postwar strategy. I felt strongly that the Afghan people should be able to select their new leader. They had suffered too much—and the American people were risking too much—to let the country slide back into tyranny. I asked Colin to work on a plan for a transition to democracy.
On Friday, October 5, General Dick Myers told me the military was ready to launch. I was ready, too. We had given the Taliban more than two weeks to respond to the ultimatum I had delivered. The Taliban had not met any of our demands. Their time was up.
Don Rumsfeld was on his way back from the Middle East and Central Asia, where he had finalized several important basing agreements. I waited for him to return before I gave the official order. On Saturday morning, October 6, I spoke to Don and Dick Myers by secure video-conference from Camp David. I asked one last time if they had everything they needed. They did.
“Go,” I said. “This is the right thing to do.”
I knew in my heart that striking al Qaeda, removing the Taliban, and liberating the suffering people of Afghanistan was necessary and just. But I worried about all that could go wrong. The military planners had laid out the risks: mass starvation, an outbreak of civil war, the collapse of the Pakistani government, an uprising by Muslims around the world, and the one I feared most—a retaliatory attack on the American homeland.
When I boarded Marine One the next morning to return to Washington, Laura and a few key advisers knew I had given the order, but virtually no one else did. To preserve the secrecy of the operation, I went ahead with my previously announced schedule, which included attending a ceremony at the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Emmitsburg, Maryland. I spoke about the 343 New York City firefighters who had given their lives on 9/11, by far the worst day in the history of American firefighting. The casualties ranged from the chief of the department, Pete Ganci, to young recruits in their first months on the job.
