THE LAST MAN STANDING
In the spring of 2001, afghanistan was as rough a place as it ever is. Four sets of forces battled for
position. Most of the country was under the authority of the Taliban, but it was not a homogeneous group.
Some of its leaders, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the self-styled emir of Afghanistan, were
dyed-in-the-wool Islamic radicals; others were fierce Afghan nationalists. The Taliban's principal support had
come from Pakistan-another interested party, which wanted a reasonably peaceful border to its west-and in
particular from the hard men of the isi. But Pakistan's policy was not all of a piece either. Since General
Pervez Musharraf had taken power in a 1999 coup, some Pakistani officials, desperate to curry favor with
the U.S.-which had cut off aid to Pakistan after it tested a nuclear device in 1998-had seen the wisdom of
distancing themselves from the Taliban, or at the least attempting to moderate its more radical behavior.
The third element was the Northern Alliance, a resistance movement whose stronghold was in northeast
Afghanistan. Most of the Alliance's forces and leaders were, like Massoud, ethnic Tajiks-a minority in
Afghanistan. Massoud controlled less than 10% of the country and had been beaten back by the Taliban in
2000. Nonetheless, by dint of his personality and reputation, Massoud was "the only military threat to the
Taliban," says Francesc Vendrell, who was then the special representative in Afghanistan of the U.N.
Secretary-General.
And then there was al-Qaeda. The group had been born in Afghanistan when Islamic radicals began
flocking there in 1979, after the Soviets invaded. Bin Laden and his closest associates had returned in
1996, when they were expelled from Sudan. Al-Qaeda's terrorist training camps were in Afghanistan, and
bin Laden's forces and money were vital to sustaining the Taliban's offensives against Massoud.
By last spring, the uneasy equilibrium among the four forces was beginning to break down. "Moderates"
in the Taliban-those who tried to keep lines open to intermediaries in the U.N. and the U.S.-were losing
ground. In 2000, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, thought to be the second most powerful member of the
Taliban, had reached out clandestinely to Massoud. "He understood that our country had been sold out to
al-Qaeda and Pakistan," says Ahmad Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary. But in April 2001, Rabbani died of
liver cancer. By that month, says the U.N.'s Vendrell, "it was al- Qaeda that was running the Taliban, not
vice versa."
A few weeks before Rabbani's death, Musharraf's government had started to come to the same
conclusion: the Pakistanis were no longer able to moderate Taliban behavior. To worldwide condemnation,
the Taliban had announced its intention to blow up the 1,700-year-old stone statues of the Buddha in the
Bamiyan Valley. Musharraf dispatched his right-hand man, Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider, to plead with
Mullah Omar for the Buddhas to be saved. The Taliban's Foreign Minister and its ambassador to Pakistan,
says a Pakistani official close to the talks, were in favor of saving the Buddhas. But Mullah Omar, says a
member of the Pakistani delegation, listened to what Haider had to say and replied, "If on Judgment Day I
stand before Allah, I'll see those two statues floating before me, and I know that Allah will ask me why,
when I had the power, I did not destroy them." A few days later, the Buddhas were blown up.
By summer, Pakistan had a deeper grievance. The country had suffered a wave of sectarian
assassinations, with gangs throwing grenades into mosques and murdering clerics. The authorities in
Islamabad knew that the murderers had fled to Afghanistan (one of them was openly running a store in
Kabul) and sent a delegation to ask for their return. "We gave them lists of names, photos and the
locations of training camps where these fellows could be found," says Brigadier Javid Iqbal Cheema,
director of Pakistan's National Crisis Management Cell, "but not a single individual was ever handed over to
us." The Pakistanis were furious.
As the snows cleared for the annual spring military campaign, a joint offensive against Massoud by the
Taliban and al-Qaeda seemed likely. But the influence of al-Qaeda on the Taliban was proving deeply
unpopular among ordinary Afghans, especially in the urban centers. "I thought at most 20% of the
population supported the Taliban by early summer," says Vendrell. And bin Laden's power made
Massoud's plea for outside assistance more urgent. "We told the Americans-we told everyone-that
al-Qaeda was set upon a transnational program," says Abdullah Abdullah, once a close aide to Massoud
and now the Afghan Foreign Minister. In April, Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg,
France, seeking support for the Northern Alliance. "If President Bush doesn't help us," he told a reporter,
"these terrorists will damage the U.S. and Europe very soon."
But Massoud never got the help that he needed-or that Clarke's plan had deemed necessary. Most of
the time, Northern Alliance delegates to Washington had to be satisfied with meeting low-level bureaucrats.
The Alliance craved recognition by the U.S. as a "legitimate resistance movement" but never got it, though
on a visit in July, Abdullah did finally get to meet some top National Security Council (NSC) and State
Department officials for the first time. The best the Americans seemed prepared to do was turn a blind eye
to the trickle of aid from Iran, Russia and India. Vendrell remembers much talk that spring of increased
support from the Americans. But in truth Massoud's best help came from Iran, which persuaded all
supporters of the Northern Alliance to channel their aid through Massoud alone.
Only once did something happen that might have given Massoud hope that the U.S. would help. In late
June, he was joined in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, by Abdul Haq, a leading Pashtun, based in Dubai, who was
opposed to the Taliban. Haq was accompanied by someone Massoud knew well: Peter Tomsen, a retired
ambassador who from 1989 to '92 had been the U.S. State Department's special envoy to the Afghan
resistance. Also present was James Ritchie, a successful Chicago options trader who had spent part of his
childhood in Afghanistan and was helping bankroll the groups opposed to the Taliban. (Haq was captured
and executed by the Taliban last October while on a quixotic mission to Afghanistan.) Tomsen insists that
the June 2001 trip was a private one, though he had told State Department officials of it in advance. Their
message, he says, was limited to a noncommittal "good luck and be careful."
The purpose of the meeting, according to Tomsen, was to see if Massoud and Haq could forge a joint
strategy against the Taliban. "The idea," says Sayeed Hussain Anwari, now the Afghan Minister of
Agriculture, who was present at the meeting, "was to bring Abdul Haq inside the country to begin an armed
struggle in the southeast." Still hoping for direct assistance from Washington, Massoud gave Tomsen all
the intelligence he had on al-Qaeda and asked Tomsen to take it back to Washington. But when he briefed
State Department officials after his trip, their reaction was muted. The American position was clear. If
anything was to be done to change the realities in Afghanistan, it would have to be done not by the U.S.
but by Pakistan. Massoud was on his own.
CLARKE: CRYING WOLF
In Washington, dick clarke didn't seem to have a lot of friends either. His proposals were still grinding
away. No other great power handles the transition from one government to another in so shambolic a way
as the U.S.-new appointments take months to be confirmed by the Senate; incoming Administrations tinker
with even the most sensible of existing policies. The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the
transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been
clear. "If we hadn't had a transition," says a senior Clinton Administration official, "probably in late October
or early November 2000, we would have had (the plan to go on the offensive) as a presidential directive."
As the new Administration took office, Rice kept Clarke in his job as counterterrorism czar. In early
February, he repeated to Vice President Dick Cheney the briefing he had given to Rice and Hadley. There
are differing opinions on how seriously the Bush team took Clarke's wwarnings. Some members of the
outgoing Administration got the sense that the Bush team thought the Clintonites had become obsessed
with terrorism. "It was clear," says one, "that this was not the same priority to them that it was to us."
For other observers, however, the real point was not that the new Administration dismissed the terrorist
theat. On the contrary, Rice, Hadley and Cheney, says an official, "all got that it was important." The
question is, How high a priority did terrorism get? Clarke says that dealing with al-Qaeda "was in the top
tier of issues reviewed by the Bush Administration." But other topics got far more attention. The whole
Bush national-security team was obsessed with setting up a national system of missile defense. Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was absorbed by a long review of the military's force structure. Attorney
General John Ashcroft had come into office as a dedicated crime buster. Rice was desperately trying to
keep in line a national-security team-including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin
Powell-whose members had wildly different agendas and styles. "Terrorism," says a former Clinton White
House official, speaking of the new Administration, "wasn't on their plate of key issues." Al-Qaeda had not
been a feature of the landscape when the Republicans left office in 1993. The Bush team, says an official,
"had to learn about (al-Qaeda) and figure out where it fit into their broader foreign policy." But doing so
meant delay.
Some counterterrorism officials think there is another reason for the Bush Administration's dilatory
response. Clarke's paper, says an official, "was a Clinton proposal." Keeping Clarke around was one thing;
buying into the analysis of an Administration that the Bush team considered feckless and naive was quite
another. So Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a new "policy review process" on the terrorism threat. Clarke
dived into yet another round of meetings. And his proposals were nibbled nearly to death.
This was, after all, a White House plan, which means it was resented from the moment of conception.
"When you look at the Pentagon and the cia," says a former senior Clinton aide, "it's not their plan. The
military will never accept the White House staff doing military planning." Terrorism, officials from the State
Department suggested, needed to be put in the broader context of American policy in South Asia. The
rollback plan was becoming the victim of a classic Washington power play between those with "functional"
responsibilities-like terrorism-and those with "regional" ones-like relations with India and Pakistan. The
State Department's South Asia bureau, according to a participant in the meetings, argued that a fistful of
other issues-Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, Musharraf's dictatorship-were just as pressing as terrorism. By
now, Clarke's famously short fuse was giving off sparks. A participant at one of the meetings paraphrases
Clarke's attitude this way: "These people are trying to kill us. I could give a f___ if Musharraf was
democratically elected. What I do care about is Pakistan's support for the Taliban and turning a blind eye to
this terrorist cancer growing in their neighbor's backyard."
It was Bush who broke the deadlock. Each morning the CIA gives the Chief Executive a top-secret
Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on pressing issues of national security. One day in early spring, Tenet
briefed Bush on the hunt for Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's head of international operations, who was
suspected of having been involved in the planning of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. After the PDB, Bush
told Rice that the approach to al-Qaeda was too scattershot. He was tired of "swatting at flies" and asked
for a comprehensive plan for attacking terrorism. According to an official, Rice came back to the nsc and
said, "The President wants a plan to eliminate al-Qaeda." Clarke reminded her that he already had one.
But having a plan isn't the same as executing it. Clarke's paper now had to go through three more
stages: the Deputies' Committee, made up of the No. 2s to the main national-security officials; the
Principals' Committee, which included Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Powell and Rumsfeld; and finally, the
President. Only when Bush had signed off would the plan become what the Bush team called a
national-security presidential directive.
On April 30, nearly six weeks after the Administration started holding deputies' meetings, Clarke
presented a new plan to them. In addition to Hadley, who chaired the hour-long meeting, the gathering
included Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby; Richard Armitage, the barrel-chested Deputy Secretary of
State; Paul Wolfowitz, the scholarly hawk from the Pentagon; and John McLaughlin from the cia. Armitage
was enthusiastic about Clarke's plan, according to a senior official. But the CIA was gun-shy. Tenet was a
Clinton holdover and thus vulnerable if anything went wrong. His agency was unwilling to take risks; it
wanted "top cover" from the White House. The deputies, says a senior official, decided to have "three
parallel reviews-one on al-Qaeda, one on the Pakistani political situation and the third on Indo-Pakistani
relations." The issues, the deputies thought, were interrelated. "They wanted to view them holistically,"
says the senior official, "and not until they'd had three separate meetings on each of these were they able
to hold a fourth integrating them all."
There was more. Throughout the spring, one bureaucratic wrangle in particular rumbled on, poisoning
the atmosphere. At issue: the Predator.
The Predator had first been used in Bosnia in 1995. Later, the CIA and the Pentagon began a highly
classified program designed to produce pictures-viewable in real time-that would be fine-grained enough to
identify individuals. The new, improved Predator was finally ready in September 2000, and the CIA flew it
over Afghanistan in a two-week "test of concept." First results were promising; one video sent to the White
House showed a man who might have been bin Laden. For the first time, the CIA now had a way to check
out a tip by one of its agents among the Afghan tribes. If there was a report that bin Laden was in the
vicinity, says a former aide to Clinton, "we could put the Predator over the location and have eyes on the
target."
But in October 2000, the Predator crashed when landing at its base in a country bordering Afghanistan.
The unmanned aerial vehicle needed repairs, and in any event, the CIA and the Pentagon decided that the
winter weather over Afghanistan would make it difficult to take good pictures. The Clinton team left office
assuming that the Predator would be back in the skies by March 2001.
In fact, the Predator wouldn't fly again until after Sept. 11. In early 2001 it was decided to develop a new
version that would not just take photos but also be armed with Hellfire missiles. To the frustration of Clarke
and other White House aides, the CIA and the Pentagon couldn't decide who controlled the new program or
who should pay for it-though each craft cost only $1 million. While the new uav was being rapidly developed
at a site in the southwestern U.S., the CIA opposed using the old one for pure surveillance because it
feared al-Qaeda might see it. "Once we were going to arm the thing," says a senior U.S. intelligence
official, "we didn't want to expose the capability by just having it fly overhead and spot a bunch of guys we
couldn't do anything about." Clarke and his supporters were livid. "Dick Clarke insisted that it be kept in the
air," says a Bush Administration official. The counterterrorism team argued that the Taliban had shot at the
uav during the Clinton test, so its existence was hardly a secret. Besides, combined with on-the-ground
intelligence, a Predator might just gather enough information in time to get a Tomahawk off to the target.
But when the deputies held their fourth and final meeting on July 16, they still hadn't sorted out what to do
with the Predator. Squabbles over who would pay for it continued into August.
Administration sources insist that they were not idle in the spring. They set up, for example, a new
center in the Treasury to track suspicious foreign assets and reviewed Clinton's "findings" on whether the
CIA could kill bin Laden. But by the summer, policy reviews were hardly what was needed.
Intelligence services were picking up enough chatter about a terrorist attack to scare the pants off top
officials. On June 22, the Defense Department put its troops on full alert and ordered six ships from the
Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, to steam out to sea, for fear that they might be attacked in port. U.S. officials
thought an attack might be mounted on American forces at the nato base at Incirlik, Turkey, or maybe in
Rome or Belgium, Germany or Southeast Asia, perhaps the Philippines-anywhere, it seems, but in the
U.S. When Independence Day passed without incident, Clarke called a meeting and asked Ben Bonk,
deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, to brief on bin Laden's plans. Bonk's evidence that
al-Qaeda was planning "something spectacular," says an official who was in the room, "was very gripping."
But nobody knew what or when or where the spectacular would be. As if to crystallize how much and how
little anyone in the know actually knew, the counterterrorism center released a report titled "Threat of
Impending al- Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely."
Predictably, nerves frayed. Clarke, who was widely loathed in the cia, where he was accused of
self-aggrandizement, began to lose credibility. He cried wolf, said his detractors; he had been in the job too
long. "The guy was reading way too many fiction novels," says a counterterrorism official. "He turned into a
Chicken Little. The sky was always falling for Dick Clarke. We had our strings jerked by him so many
times, he was simply not taken seriously." Clarke wasn't the only one living on the edge. So, say senior
officials, was Tenet. Every few days, the CIA director would call Tom Pickard, who had become acting
director of the FBI in June, asking "What do you hear? Do you have anything?" Pickard never had to ask
what the topic was.
In mid-July, Tenet sat down for a special meeting with Rice and aides. "George briefed Condi that there
was going to be a major attack," says an official; another, who was present at the meeting, says Tenet
broke out a huge wall chart ("They always have wall charts") with dozens of threats. Tenet couldn't rule out
a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas. One date already
worrying the Secret Service was July 20, when Bush would arrive in Genoa for the G-8 summit; Tenet had
intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning to attack Bush there. The Italians, who had heard the same report
(the way European intelligence sources tell it, everyone but the President's dog "knew" an attack was
coming) put frogmen in the harbor, closed airspace around the town and ringed it with antiaircraft guns.
But nothing happened. After Genoa, says a senior intelligence official, there was a collective sigh of
relief: "A lot of folks started letting their guard down." After the final deputies' meeting on Clarke's draft of a
presidential directive, on July 16, it wasn't easy to find a date for the Principals' Committee to look at the
plan-the last stage before the paper went to Bush. "There was one meeting scheduled for August," says a
senior official, "but too many principals were out of town." Eventually a date was picked: the principals
would look at the draft on Sept. 4. That was about nine months after Clarke first put his plan on paper.
PART II
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