New Woodward Book
reveals all about the White House Strategy
CIA gave Afghan
Warlords $70 million to defeat Taliban
By
Mike Allen
A new book says President Bush's advisers had grave doubts
about the early course of the war in Afghanistan and suggests
that the ultimate defeat of the Taliban was due largely to millions
of dollars in hundred-dollar bills the CIA handed out to Afghan
warlords to win their support.
"Bush
at War," by Washington Post assistant managing editor
Bob Woodward, draws on four hours of interviews with Bush and
quotes 15,000 words from National Security Council and other White
House meetings in reconstructing the internal debate that led
to U.S. military action in Afghanistan and the decision to aggressively
confront Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
In detailing tensions within Bush's
war cabinet, the book describes Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
as frequently at odds with Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld, and struggling to establish a relationship
with Bush. But it depicts Powell as determined to make his case
that military action against Iraq without the help of allies could
have disastrous consequences, a chance he finally got at a dinner
with Bush last Aug. 5.
While the dinner has been previously
reported, the book describes in detail the case Powell made --
reading from an outline on loose-leaf paper -- that the United
States has to have international support against Iraq. "It's
nice to say we can do it unilaterally," Powell told the president
bluntly, "except you can't."
The dinner persuaded Bush to seek
a resolution from the United Nations over the objections of Cheney
and Rumsfeld.
The book reports that despite their
outward optimism, Bush's advisers had deep doubts about their
strategy of bombing the Taliban while relying on ground forces
from the Northern Alliance, the ragtag, factionalized opposition.
At one point, the Pentagon developed plans to send in 50,000 U.S.
troops. Bush, according to the book, hated what he saw as "hand-wringing"
by his aides, but even he expressed doubts about the strategy,
roaring at one point that he was "concerned about the fact
that things aren't moving."
At a climactic meeting in the Situation
Room two weeks into the campaign, Bush went around the table,
demanding that his aides affirm their support for the strategy.
They pledged allegiance to his plan, and his call for alternatives
was met with unanimous "no's."
"Don't let the press panic us,"
Bush said.
According to "Bush at War,"
the CIA spent $70 million in direct cash outlays on the ground
in Afghanistan, a figure that also included money for setting
up field hospitals. "That's one bargain," the president
said in an interview with Woodward last August. The money was
handed out by about a half-dozen CIA teams spread through the
country, starting with a 10-man paramilitary team code-named "Jawbreaker"
that landed in Afghanistan on Sept. 27, 2001. The team leader
carried $3 million in a single attache case.
In the interview, conducted at the
president's ranch in Crawford, Tex., Bush was unusually reflective
about his personal style and his ambitions as president. "Sometimes
that's the way I am -- fiery," he said, describing his relationship
with his aides, and added: "I can be an impatient person."
He spoke about his "instincts" or his "instinctive"
reactions a dozen times during the ranch interview. "I'm
not a textbook player; I'm a gut player," he said.
Bush outlined a far-reaching moral
mission for his presidency in the aftermath of the attacks.
"I will seize the opportunity
to achieve big goals," Bush said. "There is nothing
bigger than to achieve world peace." Bush, discussing his
experiences as a troubleshooter during his father's presidency
and campaigns, said, "The vision thing matters. That's another
lesson I learned."
Describing his aspirations for an
ambitious reordering of the world through preemptive and perhaps
unilateral action, Bush turned first to Iraq but then to North
Korea and its dictator Kim Jong Il. With the administration contemplating
a response to North Korea's nuclear weapons program, Woodward
reports that Bush shouted and waved his finger in the air as he
vented about Kim.
"I loathe Kim Jong Il,"
Bush said. "I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because
he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these
prison camps -- they're huge -- that he uses to break up families,
and to torture people."
During the interview Bush was joined
by first lady Laura Bush, who said she had been nervous and anxious
after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. "I woke up
in the middle of the night," the first lady said, gesturing
toward her husband. "I know you did. I mean, I'd wake up
in the middle of the night and know he was awake."
"I don't remember that. Was
I some?" Bush asked, looking at her.
Woodward recounts that she nodded
a strong affirmative.
"Yes," the president conceded.
"Yes. Right after the attacks, I mean, I was emotional."
Bush said security fears forced him
to cancel two White House poker games with friends from East Texas.
Bush also said he was "floored" to learn that 11 days
after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the
FBI had interviewed 417 people as part of its terrorist sweep
and that agents had put 331 people on their watch list, which
consists of potential terrorists who might be in the United States
or traveling to the country. Bush said he decided to keep the
number secret because of the trauma that remained from the attacks.
In Bush's fractious war cabinet,
previously unreported personal differences appear to be at least
as pronounced as the widely known policy disputes: Cheney takes
a swipe at Powell, Powell perhaps unintentionally denigrates the
military, and Powell and Rumsfeld "had at times been almost
glaring at each other across the table" over Afghanistan
operations. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, bypasses Rumsfeld to give to Powell and his deputy,
Richard L. Armitage, the military information they need and the
gossip they crave.
National security adviser Condoleezza
Rice, whose role has been something of a mystery to those outside
the inner circle of the administration, emerges as a backstage
broker among members of Bush's war council who absorbs Bush's
frustration when deliberations or events peeve him. Bush described
her as "a very thorough person, constantly mother-henning
me."
Rumsfeld is portrayed as irascible
and visibly unhappy that, during the early days of war planning,
the dominant figure was CIA Director George J. Tenet, a holdover
from the Clinton administration. "This is the CIA's strategy,"
Rumsfeld railed at an NSC meeting nine days after the invasion
of Afghanistan. "They developed the strategy. We're just
executing the strategy."
The book's extensive portrait of
Powell conveys his frustration with having to pretend that there
was a policy consensus within the war cabinet on Iraq and the
Middle East. He called it being "in the icebox" during
periods when the White House banned him from television.
During the 2000 presidential campaign,
according to the book, Karl Rove, Bush's chief political aide,
"detected a subtle, subversive tendency, as if Powell were
protecting his centrist credentials and his own political future
at Bush's expense."
The ill will continued into the administration,
when Rove "felt Powell was beyond political control and operating
out of a sense of entitlement."
Powell's sense of isolation was so
great that last March he began requesting private time with Bush
in an effort to bond. Rice sat in on the meetings, held once a
week for 20 or 30 minutes. "I think we're really making some
headway in the relationship," Powell is quoted as telling
Armitage, his best friend, after a summer conversation in the
Oval Office.
Bush decided to take his case against
Hussein to the United Nations in response to Powell and over the
initial opposition of Cheney, who is described as "beyond
hell-bent for action against Saddam." Cheney continued to
argue against new resolutions giving Iraq one last chance, but
Bush yielded to Powell's case for such an offer.
When Bush spoke to the U.N. General
Assembly, however, the president realized that the addition to
his speech had been left off the TelePrompTer. "With only
mild awkwardness, he ad-libbed it," according to the book.
Bush said during a February visit
to the North Korean border that he had no intention of invading
North Korea, but made it clear in the interview with Woodward
he is not content with the status quo. "They tell me, we
don't need to move too fast, because the financial burdens on
people will be so immense if we try to -- if this guy were to
topple," Bush said. But, he went on, "Either you believe
in freedom and want to -- and worry about the human condition,
or you don't."
In another sign of how deeply the
president personalizes international relations, the book describes
how Bush's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin
flowered after the president heard that Putin had been given a
cross by his mother. In his interview, Bush recalled saying to
Putin: "That speaks volumes to me, Mr. President. May I call
you Vladimir?"
During a meeting in New York with
Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Bush bluntly denounced
an article by investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh in the New
Yorker magazine. The article, published in December, reported
that the Pentagon had contingency plans to work with an Israeli
special operations unit to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons if
the country became unstable. "Seymour Hersh is a liar,"
Bush is quoted as telling Musharraf.
The president is shown to be preoccupied
by public perceptions of the war, looking at polling data from
Rove, now his senior adviser, even after pretending to have no
interest.
Roger E. Ailes, a media coach for
Bush's father and now chairman of the Fox News Channel, sent a
confidential communication to the White House in the weeks after
the terrorist attacks. Rove took the Ailes communication to the
president. "His back-channel message: The American public
would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long
as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures
possible," Woodward wrote. He added that Ailes, who has angrily
challenged reports that his news channel has a conservative bias,
added a warning: "Support would dissipate if the public did
not see Bush acting harshly."
The book is based on interviews with
more than 100 people involved in planning and executing the war.
Woodward would not describe the records of NSC meetings he reviewed
beyond saying that they were official and verbatim, and that in
many cases he was able to check the accounts with multiple sources.
In a note to readers, Woodward said
that most of the interviews were conducted on background, meaning
that he could use the information but the sources would not be
identified by name. The 378-page book includes copious instances
of Woodward's hallmark of revealing the interior monologues of
key newsmakers, including a description of Rice's thoughts as
she watched television alone.
Since
his Watergate collaboration with Carl Bernstein, Woodward has
written a parade of bestsellers on subjects that include intrigue
at the Pentagon, the Federal Reserve Board and the Supreme Court.
Woodward, 59, shared in his second Pulitzer Prize this year as
part of a team of reporters from The Post's national staff recognized
for covering the war on terrorism.- The Washington Post
