Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [209]
Each senior officer leading a major component proceeded to report on the readiness of his forces. Each had previously assured the President that he had what was needed to begin and complete the mission. All indicators were green—ready to go.
After the teleconference ended, I called Franks. “General,” I said, “the President asked me to extend to you his respect and best wishes, and that we’re going to finish what began on September 11.”
“God bless America,” Franks replied.
That first Sunday of October was less than a month after 9/11. The Pentagon remained scarred, and rubble from the World Trade Center still smoldered. But America was now on the offense. The young Americans who would be risking their lives to defend our country were very much on my mind. Each was a volunteer. In the years that followed I had the privilege of meeting with large numbers of them. Many had signed up for military duty after 9/11 knowing they would likely be sent abroad to fight for their country. I thought about America’s last extended military campaign in Vietnam. Large number of casualties had increased the pressure on American military and political leaders to bring the war to an early and unsuccessful end. There was, of course, the possibility that the fighting in Afghanistan could produce a similar heartbreaking outcome. Our strategy of putting American forces on the ground—and not conducting the campaign entirely by means of high-altitude bombing, as in the 1999 Kosovo campaign—increased the likelihood of U.S. casualties.12 We had planned as best we could and prayed for the safety and success of our troops.
An hour after President Bush addressed the nation to announce the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, General Myers and I went to the Pentagon press room to brief on the start of military operations. We outlined the President’s goals, which while challenging, were limited: to make absolutely clear to the Taliban and to the world that harboring terrorists carried a price; to acquire intelligence for future operations against al-Qaida and against the Taliban; to develop relationships with the key groups in Afghanistan that opposed the Taliban and al-Qaida; to make it increasingly difficult for the terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base of operations; to alter the military balance over time by denying the Taliban the offensive systems that hamper the progress of opposition forces; and to provide humanitarian relief to Afghan people suffering under the Taliban.13
In the early hours of the Afghan war, I watched video links from aircraft dropping munitions. Among the first targets were the al-Qaida training camps at Tarnak Farms and Duranta. B-52s dropped two-thousand-pound bombs on the tunneled caves of Tora Bora near the Pakistani border. All known Taliban tanks were targeted. Fuel depots, training camps, radars, run-ways, and the few dubious aircraft in the Taliban air force were hit. Over the course of five nights, every fixed enemy target that American intelligence had identified in Afghanistan was attacked.
Bombs weren’t the only things we were dropping on Afghanistan, however. The country had long been suffering from drought and in a number of areas food was in short supply. In the first forty-eight hours alone, American aircraft dropped some 210,000 individual food rations.14
After the first wave of air sorties was complete, unmanned Predator aircraft outfitted with high-resolution cameras remained, loitering silently and unobserved above Afghanistan and feeding back images of additional targets. Early on the evening of October 7, Franks called me with urgent information. A Predator drone flown remotely was following a convoy believed to be carrying the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar. Franks told me the convoy fit the profile of that used by the Taliban’s leadership. It had stopped at what appeared to be a mosque.
In the weeks leading up to the war, Franks briefed me on various targeting categories and the risks of unintended, or, as it is also called, collateral damage to mosques,