In My Time - Dick Cheney [182]
General Franks reported on his recent trip to several key countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. Every leader he visited felt under pressure from public opinion, he said. We weren’t getting our story out, but Al Jazeera, the relatively new Arab satellite network, was making sure that al Qaeda’s views were broadcast. We’d continue to have the cooperation we needed from the nations Franks had visited, he said, but a number of them wanted to keep their cooperation secret.
When he turned to Afghanistan, Franks reported success working with the CIA to use Predators and AC-130 Spectre gunships to find and take out al Qaeda targets. He noted that the opposition groups, in particular the Northern Alliance, were doing well but were tired and lacked medical care. They needed more support fast, and he intended to make that a priority.
Franks also reported on the campaign under way to destroy the massive cave complexes in which the Taliban lived and hid. He had about 150 caves on a target list, he said, and estimated the count would go to 1,000. He noted that the humanitarian efforts we had begun to drop food and supplies in were going well and were critically important. Finally, Franks listed his goals for the next seven days. They were tasks on the order of enhancing our surveillance capability, getting cold-weather gear to the Northern Alliance, and talking to regional leaders. In fact, what he would deliver within the week was our first major victory.
It started with the CIA, which had contacts in Afghanistan stretching back to the 1980s and knew some of the players well. CIA officers brought our special operators together with the Northern Alliance and other opposition forces, and soon a group of our special forces was traveling on horseback with General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his men and calling in air support to destroy Taliban positions around Mazar-e-Sharif. As the Taliban fled, American special forces joined in the cavalry charges pursuing them. They called in B-52 strikes to open a crucial pass, and after Mazar-e-Sharif fell on November 9, 2001, they rode with the victorious Northern Alliance into the center of the city. Our special forces gave the first victory of the first war of the twenty-first century a lasting symbol: the man on horseback armed with the ability to call in a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb.
After Mazar-e-Sharif, things happened fast. On November 11, 2001, the town of Herat fell to the Northern Alliance. Kabul followed on November 13, and Jalalabad on November 14. The last Taliban stronghold, Kandahar, fell on December 7.
In December the United Nations sponsored a conference in Bonn, Germany, to select an interim leader for liberated Afghanistan. Delegates to the conference chose Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, who had fought against the Taliban in the south. Karzai, who had grown up in Afghanistan and served briefly in the pre-Taliban Afghan government, had reentered Afghanistan on a motorcycle from Pakistan as the bombing campaign began. With support from our forces, Karzai led the Pashtun troops who took Kandahar. He was inaugurated on December 22, 2001, as chairman of the new Interim Afghan Authority.
In a little over three months, working with the Northern Alliance and allies in the south, we had overthrown the Taliban and liberated 25 million people. We had begun to deny al Qaeda bases from which to plot and train for attacks against us. There were difficult days ahead, but at the end of 2001, we had accomplished much. And we had managed to do all we had