In My Time - Dick Cheney [263]
A few days after the actions for which Specialist Brown won her Silver Star, the army transferred her, because army regulations prohibit women from participating in combat missions. As secretary of defense and as vice president, I had supported the ban on women in combat units. Increasingly, though, soldiers like Monica Brown find themselves on the front lines, and her heroism made me think our policy ought to be adjusted. It needs to reflect the changing nature of twenty-first-century war, in which combat and noncombat, frontline and rear, are not always so easy to delineate. Brown’s own commander said this about her: “Our regular medic was on leave at the time. We had other medics to choose from, but Brown had shown us that she was more technically proficient than any of her peers.” I thought it was a mistake that she was pulled out of her unit.
THIS VISIT IN MARCH 2008 was my fourth trip to Afghanistan as vice president. Since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001, the U.S. military, our coalition partners, and the Afghan people had accomplished much, overthrowing the Taliban, denying al Qaeda the bases from which they had planned the attacks of 9/11, and capturing or killing many of al Qaeda’s top leaders. The Afghan people had elected a president and a parliament. The United States and our allies had delivered billions of dollars in economic assistance to support Afghanistan’s new leadership and their efforts to build a free, secure, and sovereign nation.
Despite these many accomplishments, by 2006 we were seeing a very worrisome trend. Violence, which decreased during the winter months, when the weather made fighting difficult, increased significantly in the spring and summer, and each year brought more attacks than the one before. Al Qaeda and the Taliban had retaken key strongholds, and at the end of 2006, President Bush had ordered a troop increase from 21,000 to 31,000 over two years.
In early 2007, I had traveled to the region for talks with Presidents Karzai and Musharraf. I brought CIA Deputy Director Steve Kappes with me to Pakistan in 2007, and we discussed with Musharraf the matter of the tribal areas on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan, which both the Taliban and al Qaeda were using to regroup and rearm before crossing the border to attack again. Musharraf had tried to work out a deal whereby he would agree that Pakistani troops would not interfere in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas if the tribal leaders would deny safe haven to al Qaeda and the Taliban. The deal did not work. And although Musharraf continued to express support for our efforts in our private meetings, increasingly his commitments were not translating into action from his government.
I left Islamabad on February 26 and flew into Bagram Air Base. Shortly after I landed, a storm rolled in, making it impossible for me to fly the thirty miles to Kabul. For security reasons, I couldn’t go by car. I would either have to cancel my meeting with President Karzai or spend the night at Bagram, hoping the weather would clear by morning. Given the critical importance of the relationship, skipping the meeting was not an option. So we stayed overnight.
The next morning, I was reading through my morning briefing materials, when I heard a blast—loud, though clearly some distance away. The Secret Service moved me into a concrete shelter, and I soon learned that a suicide bomber had struck at the front gate, killing twenty-three, including an American soldier. The Taliban later claimed responsibility and said they were aiming at me. Whether or