was relatively weak, insignificant, and vulnerable; but because of the invisibility and security of the links, the threat from the network had soon reached an unprecedented level.
This was far from the threat of world annihilation that we had endured for the nearly fifty years of the Cold War; yet the dangers from an Al Qaeda allowed to grow unchecked were far from small.
In connection with an October 21 trip to Washington for Senate testimony, I was asked by the DOD public relations office to hold a press conference at a Defense Writers’ Group breakfast.
During the session, I took questions about some exiled, London-based Iraqi opposition groups that had become the apple of Congress’s eye. The most prominent of these, the Iraqi National Congress, was led by Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi had conned several senior people into believing that he could spark a guerrilla movement that would sweep Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athists from power — if only he had a lot of money and a little specialoperations and air support. I thought this idea was totally mad (our intelligence had reported that nothing the INC said was trustworthy and none of their plans were viable).
The October press conference was not my first encounter with this idiocy. On the twenty-sixth of March, I had traveled to Washington for my annual congressional testimony.
CINCs are required to give annual testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, House Armed Services Committee, and House Appropriations Committee,[81] but are often also called during the year to give testimony on specific issues as they come up. At our annual testimony, we’d generally provide a status of our command and region and respond to questions. Most questions related to pet programs or issues that individual legislators wanted to promote or challenge; but some made a political point about the administration’s policies.
The issue at the March sessions was the administration’s policy in Iraq. Congress was brewing its own strategy, cooked up by a couple of Senate staffers, promoting the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi’s guerrilla plans. I testified then that there was no chance that this operation could succeed. Saddam was too firmly entrenched to be dislodged by a handful of guerrilla bands, and Chalabi’s organization was a sham.
Naturally, my reluctance to get on board a boat I didn’t think would float did not endear me to Chalabi’s backers, many of whom, such as Senator John McCain, were powerful in Washington. And when I offered these views, I could tell Defense Secretary Cohen was not comfortable. Though the Clinton administration was extremely leery about dealing with Chalabi, any plan that promised to get rid of Saddam played in the media like motherhood and free speech, so the administration was not eager to seem to oppose it. That evening, out on the steps of the Capitol, Secretary Cohen told me to stick to military execution of policy and stay out of policy development. The rebuke was polite, but I got the message.
Congress had passed the Iraqi Liberation Act, which applied $97 million to Iraqi opposition groups, including Chalabi’s.
The administration still did not want to touch this issue. But they had no intention of spending the money on the Iraqi opposition (except for minor administrative support). They were not about to actually buy them weapons.
But by October the two Senate staffers I’d run into in March, now working with a retired Army general, had actually come up with a crazy plan to arm the “military branches” of these dissidents and insert them into Iraq with promises from us of air cover and special forces support. It was a recipe for disaster, which I referred to at the press conference as “the Bay of Goats,” adding further insult by calling the exiles “Gucci Guerrillas.”
These comments caused a furor, and during my Senate testimony later that day I faced several angry Senators who supported this ludicrous proposal.
Though I was severely chewed out by my bosses afterward, I received hundreds of letters and calls, and several articles were written, in support of my position.
The story does not end there. Washington is a vindictive town, and the two staffers swore revenge. They did not take it out on me, but on my political adviser, Larry Pope. When Pope was nominated for Ambassador to Kuwait, they were able to block a Senate vote on it. This petty act against a man who had nothing to do with my opinions was typical of the Washington politics that sickened me.
Nineteen ninety-eight ended with a bang with Desert Fox.
I knew we’d get no respite from the constant high-level tempo of operations in 1999.
In early January, the administration directed Tony Lake to make another effort (which we supported) to broker peace in the looming Ethiopia-Eritrea war; yet I knew we were not going to stop the impending fight. When the war actually began in the spring of 1999, we conducted an evacuation of American citizens (called “Operation Safe Departure”).
The war was bloody. World War One-style trench warfare and massive frontal attacks caused thousands of deaths.
After an Ethiopian victory at Badime (by which time the two belligerents had exhausted themselves on the battlefield), we worked with Tony Lake and the State Department to establish a peacekeeping force there. By the end of the year, a UN force provided a boundary demarcation team and peacekeepers to try to help resolve the dispute.
On the twenty-first of April, I traveled to Pakistan for several days of meetings with the new chief of staff, General Pervez Musharraf. The two of us connected quickly and easily. He was bright, sincere, and personable. A fervent nationalist who nevertheless leaned toward the West, he was as appalled as General Karamat over the ever-worsening corruption within the civilian government. He also understood the various, powerful Islamist currents running through his country, and saw them as the threats they were to bringing his country into the twenty-first century; yet he also understood that his country would never modernize and solve its myriad ills without the emergence of some kind of religious accommodation, and hopefully religious consensus.
It was a great meeting, despite the chill cast by our sanctions. As I was leaving, we both agreed to stay in close touch (we exchanged our home telephone numbers). Our friendship would later prove to be enormously valuable to both our countries.
In May, Pakistani forces made a deep incursion into an area called Kargil, on the Indian side of the Line of Control.
Though there was normally “fighting” near the Line of Control, the area for a long time had been quite stable. There’d be probes and shooting during the good months of the year, but nothing ever changed much; and in wintertime, everybody would pull back down into the valleys, and the two sides would create a “no-man’s-land.” As spring came, they’d go back up into their positions.
Every so often, somebody on one side would be a little late getting up to their spring position, and the other side could grab an advantage of a kilometer or so. It was like “Aha, I’ve gotcha!” on a tactical level. But it didn’t really change things.
This time, however, the Pakistanis waylaid the Indians and penetrated all the way to Kargil. This was such a deep, significant penetration that it wasn’t tactical; it threatened Indian lines of communication and support up to Siachen glacier.
The Indians came back with a vengeance. There were exchanges of fire, there was a mobilization of forces, there were bombing attacks, planes were shot down. Then the two sides started to mobilize all their forces all along the line; and it was beginning to look like the opening moves of a larger war. It got alarming.
I was therefore directed by the administration to head a presidential mission to Pakistan to convince Prime Minister Sharif and General Musharraf to withdraw their forces from Kargil.
I met with the Pakistani leaders in Islamabad on June 24 and 25 and put forth a simple rationale for withdrawing: “If you don’t pull back, you’re going to bring war and nuclear annihilation down on your country. That’s going to be very bad news for everybody.” Nobody actually quarreled with this rationale. The problem for the Pakistani leadership was the apparent national loss of face. Backing down and pulling back to the Line of Control looked like political suicide. We needed to come up with a face-saving way out of this mess. What we were able to offer was a meeting with President Clinton, which would end the isolation that had long been the state of affairs between our two countries, but we would announce the meeting only after a withdrawal of forces.
