Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [208]
“Tony Blair said today the Taliban needs to either surrender bin Laden or surrender power,” a reporter told me. “Did he frame that correctly?”
“Well, I guess there are those who think it might be nice if they did both,” I answered.9
On my last stop, in Ankara, Turkey, its leaders offered assistance with military facilities. They were strong backers of our plan to arm and supply the Northern Alliance. The Turks knew the Taliban threatened the interests of Muslims worldwide. For many years I had considered Turkey a key country for the United States—a West-leaning Muslim democracy and NATO member that could function as a link between East and West. I had always been concerned by the American tendency to favor Greece over Turkey, at least in part because of our large politically active Greek-American population and their representation in Congress. “The U.S. needs to publicly show more support for Turkey,” I noted in December 2001, “if we are going to have their help when we need it.”10
Before I returned to Washington, a videotape from Osama bin Laden was aired on the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera, the Arabic TV station that would regularly provide a platform for terrorist propaganda over the coming years. In this tape, his first since 9/11, bin Laden prophesied that the United States would fail to oust al-Qaida from Afghanistan and renewed his call for jihad against the West.
We did not help our cause against al-Qaida’s propaganda machine when CENTCOM announced that Infinite Justice would be the name for combat operations in Afghanistan. The phrase provoked immediate criticism from Muslims who asserted that infinite justice is reserved for God alone. In light of that early error, I joked with the President that Operation Unilateral Hegemony would have been about as well received. Bush was sympathetic. He had created a similar flap when he referred to the war on terror as a crusade. Christendom’s Crusades, of course, hardly symbolized the kind of cooperation with Muslim partners that we knew we needed.
Such missteps focused attention on the pitfalls of waging war against a global network of Muslim extremists whose history, culture, and practices were unfamiliar to most Westerners, myself included. There was an enormous amount about Muslim communities we had to learn if we were to reduce the influence of the extremist ideology that was motivating the terrorists. Soon thereafter, at one of my regular morning meetings in late September, General Dick Myers told us CENTCOM’s replacement for the name of the Afghanistan campaign: Operation Enduring Freedom.
As the sun was setting in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, giving way to a moonless sky, morning broke in Washington, D.C. That Sunday I stood with General Myers in the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center awaiting the start of America’s operations in Afghanistan. Through Myers, I had sent Franks the execute order signed by the President for Operation Enduring Freedom.
In the command center, the same place where we had worked in the smoke after the Pentagon came under attack, the senior civilian and military leadership gathered to ensure everything was on track. Myers and I sat at the head of a V-shaped, dark wooden table with senior team members arrayed to our left and right. On television monitors in front of us, Franks appeared from CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa; on other screens were several of his senior officers who were deployed across the Middle East. The video feed was grainy, but we could hear Franks and his officers clearly. Franks informed us that bombs and missiles would begin to strike their targets at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time, or 9:00 p.m. in Kabul.11 Oddly, Afghanistan’s local time zone differed by thirty minutes from the on-the-hour time zones used by most of the rest of the world. This peculiarity seemed apt for a nation run by men who wanted to turn