26. BUSH (II) FUMBLES THE BALL

9/11 ... AND THE SEARCH FOR OSAMA BIN LADEN)

However, almost without giving it a second thought, Bush began immediately to set the larger American goal in Afghanistan as bringing national democracy to the country.  Presumably this loftier, more Idealistic goal would ennoble the American efforts in Afghanistan.  What he seemed not to realize was that this would also open up much larger questions concerning not only American relations with Afghanistan and the surrounding nations, but also the entire Muslim world.  It would hit the country with huge diplomatic questions that would trouble the rest of Bush's presidency.

CIA chief Tenet was ready to go immediately (presuming the operation to be merely taking out bin Laden and his associates).  The CIA began to pay off local Afghan supporters to help them locate bin Laden so that CIA operatives could do their job.  But as the operation began to expand its reach from taking out the criminal perpetrators of 9/11, to taking out all of the many al-Qaeda training camps around the country, to taking out the entire Taliban government, Tenet realized that the CIA needed the U.S. military's help in carrying out its responsibilities.

When asked to support the CIA, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld balked, refusing such support unless Tenet and the CIA operations were put under Rumsfeld's Department of Defense (DOD).  Furthermore, the taking down of bin Laden and al-Qaeda would have to wait until the Taliban had been defeated through the DOD's military operations.  Tenet was forced to yield, part of the frequent tension that would characterize relationships within the Bush cabinet.

But the DOD had no immediate plans for an Afghan operation.  That would take time to develop.  And the military would not move until they were fully ready.¹ Also any such plans required a lot of diplomatic preparation, especially in getting things organized so that America's military operations were coordinated with the local Afghan troops of the Northern Alliance.  This larger operation took time to get itself ready for action.

Eventually (October 7th, almost a month later) America was finally ready to go. There was a huge American and British attack from the air on al-Qaeda training sites and Taliban strongholds, while at the same time the Northern Alliance provided ground troops (also assisted by U.S. special forces, mostly as liaison personnel coordinating ground and air action), which invaded south into Taliban territory.

But the Northern Alliance would not be led by the highly respected Massoud, for he had been assassinated in a well-planned operation just two days before 9/11.  This had caught the attention of CIA analysts who had been watching Afghanistan and who sensed that something big was about to happen when Massoud was assassinated.  But they were not able to get their concerns passed on quickly enough to put the nation's leaders on alert.  Even then there was probably no way anyone could have expected that these events in distant Afghanistan pointed to what happened two days later on 9/11 – just as Americans in 1941 were on to the fact that the Japanese were planning something big, though it never occurred to them that it would be an attack all the way across the Pacific to Pearl Harbor. [Americans should never underestimate the abilities of their enemies to reach deeply into their national existence to try to break them.]²

Nonetheless, the Northern Alliance managed to hold together despite the loss of its leader.  And with the help of American and NATO air power, they were able to begin driving back the Taliban.  On November the 9th, they captured Mazar-i-Sharif, with its key airport in the north of the country, enabling them to fly in not only military supplies but also food for a desperately hungry Afghanistan. Three days later they took the capital Kabul after the Taliban fled ahead of advancing Northern Alliance forces.

With the fall of Kabul, celebrations broke out in Washington and across America. Laura Bush, the Presidents' wife, delivered an address to the nation describing how the Taliban was in fast retreat and how the Afghans were rejoicing, especially the Afghan women. 

"The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."  So it was clear.  What America was involved in was in fact the much larger goal of ridding the world of terrorism and bringing new rights and dignity to the people of the world.

Many of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters retreated into the mountains and caves of Tora Bora, which Americans bombed heavily on the 16th of November.  Finally, CIA operatives and Army Special Forces moved into the area.  But they had hardly enough troops to cover this huge area sufficiently.  Many Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters (including presumably bin Laden and his colleague al-Zawahiri) simply escaped across the border into Pakistan.  Other Taliban retreated south to dig in around their political center, Kandahar, where they were joined by more Taliban pouring in from Pakistan to join the Taliban defense of the Pashtun south.

Once again American Idealism and the hard realities of a complex world would clash violently.  Just the case of "freeing" the women in fundamentalist Afghanistan provides a vivid example of the complexities.  Certainly equal education and equal professional opportunities for women are well-acknowledged rights of every woman in Western culture.  But in traditional Muslim culture such personal rights do not exist.  In fact the whole Western idea of personal rights itself is not the point of Islamic culture, which instead teaches submission as the primary directive in life. Everything, from children up through families, through local clans and tribes, through anointed rulers, to Allah himself, is a construction of correct submission. To talk of personal rights throws the whole sense of Islamic order into confusion. In fact it is one of the major points in the hostility of traditional Muslims against the invasion of their culture by Western values.  When Muslims hear of Westerners crusading in their lands to bring individual rights, this touches the nerves of devout Muslims, not just in Afghanistan but also in other parts of the Muslim world.  And in many cases, it merely makes them all the more deliberate in their sense of opposition to the Westernizing of their culture.

To be sure, there are many, very many, in the Muslim world who find these Western values attractive.  These are the people that Westerners are most likely to deal with in their contacts with the world of Islam.  It is thus easy to get the impression on the basis of this personal sampling that pro-Western attitudes are much more prevalent in the Middle East than they actually are.

It is thus also hard, very hard, for Americans to understand how Muslims who have lived among us in America (as most of the 9/11 perpetrators had) could hate us as they do.  Do they not see the good in what we stand for?  The answer is obviously "no."  Contact with our culture has made them all the more committed to the idea that the evil ways of our culture must be destroyed – just as we Americans believe that the evil ways of their culture must be destroyed.

Thus it was that in Afghanistan, America became drawn into a much larger challenge, one that had been brewing for a while and was about to become monumental in size.  The war on terrorism in Afghanistan was quickly to become a war of global cultures.