CHAPTER 26
America awoke the next day a nation at war. Above pictures of the burning World Trade Center, the Washington Times had a one-word front-page headline that read, in large, bold, capital letters: “infamy.”1 Across the United States, Americans expressed anger and sadness. They also voiced fear of further attacks. Many wondered if they were safe, how their lives might have to change, whether their family members and friends were in danger. Major landmarks considered likely targets were watched with anxiety. Each rumor of another attack set people on edge. Some feared for family members in the military. The financial world was in shock. The stock market suffered one of its biggest drops in history when it reopened six days after 9/11. Hundreds of billions of dollars—property damage, travel revenue, insurance claims, stock market capital—all lost in a single day because nineteen men with a fanatical willingness to die boarded four commercial airliners wielding box cutters.
Throughout the Pentagon, the environment had changed radically. Smoke and the smell of jet fuel lingered. Many of the Pentagon’s seventeen miles of usually bustling corridors were quiet. Halls were sealed off with yellow police tape. Armed Air Force jets patrolled the skies overhead.
NATO unanimously invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which provides that “an armed attack against one…shall be considered an attack against them all.”2 The NATO nations sent five AWACS aircraft and crews to help patrol American airspace in the months after 9/11. It was a welcome sign of commitment and support from the alliance, for which I was and remain deeply grateful. NATO was born early in the Cold War, when it was thought that the United States might have to come to the defense of our allies in Western Europe. Despite my many years of association with the alliance, it had never crossed my mind that NATO might someday step up to help defend the United States.
At the Pentagon, I noticed a different look on people’s faces as I passed them in the corridors. We had lost members of our Pentagon family and were determined to protect the country and prevent this from happening again. Calling for “a fundamental reassessment of intelligence and defense activities,” even the New York Times sounded almost unilateralist; they suggested America should be prepared to take the fight to the terrorists, with or without our allies. “When Washington has prepared to act in the past it has often been stymied by faint-hearted allies,” the paper’s editorial board charged. “Some of America’s closest friends have found it more useful to do business with countries that have either supported terrorists on their soil, been indifferent to them or been too afraid to go after them.”3 Members of Congress were working together in ways that promised a truly united approach, with a spirit perhaps not seen since the attack on Pearl Harbor. On September 18, 2001, Congress passed a joint resolution amounting to a declaration of war. It was approved by stunning margins: 420-1 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. The resolution gave the President the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks and those who “harbored” the terrorists.4
No longer were discussions in Washington or the White House focused on the issues that had divided Americans—stem cell research, the Social Security lockbox, or withdrawing from the ABM treaty. Defense of the American people was now the nation’s number one priority.
Administrations frequently end up being judged by an event they had not anticipated—the Cuban missile crisis for John F. Kennedy; the invasion of Kuwait for George H. W. Bush; and the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center for George W. Bush. After the attack, Bush won plaudits for his leadership even from opponents. Critics who had considered him to be an accidental president out of his depth were, for the moment, silenced.
Later controversies tended to obscure Bush’s sound stewardship of the country after the 9/11 attacks. But in those critical moments for the country, he was somber, purposeful, and determined to act. He was deeply saddened by the loss of so many lives but not distracted by his sorrow. With his advisers, he probed, questioned, and provided well-considered guidance. In fact, he did better than that. He was both courageous and strategic.
The war against the terrorists would require all of the cabinet departments and agencies to take on new roles. The attorney general would be charged with new legal challenges and developing a new mission in counterterrorism for the FBI. Beginning in the 1970s, civil liberty considerations had resulted in the erection of an information barrier that prevented the FBI and domestic law enforcement agencies from sharing information freely with the CIA and the intelligence community. After 9/11, this theoretical wall was widely considered a dangerous and unnecessary barrier to effective counterterrorism work. The Department of Justice and the CIA had to negotiate a delicate balance, devising new ways to cooperate and exchange intelligence while protecting our civil liberties.
The Treasury Department would be tasked with helping to track terrorist financing. The Department of Energy would have to ensure the safety of American nuclear power plants and work with our allies to make sure their nuclear programs and materials were secure. And still other elements of the government would need to join the effort. The President believed—and over the years that followed frequently underscored—that it would not be enough for the Defense Department and the CIA to be the only departments at war. All elements of our national power would need to step up.
On the morning of September 12, President Bush visited the Pentagon to inspect the damage and thank the rescue workers. He met those who were still pulling body parts from the wreckage. It was impossible for me to get out of my mind the image of the passengers on that doomed plane during their frightful descent. The thought of men and women working quietly in their Pentagon offices and then hearing the deafening roar of the engines or seeing through their windows an unfamiliar shadow about to consume them was equally haunting.
Perhaps noticing my distraction, the President put his arm on my shoulder. “You’re carrying a heavy load,” Bush said, “and I appreciate it.” I was grateful for his thoughtfulness, but I knew his load was even heavier, and that the members of our armed forces and their families would in the end bear the heaviest burdens of all.
Two days later President Bush asked me to open the first cabinet meeting after 9/11 with a prayer. I had never been one to wear my faith on my sleeve, but I valued prayer and the connection to the Almighty. I believed those of us in positions of authority needed to keep in mind that all human beings are prone to error. I felt the need to seek the Lord’s guidance as we charted our way forward. I began,
Ever faithful God, in death we are reminded of the precious birthrights of life and liberty You endowed in Your American people. You have shown once again that these gifts must never be taken for granted…We seek Your special blessing today for those who stand as sword and shield, protecting the many from the tyranny of the few. Our enduring prayer is that You shall always guide our labors and that our battles shall always be just.5
Looking back on the weeks following 9/11, some accounts suggest an administration that seemed to have a preordained response to the attacks. From my vantage point, however, quite the opposite was the case. It was a time of discovery—of seeking elusive, imperfect solutions for new problems that would not be solved quickly. There was no guidebook or road map for us to follow.
We had discussions at our roundtable meetings in the Pentagon and in the Situation Room at the White House about the best way to characterize the threats our country faced and the nature of the conflict ahead. Early on, President Bush labeled the effort the “war on terror.” In one sense, calling the new conflict a war was helpful. It signaled that he believed treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter and terrorists as common criminals would not be adequate. Bush rightly rejected the longstanding practice of treating jihadist terrorist attacks as simple matters of domestic crime. The term also helped drive home the point that our primary goal was not to punish or retaliate, but rather to prevent additional attacks against America and our interests.
However, I became increasingly uncomfortable with labeling the campaign against Islamist extremists a “war on terrorism” or a “war on terror.” To me, the word “war” focused people’s attention on military action, overemphasizing, in my view, the role of the armed forces. Intelligence, law enforcement, public diplomacy, the private sector, finance, and other instruments of national power were all critically important—not just the military. Fighting the extremists ideologically, I believed, would be a crucial element of our country’s campaign against them. The word “war” left the impression that there would be combat waged with bullets and artillery and then a clean end to the conflict with a surrender—a winner and a loser, and closure—such as the signing ceremony on the battleship USS Missouri to end World War II. It also led many to believe that the conflict could be won by bullets alone. I knew that would not be the case.
I was also concerned about the other word in the phrases: terrorism, or terror. Terror was not the enemy, but rather a feeling. Terrorism was also not the enemy but a tactic our enemies were using successfully against us. Saying we were in a war on terrorism was like saying we were in a war against bombers or we were waging a war on tanks, as opposed to a war against the people using those weapons.
Striving for appropriate nomenclature is part of sound strategic thinking.6 If we did not clearly define who exactly we were at war against, it was harder to define the parameters of victory. As I developed these thoughts over the weeks and months following 9/11, I periodically raised them in the Department, with the President, and with the members of the National Security Council. I urged that we find ways to avoid the phrase war on terror and consider other alternatives.7
The phenomenon we were up against was not easily delineated in a few words. Sometime later, I tried out the phrase “struggle against violent extremists” in place of war on terror. A struggle suggested that military action alone would not be sufficient. Violent extremists seemed to be more accurate than terror or terrorism, but it was not quite right either, in that it stopped short of noting the central fact that our enemies were Islamists. My attempts to calibrate our administration’s terminology eventually gave rise to a minor brouhaha in the press.8 Ultimately, President Bush settled the issue and decided against my suggestions by reaffirming that we were fighting a global war on terror. I was not able to come up with a perfect alternative.
From the beginning, members of the administration worked gingerly around the obvious truth that our main enemies were Islamic extremists. I didn’t think we could fight the crucial ideological aspect of the war if we were too wedded to political correctness to acknowledge the facts honestly. While we certainly were not at war against Islam, we did intend to fight and defeat those distorting their religious beliefs—their Islamic religious beliefs—to murder innocent people. I thought the best term was Islamistextremists, which made clear we were not including all Muslims. Islamism is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology that seeks the destruction of all liberal democratic governments, of our individual rights, and of Western civilization. The ideology not only excuses but commands violence against the United States, our allies, and other free people. It exalts death and martyrdom. And it is rooted in a radical, minority interpretation of Islam.
The war declared on us was not about any particular policy dispute. Though bin Laden and others referenced their opposition to the U.S. forces based in Saudi Arabia or our policies with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, those were more excuses to rally support, recruits, and financing. The intractable Arab-Israeli dispute in particular was a frequently referenced source of irritation to Arab leaders and was used as an excuse for nearly every setback in the region. But in fact the extremists sought a return to an ancient caliphate that would require blurring boundaries in the Middle East and North Africa and part of Spain, putting the territory all under the rule of one pan-Islamic state, much like the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan.
One of the more complex strategic challenges we faced was how to fight an enemy that was present in numerous countries with which we were not at war. Unlike conventional conflicts, where the enemies were nations and the United States could attack the enemy wherever our forces could find him, we knew that our current enemies, the terrorists, were not just in Afghanistan but could also be in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a number of other countries. These were sovereign countries—and in some cases friends and partners—and there were delicate legal and diplomatic issues involved in sending intelligence operatives or special operations forces, even if we discovered that al-Qaida or another terrorist group might have a cell there. If we asked permission, there was a risk that a country would say no or that the information might leak. If they offered to go after them, we knew they did not have the same capabilities as our forces. Senior Bush administration officials understood that to meet the terrorist challenge, we generally would have to reach an understanding with these countries on the nature of the threat—and on the actions that we could take in response.
Eleven days after 9/11, I sent a note to the President suggesting a way to think about working with our friends and allies in response to the attack. “The mission must determine the coalition,” I wrote. “The coalition ought not determine the mission.”9 The memo stemmed from a conversation I had in my office the day before with israel’s resolute former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He cautioned against building any permanent alliance that would restrict our flexibility in the future.
Though I understood the great value of having friends and allies in support of our efforts, I knew that not every country was likely to be willing or able to be helpful in all of the activities. As a result, not every operation would benefit from being tied to the largest coalition possible. I wanted the administration to think through carefully the activities we needed to undertake and then fashion the largest coalition possible for each of the necessary missions.10
I respected the well-considered views of America’s friends, even when they might differ in some respects from our own. In fact, the several coalitions we would eventually assemble to go after terrorists and their sponsors would evolve over time. Each country had its own perspectives and concerns, I understood also that some nations would want to keep private or downplay their cooperation with a particular mission. I saw that as a fact to be accepted.
No senior administration official ever suggested that the United States would be better off responding to 9/11 alone. To this day I find it surprising that Bush administration critics were so successful in claiming that that was the President’s view. The truth was that we solicited and eventually gained the assistance of more than ninety countries in the global coalition against terrorism. An even greater number took part in our Proliferation Security Initiative, a multilateral program designed to interdict the spread of weapons of mass destruction.11 The unilateralism accusation against Bush was a preposterous charge. That we were so ineffective in countering it was a harbinger of other communication problems to come.
A key element of the administration’s policy was that the primary purpose of America’s reaction to 9/11 should be prevention of attacks and the defense of the American people, not punishment or retaliation. The only way to protect ourselves is to go after the terrorists wherever they may be.12 This was a more ambitious goal than the approaches previous presidents had set. It reflected Bush’s view, which I shared, that 9/11 was a seminal event, not simply another typical terrorist outrage to which the world had become accustomed. The 9/11 attack showed that our enemies wanted to cause as much harm as possible to the United States—to terrorize our population and to alter the behavior of the American people. No one in the administration, as far as I know, doubted that the men who destroyed the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon would have gladly killed ten or a hundred times the number they killed on 9/11. They were not constrained by compunction, only by the means to escalate their carnage. This meant that their potential acquisition of weapons of mass destruction—biological, chemical, or nuclear—represented a major strategic danger.
This danger was highlighted dramatically by a Johns Hopkins University simulation of a biological attack on the United States. The report on that work, called “Dark Winter,” was published just three months before 9/11. The researchers concluded that an outbreak of smallpox in three cities in the American interior could, within two months, result in approximately three million Americans infected, with one million dead. Such an epidemic could lead governors to try to insulate their states from the disease by shutting down interstate commerce, and lead to the imposition of martial law nationwide.13 The report, drafted mainly by former officials of Democratic administrations, was widely read and much commented upon within the Bush administration. No responsible president could allow a scenario like that to materialize if there were reasonable steps he could take to avert it.
In the months after 9/11, I urged our Pentagon team and the combatant commanders to go through a mental exercise: I asked that they imagine that three or six months from now a major terrorist attack occurs in the United States. What would you regret not having done in the interim to prevent that attack? I urged them to head off regret. “Ask yourself what it is we must do every day between now and then to prevent that attack if possible, and if not to prevent it, at least to reduce the damage and save American lives. We must get up every morning and know that that is our job.”
The President knew that a series of 9/11-type attacks—in conjunction with biological toxins, or suitcase nuclear weapons, or other nightmare combinations—could drastically alter the free and open nature of our society. It wouldn’t be enough to rely on the FBI to investigate, indict, and prosecute terrorists in absentia as earlier administrations had done. Nor could we rely on precision air strikes to punish those we suspected were involved. Nor was this struggle simply about apprehending one man—Osama bin Laden—or one organization—al-Qaida. The task we faced was about systematically pressuring, attacking, and disrupting terrorist networks worldwide.
Terrorists had an easier time indoctrinating, recruiting, training, equipping, raising funds, and planning their attacks when they enjoyed a stable base of operations. So I argued that our strategy should be to put them on the defensive—indirectly (through the states that gave them safe havens) and directly (whenever we had actionable intelligence). The emphasis on a global campaign was important, I believed, because striking only al-Qaida in Afghanistan would result in little more than causing the terrorists to shift their base to Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, or elsewhere. To deny them safe havens, we needed to take action so that terrorists would feel unsafe wherever they tried to flee. So, for example, if the United States acted as a hammer against al-Qaida in Afghanistan, our diplomacy should try to ensure that Pakistan would function as the anvil. Also, the United States should conduct maritime interdiction operations to catch al-Qaida and other terrorists who might try to flee from Pakistan to the Arabian Peninsula or East Africa. There would be what I called secondary effects—terrorists would move to wherever there was the least pressure on them.14 Denied safe havens, terrorist groups would have to scatter, creating inconveniences and vulnerabilities we could capitalize on. If they were continually on the run, worried about detection and capture, they would have less time, less energy, and less ability to plan attacks. Our goal had to be nothing less than making everything hard for them—raising money, traveling, communicating, recruiting, transferring funds, finding safe havens—in short, complicating everything they needed to do to be successful in their attacks.
Aware of the public’s impatience, I urged the President to try to adjust the American people’s expectations away from quick, decisive results. I stressed that the war on terrorism would be “a marathon, not a sprint.”15
People commonly talk about the campaign in Afghanistan as if it were the inevitable response to 9/11. Events can often seem to have been obvious in retrospect. But the administration had a range of possible responses, none very attractive. One of the approaches the President considered was to focus on a tailored, retaliatory strike against al-Qaida and its operatives in Afghanistan. That approach would have been similar to our country’s earlier responses to terrorist attacks: arrest the terrorists and bring them to justice and launch cruise missiles or drop bombs on their crude training facilities. But that was not going to be good enough this time.
Led by its supreme ruler, Mullah Muhammed Omar, Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was one of the most isolated governments in the world. At the time of the 9/11 attack it had diplomatic relations with only three nations: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Taliban had broad and longstanding ties to terrorism. Our intelligence agencies were certain that bin Laden was hiding and operating under their hospitality. Bin Laden had been the Taliban’s “guest” since 1996.16 After he masterminded the 1998 bombings of United States embassies in East Africa, the Clinton administration launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan. He escaped injury and, as a result, al-Qaida continued to do its work—up to and including killing thousands of Americans on 9/11.
Even though the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had refused a Clinton administration request to hand bin Laden over to the United States, President Bush decided to give them an additional opportunity. That seemed reasonable to me. After 9/11, the Taliban might have recalculated, deciding that it would be prudent to accommodate this new American president who was backed by an angry, united American people, a large and growing international coalition, and the most powerful military on earth.
Responding to news reporting that the Taliban had aided the 9/11 plotters, Taliban leaders issued a cynical statement. “Mullah Omar condemns this act,” it said. “Mullah Omar says Osama is not responsible. We have brought peace to this country and we want peace in all countries.”17 Every sentence was untrue.
On the morning of Saturday, September 15, President Bush assembled his National Security Council at Camp David. The famous presidential retreat was no longer the cluster of rustic log cabins I had known in the early 1970s; Camp David had become a more modern facility, with many of the comforts of the White House, and for me, at least, had lost some of its appeal.
Autumn had arrived in western Maryland, and even as we gathered inside the wood-paneled conference room of Camp David’s Laurel Lodge, most of us wore fleece jackets against the chill. The discussions that day began with a briefing from Tenet. He laid out an interesting first cut of a plan that proposed sending small CIA teams to Afghanistan to begin gathering on-site intelligence on al-Qaida and Taliban targets.
General Shelton followed with a presentation on what his staff suggested might be accomplished militarily. Six foot five and built like a tree trunk, Shelton had an unmistakable presence in the halls of the Pentagon. He had been an Army special operations officer who had spent most of his adult life in uniform. He was disappointed that his four-year term as chairman was coming to a close at the end of the month, just as America was entering a conflict in which special operations forces would play a larger role than ever before.
The shock of 9/11 had not provoked much originality or imagination from the Chairman or his staff. It was true that in the ninety-six hours since the attack, Shelton had not had time for substantive discussions with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command (CENTCOM), or the senior civilian leadership, much less with the CIA, whose support and intelligence would be critical. I alerted Bush that what Shelton would be presenting was not a satisfactory recommendation of the Defense Department but simply some of his preliminary ideas to begin the discussions.
The first option Shelton presented was a cruise missile strike, similar to what the prior administration had executed in response to earlier terrorist attacks during the 1990s. It was obviously inadequate. President Bush made clear he was in no mood for more of the same ineffective half-measures. He told Shelton we needed to “unleash holy hell.” “We’re not just going to pound sand,” he added.
Shelton’s second option was a somewhat more muscular version of the first: cruise missile strikes accompanied by American aircraft bombing Afghan targets for several days. To Bush this represented pounding sand a little harder.
A third option was a combination of cruise missile strikes and stealth bomber runs plus what Shelton called “boots on the ground.” It was not clear precisely what the missions would be for those troops. There were not many good targets for conventional American ground forces to engage. And, in any case, it would take considerable time to deploy a large force to that remote, landlocked country.
The President said he wanted American military forces on the ground in some fashion as soon as an effective response could be prepared and mounted. Shelton responded that a buildup of conventional ground troops could take months. I was concerned that during those months of preparation al-Qaida could scatter, and that the American people would be at risk of another attack. I decided we would spend the next several days working around-the-clock to develop a more appropriate plan.
Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz helped conceptualize the global war on terrorism as being broader than just Afghanistan. At that Camp David discussion Wolfowitz raised the question of Iraq, but Bush wanted to keep the focus on Afghanistan. Wolfowitz also suggested that wherever we struck first, our special forces should be a part of the military strategy. He had been impressed by the use of special forces to locate and destroy Iraqi Scud missiles during the 1991 Gulf War. Two weeks after 9/11, he wrote in a memo that “In addition to using Special Forces to attack targets associated with Al Qaida or the Taliban, we should consider using those [Special Forces] as a kind of armed liaison with anti-Al-Qaida or anti-Taliban elements in Afghanistan.”18 We believed our special operations forces could establish links with potential allies in Afghanistan, providing us with better intelligence and demonstrating that we were willing to help those who helped us. It was also a way of emphasizing the point that we were not fighting the Afghan people but only those who were supporting terrorism. The various suggestions from those in attendance and others became the nucleus of an audacious military campaign.
Looking back now on 9/11 and the early U.S. response, I see things we should have done differently and things that we might have done better. The administration, for example, should have focused more effectively and earlier on the ideological nature of the Islamist extremist enemies instead of describing the enemy vaguely as terrorism. We should not have shrunk from labeling the challenge Islamist while still properly making clear that we did not view Islam—the religion, as opposed to the totalitarian political ideology—as an enemy.
By the same token, we should have avoided personalizing the war around particular individuals—such as Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Though I was eager to see them in American custody or dead, I knew the war would not end with their capture or their deaths. We needed to go after their networks and their means of operating. Nonetheless, the war’s progress was frequently measured by whether bin Laden was at large or not. He became the face of the enemy, which was likely exactly what he wanted.
We also could have engaged and asked more of the American public in the war effort. One of the common criticisms by Democrats and Republicans was that President Bush did not encourage the American people to make sacrifices in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. A myth arose that Bush simply encouraged citizens to “go shopping.” That is not what he said—he was actually urging people to get on with their lives—and I understood his logic. Nonetheless, I sensed that Americans were anxious to do something—to be involved, to help—just as so many did their part for the war effort during World War II, with Victory Gardens, war bonds, and rationing. But the twenty-first century versions of those public contributions were not clear.
The President might instead have pushed for more education and scholarship on Islam and more training in languages like Arabic, Pashtu, and Farsi. The administration might have mounted a serious and sustained effort on alternative sources of energy to reduce America’s dependency on foreign oil. We might have more energetically encouraged young people to volunteer in a civilian reserve corps or in the U.S. military and intelligence services. Instead the President said that “one of the great goals of this nation’s war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry. It’s to tell the traveling public: get onboard. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots…Take your families and enjoy life.”19
Also, in retrospect, I believe we might have put even greater pressure on some key partners, such as Saudi Arabia. Our relationship with the Saudis was a continuing concern for me in the months after 9/11. In memos to Cheney, Powell, and Rice, I urged that we develop a strategy to move that country in a better direction. Noting Saudi support for madrassas—Islamic schools that taught anti-Americanism and encouraged violence—I suggested Powell travel to the country to deal personally with these issues.20 I also asked my staff “how we would start going after them to get them to behave responsibly, stop supporting terrorism and also to start doing the kinds of things they are going to have to do if they are going [to] survive as a country.”21 The Saudi government eventually made reasonable efforts against al-Qaida and its affiliates, but we might have been able to get them to do more sooner had America intensified its diplomacy in coordination with our allies. There were dangers in pushing friendly governments too hard, but in retrospect I think we may have given those dangers more weight than they merited.
Some critics suggested that the administration overreacted to the 9/11 attack. Their contention was that the terrorism problem and the challenge of radical Islamism were not and are not large enough to have justified a war on terrorism. I disagree. Islamist totalitarian ideology fuels an international movement that considers the United States and the West as enemies—not just of their movement but of God. Adherents to their extremist ideology are passionate, often fanatical, and certain in their conviction that their holy mission is to destroy their enemies utterly and without mercy. They have the advantages of being able to use Western technologies, gain access to international travel, and exploit the openness of liberal democratic societies and free people, all of which enable them to cause us great harm—harm of a magnitude many multiples of what we experienced on 9/11.
Lenin once said, “The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.” By sowing fear, terrorists seek to change our behavior and alter our values. Through their attacks, they trigger defensive reactions that could cause us to make our societies less open, our civil liberties less expansive, and our official practices less democratic—effectively to nudge us closer to the totalitarianism they favor. I thought our priority should be to maintain our free society and our values, and to not be terrorized into altering our free way of life. I had learned in Beirut in 1983 that a terrorist can attack any place and at any time of his choosing, using any conceivable technique. It is not physically possible to defend against terrorists day and night in every location, against every method of attack. In order to maintain our civil liberties and the sense of security Americans take pride in, we needed to go on the offensive.
In a way we made it easier for critics to discount the danger of terrorism, because the administration succeeded in our strategic goal: preventing additional attacks on the United States. There were attempts, but they were foiled. The institutions, laws, and policies that the President initiated contributed to discovering and deterring those attacks. For all the criticism the administration received, some no doubt deserved, one fact remains: Anyone who lived through 9/11 never would have believed that almost a decade later there would not have been another successful attack on our soil. That this was avoided was not the result of good luck. Rather, it was the result of an aggressive, unrelenting offensive against the enemy. The ultimate credit for that belongs to President George W. Bush.
The Taliban had heard demands and complaints from American administrations before. Nothing significant had come of them. “We don’t foresee an attack against us,” said the Taliban foreign minister, “because there is no reason for it.”22
Taliban officials undoubtedly believed that Afghanistan’s forbidding geography would discourage anything but a cosmetic military effort. After all, they had heard President Clinton declare after a previous bin Laden attack in 1998 that Afghanistan had “been warned for years to stop harboring and supporting these terrorist groups. But countries that persistently host terrorists have no right to be safe havens…. There will be no sanctuary for terrorists.”23
Things were different now. And if the Taliban believed America was bluffing, they miscalculated.