Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East by Gwynne Dyer Read Free Book Online Page B

Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had all served in senior posts under his father, President George H.W. Bush, during the first Gulf War a decade before: they had met all the Arab leaders many times, they knew the terrain, and they even knew a fair amount about Arab politics. It’s unlikely that they knew a lot about the theory and practice of terrorism (except Powell, who would undoubtedly have been taught it as a young officer), but they were all people whose experience would lead them to ask the right question: What did al Qaeda’s planners want America to do next? And the answer was obvious: invade Afghanistan.
    They would certainly have known from history that invading Afghanistan is generally a bad idea. It’s quite easy to conquer the provinces and take control of Kabul; pretty well every invading army has got that far. But it’s very hard for a foreign army to stay in Afghanistan with any comfort for more than a year or two, because the Afghans hate being invaded (it has happened too often in their history), and almost every male Afghan, at leastin rural areas, has access to firearms. On the other hand, American public opinion would accept nothing less than an invasion. The American media, of course, were demanding decisive military action by lunchtime tomorrow at the very latest, but the White House held its fire and made its plans.
    The most important element in the plan came from George Tenet, a Democratic appointee whom Bush had the sense to leave in place as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Only two days after the New York and Washington attacks, Tenet proposed that there should be no conventional invasion of Afghanistan at all. Instead, CIA paramilitary teams would enter the country secretly and buy up allies among the various tribal forces in the north of the country that were still resisting the authority of Mullah Omar’s Taliban regime in Kabul. They would bring in communications equipment to keep those tribal forces in constant contact with their new American allies, and later they would be joined by U.S. Special Forces teams whose main task was target designation for American aircraft. Then, when everything was ready, U.S. Air Force and Navy planes would bomb the bejesus out of the Taliban forces in the trenches facing the various ethnic groups that made up the Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen and Hazaras), the northern militias would advance, and the fighting should be practically over before American ground forces arrived in the country.
    It worked exactly according to plan. The so-calledNorthern Alliance was barely a real alliance at all: outnumbered two-to-one by Taliban troops, the various ethnic militias often fought each other, and the one widely respected leader of the alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had been killed by an al Qaeda suicide team posing as television journalists two days before 9/11. But the first ten-man CIA team arrived in northern Afghanistan on September 26 bearing $3 million in cash and promising American air support to General Mohammed Fahim, Massoud’s successor. American aircraft began bombing al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan on October 7, although they did not spend much time on the Taliban troops facing the Northern Alliance until the other CIA teams and U.S. Special Forces troops were in position all along the 550-mile (800-kilometre) front line that stretched across northern Afghanistan.
    That took a further month, and the Bush administration, despite its unilateralist instincts, spent the time gaining a form of legal authority for the attack from the U.N. Security Council and building a coalition of allies for the job of peacekeeping in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Even the bombing was done with extra care, avoiding civilian casualties as much as possible. One estimate is that the United States dropped eighteen thousand bombs on Afghanistan during the five weeks of the war