Every new administration arrives in office bearing its own foreign policy vision, which rarely survives the encounter with actual events. The vision of the new Bush administration, which came to power on January 20, 2001, was more ambitious and more concrete than most. It derived from specific convictions that President Clinton had willfully disregarded. Chief among those convictions was a belief in military assertiveness as the foundation of American global leadership. For the United States to fulfill its providentially assigned role as history’s indispensable nation, possessing and wielding supreme military power formed a sine qua non. Bush’s secretary of defense believed that Clinton had given the impression that the United States was “gun-shy” and “risk averse.”1 The Bush team was intent on changing that.

That said, the new president himself, like his predecessor, had acquired little relevant experience prior to assuming his responsibilities as the nation’s commander in chief. When it came to national security, he was a novice. So, again like his predecessor, George W. Bush compensated for that inexperience by surrounding himself with seasoned subordinates, known commodities whose very appointment signaled administration intentions.

For our purposes, three appointments in particular stand out. As his running mate, Bush had selected former defense secretary Dick Cheney, now vice president. To preside over the Pentagon, he appointed Donald Rumsfeld, himself a former defense secretary known to be close to Cheney. As Rumsfeld’s deputy, he chose Paul Wolfowitz, a key Cheney lieutenant during the administration of the elder Bush who in Washington circles had by now acquired a reputation for being a broad-gauged thinker.

Although Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz did not see eye to eye on everything, all three subscribed to this proposition: For those with the wit and will to tap its potential, military power is eminently usable. When America’s War for the Greater Middle East kicked into high gear—a development that neither Bush nor any of his chief subordinates had anticipated—these three officials seized the opportunity to put that proposition to the test. In doing so they left an indelible mark on U.S. policy. Unfortunately, their achievements proved negligible, their blunders monumental and enduring.

The events of September 11, 2001, occurred on the 234th day of George W. Bush’s presidency. Little of what happened on Bush’s watch prior to that date merits our attention. Up to that point, the War for the Greater Middle East had continued on autopilot. American warplanes patrolling the northern and southern no-fly zones kept up their occasional bombing of Iraqi targets. The Clinton administration’s “dual containment” of both Iraq and Iran remained in effect. While not ignoring bin Laden, Bush’s national security team moved with great deliberation as it assessed how to deal with him.2 Deliberation in this case implied inaction. Al Qaeda ranked as one problem among many. Of somewhat more pressing concern than Fidel Castro’s Cuba, it trailed behind the urgent need to field ballistic missile defenses and respond to the strategic challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China.

As far as the Greater Middle East was concerned, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict defined the principal point of discontinuity between the outgoing and incoming administrations. President Bush made clear his lack of interest in replicating his predecessor’s enthusiasm for trying to settle that dispute. On his watch, brokering peace in the Middle East did not qualify as a priority. As to the larger constellation of problems that had induced one U.S. intervention after another in various quarters of the Islamic world, they received no consideration whatsoever. The new team of old hands had neither the time nor the inclination for any fresh thinking. They arrived knowing everything they needed to know.

They just didn’t know enough to avert a horrific attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed several thousand innocents and caused an estimated $178 billion in physical damage and lost economic activity.3

Success in any surreptitious undertaking, be it bank heist or terrorist attack, requires careful planning, audacious implementation, and a fair dose of plain luck. It also requires a permissive environment, with flimsy defenses and guards asleep at their posts. Although observers may differ over the relative proportions, all of these factors were present on 9/11.

That nineteen young men armed with nothing more than box cutters should so easily hijack four commercial airliners and convert them into devastatingly lethal missiles shook Americans to their core. A people accustomed to taking their own collective safety as a given now experienced a sense of naked vulnerability.

No historical antecedent existed to provide an adequate reference point. Reflexive comparisons to Pearl Harbor did not hold up. In December 1941, Americans had learned about the Japanese attack by tuning in to radio bulletins broadcast after the assault itself had ended. In September 2001, they watched with horror events as they actually unfolded. They witnessed people leaping to their deaths. They saw buildings burn and collapse. For those living in Manhattan or Washington, D.C., the experience overwhelmed the senses. They could taste and smell the destruction.

In the performance of their most fundamental mission—defending the homeland—the Bush administration and the world’s largest and ostensibly most sophisticated national security apparatus failed utterly. Yet curiously, in the wake of that failure, not one U.S. official of any rank lost his or her job. No one was reprimanded or demoted. Rallying around the flag and getting on with the business at hand took precedence over fixing accountability.

Was it fair after December 1941 to single out Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short as personally responsible for the disaster at Pearl Harbor? Probably not. Yet firing these two senior officers and reducing them in rank served at least to acknowledge that an unacceptable failure of leadership had occurred. From the outset of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, the cabinet secretaries and four-star military officers charged with formulating and implementing national security policy had remained largely exempt from accountability—the arbitrary firing of defense secretary Aspin after Mogadishu being the exception that proved the rule. Remarkably, that practice survived the events of 9/11. So those who failed to anticipate or prevent the worst ever direct attack on American soil stayed on the job, if anything accruing even greater authority as the officials to whom the public now turned to “keep America safe.”

It fell to President Bush himself to explain what had happened, what it meant, and how he would ensure that nothing similar could ever befall Americans again.

In a series of now iconic statements, Bush conceded that the United States found itself engaged in a very large-scale conflict, which he misleadingly and unhelpfully characterized as a “global war on terrorism.” In the presidential lexicon, terrorism was interchangeable with evil, so a war to destroy terrorism, as Bush vowed to do, necessarily became a war to destroy evil.

With that in mind, Bush chose to disregard U.S. military actions undertaken pursuant to the Carter Doctrine since 1980. The United States embarked upon the global war on terrorism with a clean slate. So although fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been Saudis, the president showed no interest in examining the potential implications of that fact. Concern for the security and well-being of Saudi Arabia had prompted the United States to issue the Carter Doctrine in the first place. What did it signify that the perpetrators of this heinous attack came from that very country? The Bush administration treated the question as off-limits.

To place the global war on terrorism in a suitable historical perspective, the president instead described it as a successor to the wars that in collective memory had defined the prior century. Whatever the United States may have done militarily in the Islamic world during the previous twenty years counted for less than what it had done in Eurasia from the 1930s to the 1980s. By extension, the central issue was reassuringly familiar.

“We have seen their kind before,” Bush said of America’s new enemy. “They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions—by abandoning every value except the will to power—they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.” As with World War II and the Cold War, freedom itself was at stake and was destined once more to prevail.4

Coming to freedom’s defense, however, was going to require wide-ranging offensive action. How specifically such a war was going to unfold was very much up for grabs. A global war on terrorism did not number among the contingencies for which the Pentagon had at hand a ready-made plan. And although the president warned Americans to expect an altogether different conflict—there were “no longer islands to conquer or beachheads to storm”—he did not spell out exactly what those differences implied.5

Others in his administration had already taken up the question. The term they devised to describe the enterprise offers a concise expression of their intentions. Not without reason, critics of the “global war on terrorism” have noted the absurdity of waging war against a tactic or, in Bush’s preferred formulation, of waging war to eliminate evil. Yet for our purposes the instructive element of that phrase is the administration’s insistence on characterizing the war as “global.”

To undertake a “global war” was to remove limits on the exercise of American power. Even before 9/11, the Bush administration had chafed against any such constraints and had sought to eradicate them. With the passing of the Cold War, “deterrence is not enough,” the president had declared in a speech at the National Defense University not long after entering office. With the world “less certain, less predictable,” anticipatory action was becoming the order of the day.6

The events of 9/11 created the opportunity to act on this perceived imperative. While any war of even modest scope is fought for multiple purposes, a principal aim of the global war on terrorism was to unshackle American military power. Doing so, Bush and his principal subordinates believed, held the key to preserving the American way of life and all that it entailed. From the outset, in other words, the war’s purposes looked beyond any immediate danger posed by Al Qaeda or even by the disordered condition of the Greater Middle East. By now, oil had become an afterthought. Ultimately, the war’s architects were seeking to perpetuate the privileged status that most Americans take as their birthright. Doing so meant laying down a new set of rules—expanding the prerogatives exercised by the world’s sole superpower and thereby extending the American Century in perpetuity.

Just a week after September 11, Rumsfeld stated the matter with admirable candor. “We have a choice,” he told reporters, “either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we…chose the latter.”7 No member of the Pentagon press corps pressed Rumsfeld to explain who “they” (not to mention “we”) were. But the implication of Rumsfeld’s diktat was clear: Any state or group or entity actively supporting, inclined to support, or sympathizing with anti-American terrorism was going to have to mend its ways. Rumsfeld’s very first impulse on 9/11 itself was to frame the problem in a broadest possible terms. “Need to move swiftly…go massive—sweep it all up, things related and not.”8 Without bothering to count heads, going massive implied an encounter with many millions of people in at least a couple of dozen countries, most if not all of them in the Islamic world.

Over the previous two decades, U.S. military involvement in those precincts had amounted to little more than dabbling. According to the Carter Doctrine, to sustain the American way of life it was incumbent upon the United States to ensure the security of the Persian Gulf and its environs. Each of the younger Bush’s predecessors going back to Carter himself had accepted this proposition, as did Bush himself. Yet to this point, each of these predecessors had shied away from engaging in large-scale, ongoing military action. America’s War for the Greater Middle East had lacked seriousness. But that phase had now ended. “If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map,” Rumsfeld wrote President Bush that same month, “the U.S. will not achieve its aim.”9

As a military objective, changing the way “they” live possessed a sort of Napoleonic grandeur, either noble or preposterous depending on one’s point of view. Making good on such an ambitious aim, thereby redrawing the world’s political map, implied a willingness to undertake comparably large exertions.

Oddly, however, the Bush administration balked at providing the wherewithal required. In terms of the stakes involved, the global war on terrorism might bear comparison with World War II or the Cold War. But it was not going to resemble those earlier conflicts in terms of national commitment. Undertaking a global war did not prompt President Bush to mobilize the nation.10 The state would not exact new taxes or expect shared sacrifice. It would not impose conscription. Everyday existence was to continue as usual, the president charging Americans to “enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.”11 The difficulty of imagining Abraham Lincoln during the siege of Fort Sumter or Franklin Roosevelt following the attack on Pearl Harbor expressing comparable sentiments speaks volumes about the Bush administration’s failure to grasp the challenges waiting just ahead. From the outset, in other words, between declared ends and the means available to achieve those ends there yawned a large gap.

In the days and weeks immediately after 9/11, Americans—united in righteous anger—would have done just about anything that Bush as commander in chief asked of them. Apart from passive deference, he asked for next to nothing. While greatly enlarging the scope of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, the Bush administration did not expand the role allotted to the American people. Indeed, it minimized that role, thereby establishing a relationship between state and society destined to persist for the duration of Bush’s term in office and beyond. The effect was comparable to that of a prenuptial agreement—once signed, difficult if not impossible to renegotiate, especially once the romance begins to wear thin.

Two factors explain the Bush administration’s decision to consign the public to the status of spectators. On the one hand, senior U.S. officials, civilian and military alike, assessed public involvement in the war as unnecessary. Properly employed, existing military capabilities would suffice to get the job done. On the other hand, they saw public involvement as inconvenient, more likely to infringe on their own freedom of action than to make any meaningful contribution to victory.

Underpinning these views was a set of expectations about how the contest ahead was going to unfold. Put simply, the capabilities inherent in the Revolution in Military Affairs, if fully exploited and effectively put to use, would determine the war’s outcome. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz all subscribed to the theology of the RMA, now rebranded as “transformation.” Bush himself was at least a semi-believer. In that church, technology was God. Quality mattered more than quantity, agility and precision more than brute force. Modern war was a business best left to professionals. On the twenty-first-century battlefield, soldiers cut from the same cloth as those who had fought World War II or Korea or Vietnam were likely to prove a net liability.

The preliminary results achieved in the first post-9/11 military campaign affirmed such expectations. That campaign initiated a new Afghanistan War, with the United States this time playing a direct rather than covert role. The purpose of Operation Enduring Freedom (to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities, the Pentagon jettisoned the initial name Infinite Justice) was twofold: first, to destroy or at least severely weaken Al Qaeda, and second, to make clear the fate awaiting any regime providing support or sanctuary to anti-American terrorists, as the Taliban had done. Although the president’s advisers briefly toyed with the notion of going after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—Wolfowitz in particular urging that course—Afghanistan’s number-one ranking on the Bush administration hit list was never seriously in doubt. The demands of vengeance alone would not permit otherwise.

The opening phase of Enduring Freedom was as daring an operation as any undertaken in the annals of U.S. military history. It was also astonishingly successful—even if that success proved incomplete, transitory, and misleading.

Mounting any sort of military campaign in Afghanistan—distant, desperately poor, landlocked, and immense—poses enormous challenges. Even so, the events of 9/11 required action sooner rather than later. Especially in Washington, patience was in short supply. Responsibility for responding to that impatience fell to the CENTCOM commander, General Tommy Franks.

In the U.S. Army, a tradition exists of very senior military officers adopting a persona. Douglas MacArthur cultivated the image of a demigod, George S. Patton a warrior, Omar Bradley a modest, self-effacing “G.I.’s general,” Dwight Eisenhower a genial, avuncular, “regular guy.” None of these guises was particularly authentic, but each served a purpose.

Tommy Franks came across as a good ol’ boy from Texas, perhaps not as smooth as those toadies in the Pentagon but twice as savvy. This meant putting up a crude, boorish front, which Franks excelled at doing. He is, to my knowledge, the only retired general to refer in his memoirs to his fellow four-stars as “motherfuckers.”12 Unfortunately, Franks lacked the gifts to pull off the second half of his act. Imagine Stephen Colbert as a world-class buffoon, but without the incisive wit. That was Franks: a thin-skinned lout, but lacking the smarts to grasp the magnitude of the task that was now his.

Although CENTCOM’s AOR included Afghanistan and prior CENTCOM operations had targeted that country, no plan for actually waging war there existed on September 11. Prodded by an impatient Rumsfeld, Franks and his staff quickly corrected that omission, hastily designing a counteroffensive targeting Al Qaeda and the Taliban, although going after the latter first.13 With some forty-five thousand men under arms, perhaps one-quarter of them non-Afghan “foreign fighters,” and a motley collection of leftover Soviet tanks and aircraft, the Taliban did not constitute an especially imposing combat force.14 Getting to them promised to be the hard part, but getting to Al Qaeda promised to be harder still.

The CENTCOM plan relied on readily available assets—American airpower combining with anti-Taliban proxies who might respond favorably to offers of assistance, even from infidels. Or as General Franks put it, the United States “would leverage technology and the courage of the Afghans themselves to liberate their country.”15 Attributing the Soviet failure to pacify Afghanistan in the 1980s to Russian heavy-handedness, Franks proposed to take a different tack. In fact, however, this was making a virtue out of necessity. Moving large numbers of U.S. ground forces to Afghanistan would require many months of preparation. Any near-term action necessarily meant taking a “light footprint” approach.

On October 7, less than a month after 9/11, that operation began, predictably enough, with air strikes conducted in the dead of night.16 In all things military, members of the Bush administration had sought to distinguish themselves from their immediate predecessors. Even so, the intensity of the initial assault did not differ appreciably from the start of the Kosovo campaign two years earlier. Featuring a mix of ship-launched cruise missiles, carrier-based strike aircraft, and long-range bombers operating from bases in the United States, the attack delivered blows that were more than symbolic but fell short of being significant.17 In a humanitarian nod, two U.S. Air Force C-17 transports, flying from Ramstein AFB in Germany, dropped rations and medical supplies near areas subjected to attack. Once begun, the delivery of ordnance and relief supplies continued, albeit without decisive effect. A primitive country like Afghanistan had plenty of people needing to be fed but relatively few targets meriting attack with precision guided munitions. In short order, American warplanes were reduced to “Taliban plinking.”18 An impatient President Bush complained, “We’re pounding sand.”19

In the meantime, contingents of elite U.S. troops were gathering at a former Soviet airbase in Uzbekistan, known to the Americans as K2, to form Task Force Dagger.20 Commanded by Colonel John Mulholland and drawn principally from the U.S. Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, garrisoned at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, TF Dagger consisted of slightly more than three hundred soldiers.21 Mulholland’s mission was as clear-cut as it was daunting: to build a fire under anti-Taliban militants controlling bits of Afghanistan but thus far unable to wrest Kabul and other major Afghan cities from Taliban control. To accomplish this mission, small special operations teams were to link up with Afghan resistance forces and then, employing money, arms, and firepower as blandishments, motivate them to fight.

According to U.S. intelligence estimates, the most promising of such groups was the so-called Northern Alliance located in the Panjshir Valley northeast of the capital. The Northern Alliance qualified as an “alliance” in the same sense that the Republican Party qualifies as a “party.” Like the present-day GOP, the Northern Alliance was a loose coalition of unsavory opportunists, interested chiefly in acquiring power. But the several warlords sitting atop the Northern Alliance commanded something on the order of twenty thousand fighters, most of them ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks. That sufficed to persuade the Bush administration to pursue a marriage of convenience.22

On the night of October 19, two helicopters inserted the first of Mulholland’s special operators into mountainous terrain with elevations reaching up to sixteen thousand feet. A handful of other teams soon followed and offered their services to anti-Taliban warlords of otherwise dubious reputation.23 Their offer accepted, the Americans—traveling by horseback on mounts provided by their Afghan hosts—began calling in air strikes on frontline Taliban positions.24

With the world’s most capable air forces at their beck and call, Northern Alliance commanders launched a major offensive on October 28 toward Mazar-e-Sharif, a Taliban stronghold located on the northern approaches to Kabul. The generous application of American air power fundamentally altered the correlation of forces. Suddenly, thanks to the presence of a handful of Americans wielding laser target designators, the Northern Alliance enjoyed the upper hand. On November 9, Mazar-e-Sharif fell, although intra-Afghan negotiations allowed some Taliban to escape and others to switch sides. As U.S. forces would come to appreciate, the contingent nature of allegiance made it all the more difficult to reach a fixed determination of who was friend and who foe.

These and other realities of the battlefield undermined Bush administration efforts to frame Enduring Freedom as a contest pitting white pakols against black ones. All hats—and hands—were soiled. The vicious nature of the 9/11 attacks had reinforced an American inclination, present from the very outset of its War for the Greater Middle East, to cast the United States in the role of either innocent victim or exponent of righteousness or both.25 The course of events in Afghanistan made such claims difficult to sustain.

After a battle that ended with Taliban forces surrendering the city of Kunduz, for example, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a senior Northern Alliance commander, ordered prisoners confined to metal shipping containers. There they remained for days, without food or water. In what became known as the Dasht-i-Leili massacre, large numbers died, estimates ranging from the hundreds to the thousands. Other prisoners were simply shot. But U.S. officials, considering General Dostum to be an exceptionally valuable asset, looked the other way. Then and later, they protected him, suppressing knowledge of the event or minimizing its significance.26

Even so, Mazar-e-Sharif seemingly offered concrete evidence that Enduring Freedom was now headed in the right direction. The forward momentum of the offensive continued on toward Kabul, with Taliban defenses outside the Afghan capital essentially giving way without a fight. Once again, Taliban fighters defected in large numbers. Others returned to their villages or fled toward the sanctuary of neighboring Pakistan. In less than a week, the Northern Alliance had seized Kabul itself. Almost immediately, small contingents of U.S. and allied forces arrived to take control of the former Soviet airbase at nearby Bagram.27

Attention now turned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual home and last remaining stronghold. Southwest of that city, beginning on November 25, U.S. Marines under the command of Brigadier General James Mattis occupied an abandoned airfield, soon to be known as Forward Operating Base Rhino. This marked the most substantial commitment of conventional U.S. ground forces.28 Almost imperceptibly at first, the occupation of Bagram and Rhino inaugurated a shift away from the light footprint and toward long-term presence.

Just days before, Franks had assigned army Lieutenant General Paul T. Mikolashek “to direct and synchronize land operations to destroy al Qaeda and prevent the reemergence of international terrorist activities” throughout Afghanistan.29 During his tenure in command, Mikolashek failed to fulfill his mandate, a judgment equally applicable to the eight other three- and four-star generals who succeeded him over the course of the next fifteen years. With Mikolashek situating his headquarters in far-off Kuwait, Major General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, commanding general of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, arrived in theater to set up a smaller forward command post. Although Hagenbeck found himself a division commander without a division to command, the apparatus of occupation was beginning to take shape.

By November 28, Northern Alliance forces, now augmented by local Pushtun militants, had laid siege to Kandahar, with both fixed-wing aircraft and Marine attack helicopters pummeling Taliban defenders. Hamid Karzai, the Pushtun exile that Washington was positioning to become Afghanistan’s new leader, negotiated a deal allowing the Taliban to evacuate. On December 9, escorted by U.S. special operations forces soldiers serving as his security detail, he made a triumphal entry into Kandahar.

Karzai stands in relation to the Afghanistan War as Ngo Dinh Diem stands in relation to the Vietnam War: His credentials as a nationalist untainted by corruption but with a Western orientation made him in Washington’s eyes a seemingly ideal partner. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration had sought to use President Diem as its agent in creating a Republic of Vietnam compatible with U.S. national security interests. In the 2000s, the Bush administration sought to use Karzai for similar purposes. Much to their subsequent consternation, U.S. military and civilian officials soon enough discovered, as they had four decades earlier with Diem, that Karzai had a mind of his own.

By now several anti-Taliban factions, too optimistically referred to as the Eastern Alliance, were advancing into the mountainous Tora Bora Valley, a short distance from the Pakistan border. This was the site of a huge cave complex believed to be the last refuge of Al Qaeda and perhaps Osama bin Laden himself. Although provided with extensive air support and reinforced by an elite U.S. hunter-killer team known as Task Force 11, the push into Tora Bora did not get very far.30 The Eastern Alliance lacked the numbers, cohesion, and energy needed to mount anything more than a desultory offensive. With General Franks disinclined to commit U.S. forces such as the Marines situated at Rhino to block escape routes, bin Laden along with a remnant of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters slipped into Pakistan unmolested.31

On December 18, Operation Enduring Freedom reached a pause that U.S. military officers along with civilian officials back in Washington mistook for victory. Twelve weeks of fighting had badly mauled the enemy without definitively defeating it. Al Qaeda and the Taliban had dispersed, but each retained an ability to reconstitute itself. Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar were still at large. Much unfinished business remained.

Franks himself believed otherwise. In Kabul on December 22, while attending ceremonies marking Karzai’s installation in power, the CENTCOM commander briefly toyed with the image of himself as a “proconsul” wearing “a purple-trimmed toga and a laurel wreath.” In his estimation, Operation Enduring Freedom had “destroyed an army the Soviets had failed to dislodge with more than a half million men.” Forces under his personal direction had “liberated twenty-five million people and unified the country.”32 This was balderdash, of course. Like Schwarzkopf at the conclusion of Desert Storm, Franks confused partial operational success with permanent mission accomplishment.

Ironically, despite all the emphasis on avoiding Soviet mistakes, Franks had managed to replicate their achievement. He had unleashed upon Afghans the forces of anarchy and seemed oblivious to what the restoration of order was now likely to require. To “stabilize the country,” he estimated that a contingent of some ten thousand U.S. troops “seemed about right.”33 Although that assessment soon proved wildly wrong, it illustrates his tenuous grasp of the actual situation. Notwithstanding the CENTCOM commander’s self-congratulatory mood, the Afghanistan War had not ended in mid-December 2001. It had only just begun.

At least some senior officials back in Washington seemed to know better. “In some ways,” Wolfowitz told an interviewer as Kandahar was about to fall, “the hardest job begins now,” emphasizing that “one of the worst mistakes one can make is to leave a half-defeated enemy on the battlefield.”34 A day later, he returned to the same point. Bush and Rumsfeld had issued clear instructions “to keep our eye on the ball, and the ball is still in Afghanistan, and there’s a lot of work to do there. It can be very distracting to try to do too many different things at once.”35

But this was for public consumption. Behind the scenes, eyes and attention were shifting to a different ball. Already on November 27, Rumsfeld had issued oral orders to Franks: Start gearing up CENTCOM to invade Iraq.36

As interpreted at the highest levels of the Bush administration, the real significance of Enduring Freedom was that it affirmed America’s unquestioned and unprecedented military supremacy. Here, Rumsfeld later wrote, “was a demonstration of the kind of defense transformation that the President envisioned—a mentality of eyes-wide-open situational awareness, can-do determination, and creative adaptability.”37 Rendered into plain English, Rumsfeld was saying that Afghanistan had rendered military orthodoxy obsolete. Big and slow were out. Lean and quick were in.

If anything, previous estimates of U.S. military capabilities now appeared to have been too modest. Wolfowitz characterized the achievements of U.S. forces in Afghanistan as “revolutionary” and “amazing.” By way of historical comparison, he cited the World War II Battle of Arnhem, a defeat attributed to planners overestimating Allied capabilities and fatally committing them to “a bridge too far.” Now, given “the potential that people on the ground can have for leveraging the capability of long-range air power,” Wolfowitz worried, military planners were likely to err in the other direction. Lacking sufficient boldness and imagination, they were prone to producing plans that were not “a bridge too far” but “several bridges too short.”38 For Wolfowitz and other like-minded officials in the national security establishment (and for hawks generally), Enduring Freedom had demolished any need for the United States to constrain its use of force. The risks appeared manageable, the costs modest, the prospective payoff great.

The journalist Charles Krauthammer made the point with typical directness and supreme assurance. “Afghanistan demonstrated that America has both the power and the will to fight, and that when it does, it prevails,” he wrote. “The demonstration effect of the Afghan war has already deeply changed the Near East. The area’s leaders understand that their future lies with us, not [bin Laden]. Accordingly, they are listening to us.”39 To get people’s attention, nothing worked better than throwing your weight around, an expectation animating the next phase of America’s War for the Greater Middle East.

This spirit permeated President Bush’s State of the Union Address delivered in January 2002. As the president made clear, his administration had already put Afghanistan in its rearview mirror. That prize was already bagged. “In four short months,” he crowed, U.S. troops had “captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.” Confident that more such successes lay just ahead, Bush flatly declared, “We are winning the war on terror.” Yes, more work remained to be done, but not in Afghanistan. Bush vowed to turn next on what he called an “axis of evil” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. For those regimes, but above all for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the day of reckoning was fast approaching.40 Unfortunately, Bush’s verdict on the Afghanistan War proved premature.

Without doubt, the unconventional warriors of TF Dagger had done everything asked of them and more. Also without doubt, the Enduring Freedom air campaign qualified as a marvel of planning and execution, exceeding in precision the feats of Desert Storm and its lesser companions of the previous decade. With more than thirty thousand sorties flown, no aircraft were lost to enemy action. According to Pentagon tabulations, 75 percent of munitions expended hit their intended target, an appreciable improvement over Desert Storm in 1991 and Allied Force in 1999. Given the quantity of ordnance expended—more than twenty-two thousand bombs and missiles—noncombatant casualties were also relatively few in number. Cutting-edge technologies such as laser designators to guide bombs to their targets and UAVs that loitered high above the battlefield to provide intelligence and even launched missiles at ground targets had testified to the U.S. military’s technological edge.41 Best of all, U.S. casualties had been negligible—enough to elicit pious expressions of condolence, not enough to provoke real concern. Of twelve American fatalities, only one—a CIA operative—resulted from enemy action; an errant bomb killed three military personnel; the remaining deaths were due to non-hostile causes.42 By any of the measures that the Pentagon relied on to assess performance, U.S. forces had shone.

Unfortunately, the measures were incomplete and to some degree beside the point. The initial stages of Enduring Freedom resembled the Tanker War of the 1980s, except on a larger scale. Given the advantages U.S. forces enjoyed in range and lethality, the enemy couldn’t even return effective fire.

Those advantages derived from the fact that the Taliban had foolishly chosen to fight as a quasi-conventional force defending fixed positions near major Afghan cities.43 Yet “defeat” freed the Taliban of any further requirement to fight conventionally. After the fall of Kandahar, they returned to their roots as a guerrilla force, thereby inaugurating a new phase of the Afghanistan War. In that new phase, destined to last years rather than weeks, the “revolutionary” and “amazing” U.S. capabilities on display during the autumn of 2001 proved less than salient.

As a consequence, the victory that President Bush and General Franks fancied they had won proved ephemeral. A protracted war ensued, waged in a country where the United States was without vital interests against an adversary that, however repellant, did not directly threaten U.S. national security. The war against the Taliban became an exercise in strategic irrelevance—as if in response to Southern secession, Abraham Lincoln had sent the Union Army to Brazil to liberate the black multitudes held in bondage there. Cleansing Brazil of practices deemed objectionable in American eyes would have posed a mighty challenge without offering much by way of rewards. So too with Afghanistan.

Events on the ground almost immediately hinted at the difficulties to come. In March 2002, U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan—numbering no more than two thousand at the time—undertook their first significant ground offensive. The shortcomings of this operation, known as Anaconda, laid bare the limitations of Rumsfeld’s lean-and-quick approach to changing the way they live.

The site chosen for this operation was the Shah-i-kot Valley, a rugged and inhospitable piece of terrain nestled alongside the Pakistan border south of Kabul. Intelligence reports suggested that Taliban or Al Qaeda kingpins—“high-value targets” or HVTs, in American military parlance—might have taken refuge there. As measured by body count or by cities freed from Taliban control, Enduring Freedom had racked up a series of impressive successes. As measured by HVTs permanently taken out of circulation, it had proven something of a bust. Anaconda was going to be a step toward fixing that.44

The commanders who authorized and planned Anaconda did not anticipate serious fighting. Rather than an actual battle, they envisioned something more like a grouse hunt. A group of several hundred amenable Afghan militants guided by American handlers would enter the Shah-i-kot to flush the enemy. Blocking forces pre-positioned to cover the valley’s several exits and occupied by U.S. infantrymen would then do the necessary killing and capturing. From start to finish, the operation would require no more than a couple of days.

Complicating this seemingly straightforward proposition were several factors. First, weather and terrain posed larger than anticipated impediments. Second, intelligence regarding the enemy proved wildly inaccurate. Rather than an estimated 150 to 250 enemy fighters in the valley, actual enemy strength turned out to be two or three times that. Worse, rather than beaten, the enemy was well armed and full of fight. Third, the force assembled for Anaconda was a hodgepodge, made up of bits and pieces from different units, different services, and different countries thrown together without regard for whether the result constituted a workable whole. Fourth, and ultimately decisively, whether through inattention, stupidity, or ornery parochialism, those charged with signing off on Anaconda disregarded the most fundamental precepts of unity of command.

It was left to General Hagenbeck, division commander sans division, to deal with the consequences. In mid-February 2002, Hagenbeck had shifted his demi-headquarters from K2 to Bagram. Lieutenant General Mikolashek, back in Kuwait, charged Hagenbeck with planning and executing Anaconda. For that purpose, General Franks, back in Tampa, gave Hagenbeck control of all forces in Afghanistan except unconventional assets grouped together under the heading of Task Force 11. From Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia, air force Lieutenant General T. Michael “Buzz” Moseley would coordinate air support. New to his job, Moseley paid little attention to developments brewing in Afghanistan. That he and Mikolashek reputedly did not care for one another may have exacerbated the problem. Back at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, meanwhile, Major General Dell Dailey, commander of U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, directed the actions of “black” units to include TF 11. CIA operatives, still active in the field and reporting up their own independent chain, collaborated with the military at times and on terms of their choosing. Whatever the benefits of this lash-up, tight coordination did not number among them. It was shades of Mogadishu all over again.

The forces provided to Hagenbeck for Anaconda made for an odd mix. In January, the Marines occupying Rhino had departed, their place taken by parts of the 3rd Brigade of the army’s 101st Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles.” The brigade arrived with two of its three infantry battalions and none of its standard complement of field artillery. Given an ostensibly negligible threat and a persisting preoccupation with “footprint,” Franks and Rumsfeld deemed it unnecessary to provide the brigade with any significant fire support. Upon appeal, the CENTCOM commander grudgingly approved the deployment of eight AH-64 attack helicopters to compensate for the lack of heavy weapons. Hagenbeck also had a single battalion from his own division. The 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry had initially deployed to K2 as a security force but was now reassembling at Bagram. Together, these various units formed Task Force Rakkasan, commanded by Colonel Frank Wiercinski.45

Rakkasan had an indigenous counterpart, which the Americans styled Task Force Hammer. This imposing name referred to an armed rabble recruited by an army special forces team, sustained by CIA operatives with plenty of cash to distribute and led by Zia Lodin, son of a reputedly influential Pushtun tribal chief. A mélange of small clandestine units, some contributed by allies, but including U.S. Navy SEALs, completed Hagenbeck’s order of battle. To describe the overall product as slapdash would be kind.

Sending infantry into combat without field artillery is like having unprotected sex with a stranger—you had better be lucky. Luck was not with General Hagenbeck or the troops under his command when Operation Anaconda kicked off at night on March 2.

Almost everything that could go wrong did. Traveling by truck over primitive, nearly impassible roads, TF Hammer made exceedingly slow progress toward its assigned objective. An orbiting U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship mistakenly engaged the advancing convoy, killing one American and three Afghans and wounding others. Hammer retreated, regrouped, then resumed its advance, only to encounter enemy mortar fire. With that, the task force halted and waited for the lavish application of American airpower that had been promised but now was slow to materialize. Soon thereafter, Zia’s Afghans withdrew without even actually entering the Shah-i-kot. Half of Hagenbeck’s plan had fallen apart.

Worse was to come. By his own admission, going into the operation Hagenbeck had assumed that “enemy resistance had all but collapsed” in Afghanistan.46 As CH-47 Chinook helicopters began delivering elements of TF Rakkasan to landing zones near their assigned blocking positions, the Americans discovered otherwise. The choppers encountered intense fire that damaged one Chinook and put holes in every Apache committed to the fight. An ugly firefight at very close quarters ensued, with the Americans pinned down by small arms and mortar fire. Dozens were wounded. With artillery unavailable and helicopter gunships forced out of the battle, Rakkasan had to rely on fixed-wing air support, which again was slow in coming. Nightfall brought some respite and the welcome return of AC-130 gunships.

On March 3, the situation stabilized as units consolidated, casualties were evacuated, and reinforcements arrived. The night of March 3–4 brought more bad news, however. A CH-47 belonging to TF 160 was shot down while inserting a SEAL team high on a ridgeline called Takur Ghar. A second CH-47 carrying a quick reaction force of army rangers suffered a similar fate. Seven Americans were killed in action. Only after an intense seventeen-hour firefight were these forces finally extracted.

By this time, however, the realization that Anaconda had encountered unexpectedly stiff resistance had roused the various headquarters charged with supporting the U.S. troops fighting for their lives. A massive surge of air support from bombers of all types ensued. By March 6, the infantry fight had effectively ended. Even as elements of TF Rakkasan held their positions, air attacks now superseded action on the ground. Over the next several days, the Shah-i-kot Valley “saw the greatest number of precision munitions dropped into the smallest geographic space in the history of air warfare.”47 On March 10, now augmented by several vintage Soviet armored vehicles, a reconstituted TF Hammer finally entered the Shah-i-kot, where it encountered little of note. By now, enemy forces had either died fighting or successfully made their escape. For its part, TF Rakkasan had already begun to exfiltrate its units and was clear of the valley by March 12. Anaconda ended soon thereafter.

The Pentagon did its best to portray Anaconda as a victory. General Franks pronounced it “an unqualified and absolute success.”48 In reality, it was anything but. The operation did not net any significant HVT. It did not end the Afghanistan War. Abysmally planned and inadequately resourced—shortcomings destined to recur throughout the post-9/11 phase of America’s War for the Greater Middle East—the operation had at very considerable cost cleared a piece of nondescript terrain, which U.S. forces promptly abandoned.

With few exceptions, the Americans participating in Operation Anaconda performed their duties with stoic heroism. Yet in comparison with the extraordinarily light casualties sustained since the Afghanistan War began the previous October, U.S. troops suffered grievous losses. Sadly, these offered but a foretaste of what awaited: In the years to come, well over two thousand Americans were to die in Afghanistan, with another twenty thousand wounded.

To be sure, as they had in every conflict since at least the Korean War, U.S. forces inflicted more casualties than they had sustained. How many more was difficult to say. Just as the Americans had entered the Shah-i-kot not knowing how many enemy soldiers they were to face, they departed not knowing how many they had killed or how many had escaped to fight another day. All they had were estimates, which were in any event beside the point: Casualty ratios do not necessarily correlate with victory.

To anyone willing to assess its implications, Tora Bora and Anaconda warned that the Afghanistan War was far from over. Succumbing to its fixation with Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration chose to pretend otherwise. Consigned to the back burner, Afghanistan became yet another phony war, a conflict that the United States had ignited but failed to extinguish and then left to simmer.