After weeks of careful deployments–and intransigence from Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, Bush decided on the timing for the strikes last Wednesday, NEWSWEEK has learned. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had returned from a trip to shore up support in the Mideast on Saturday, mapped out the final details early Sunday morning. So closely held was the plan that even the president’s close friend and advisor, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, had to travel back from Houston on Sunday, administration officials said. Senior administration officials rushed to their offices straight from church. Bush, at the White House, spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Jacques Chirac, among others, before launching the attack. Working from home, Powell made 16 phone calls to world leaders and ministers to tell them of the attacks. Bush called Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle at 9 p.m. on Saturday night to alert him the attacks would begin the next day. Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were told late last week that “in the next few days something might happen,” said a committee aide.
Beginning at 12:30 p.m. ET, 50 missiles fired from three U.S. Aegis cruisers and one destroyer positioned in the Arabian Sea hit targets inside Afghanistan. In the air were 25 strike aircraft, mainly F/A-18s, accompanied by escort aircraft, deployed from two U.S. carriers, the USS Enterprise and the USS Carl Vinson. They were joined by a total of 15 B-1 and B-52 bombers out of America’s Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean and long-distance B-2s that took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. British and American submarines, each firing cruise missiles, also took part. “It is not yet over,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference at about 3 p.m. Standing beside him, Gen. Richard Myers, sworn in a week ago as the new Joint Chiefs chairman, said the U.S. was only in the “the early stages of ongoing combat operations.”
The U.S. military strategy is one of progressively weakening the Taliban government, which has defied a Bush ultimatum to turn over Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants, as well as to dismantle bin Laden’s terrorist training camps. Rumsfeld calls it “draining the swamp” in which bin Laden hides. If the Taliban is toppled, most likely by opposing warlords or the Northern Alliance opposition militia, the lack of state support could force the terrorist chieftain out of hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan In Sunday’s strike, the initial air targets were air defenses and communications sites controlled by the Taliban clerics. By taking out the phone lines, the United States hopes to force bin Laden to communicate in other ways. Previously, his use of cell phones had provided officials with intelligence on his whereabouts. Taliban’s anti-aircraft batteries and tiny air force, which consists of a handful of aging Russian Sukhoi-21s and MiG interceptors, were targets to make the skies safer for the second dimension of Sunday’s campaign: humanitarian airdrops, which began about 45 minutes after the air strikes.
Food, medicine and supplies were dropped into Afghanistan, mainly in areas where thousands of refugees have fled in anticipation of the attacks. C-17s flying at about 30,000 feet tossed out 37,500 daily rations across the country. Each ration was a thick yellow plastic packet reading, in English, “humanitarian daily rations, food gift from the people of the United States of America.” Each contained beans, potatoes, biscuits, shortbread, strawberry jam, peanut butter, a fruit bar and pastries, along with yellow book matches stamped USA on the cover. Bush, in his televised speech from the White House Treaty Room, was plain-spoken about the purpose of the tactic. “The United States of America is friend to the Afghan people, and at the same time is a friend to more than a billion Muslims worldwide,” he said.
Among other targets hit by the U.S. strikes on Sunday were Taliban Scud missile launchers, NEWSWEEK has learned. The administration feared the Afghan clerics might use them to start a war with Pakistan, which has been roiled by pro-Taliban demonstrations in recent weeks. In Islamabad, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, forewarned of the attacks, fired several military officers in what appeared to be an attempt to further consolidate power ahead of expected demonstrations from angry Muslim fundamentalists. Shortly after the strikes, radical clerics in Pakistan called for a general strike on Monday. Secretary of State Colin Powell planned a trip later this week to the region. In Islamabad, where police were on high alert, the reaction was mostly shocked resignation. “We knew it was coming but I guess we were still hoping it wouldn’t,” said a vegetable dealer, closing up his stand.
A main goal for the Bush administration is to keep the war on bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network from escalating into a broader clash with the Islamic world, which from Pakistan to the Mideast has proved to be vulnerable to radical fundamentalism. In building a worldwide coalition against terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. officials have been especially sensitive to the concerns of moderate Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, whose rulers fear that the visceral support bin Laden elicits on the Arab street could be turned against them. Administration officials were especially concerned about destabilizing Pakistan, which is critical to supplying intelligence and support in the war on Al Qaeda; the also feared that killing innocent Afghans might unite dissident Afghan warlords, whom the U.S. hopes to win to its side, around the Taliban.
But bin Laden clearly hopes to launch a wider war between Islam and the West. Shortly after the attacks began, bin Laden, in what may be his first public comment since Sept. 11, warned Americans would “have no peace” until Israel is gone from the Middle East. “They have come out with their men and their military to fight Islam,” bin Laden said from a mountain redoubt via Qatar’s Al-Jazeerah-TV, in what appeared to be remarks recorded before Sunday’s attacks. “They have come to attack Allah’s religion. They have come to fight Islam. And they tell the world they are fighting terrorism.” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer dismissed the comments. “The Taliban and Osama bin Laden have said all kinds of things that are often at odds with reality, and in all cases it’s a reminder of why the president has brought together the world to fight terrorism so that freedom can prevail over fear,” he said.
Meanwhile, after weeks of downplaying expectations that a conventional military strike was in the offing–Rumsfeld himself was quoted as saying that Afghanistan had few “high-value” targets–the administration now has to prove that precisely that kind of campaign can work. Admiral William J. Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview that it was far too early to judge whether the U.S. strikes would be effective or what the reaction to them would be. “I’m not sure bombs in the desert are any more effective than cruise missiles. They do the same thing,” he said. But he said Bush’s decision to couple a humanitarian effort with the military strikes seemed “unprecedented. It may be inspired,” he said. “It doesn’t suggest we’re at war but that it’s some kind of justice operation. In war, you usually don’t worry about justice.”
The timing of the strikes, coming nearly a month after the terror attacks on America, was a “cumulative process,” a senior administration official told NEWSWEEK. “It was question of getting intelligence information on the targets, waiting for the campaign plan to be developed. It was moving our forces into position. It was getting collaboration of allies that we need. And then it was some knowledge of where particular people are.” That latter point appeared to refer to gaining intelligence on the location of bin Laden and his al Queda lieutenants. The official said the U.S. will use successive strikes to gauge the reaction and movements of the Taliban and of bin Laden, and learn from it.
Afghanistan, a country of rugged mountains and gorges that has been death to other invaders, is a notoriously brutal battlefield. Now that the real conflict has begun, many of the questions about what Rumsfeld himself called “this so-called war” can be answered.
Frank Anderson, a former chief of the CIA’s Near East Division and someone long familiar with Afghan politics and war, says he is optimistic, not least because he believes Afghans themselves are now more likely to rise up against the Taliban–especially if they know the U.S. has no intention of invading itself. That effort could be helped along, he says, by one of the more covert aspects of the war: U.S. bribes to win over warlords from the battered, unpopular Taliban. “The wonderful thing about Afghanistan is the role in which treachery plays,” Anderson says. To get bin Laden and his fellow terrorists, America appears ready to use whatever works–from B-2s to bribes.
