Upheaval in Panama, Trouble in Afghanistan
ON MONDAY EVENING, December 19, 1989, while the president and dozens of guests were listening to the US Army chorus sing carols at a White House Christmas party, Brent Scowcroft slipped away to join Bob Gates in his West Wing corner office. The United States was about to launch Operation Just Cause for the overthrow of General Manuel Noriega. Earlier that day, Scowcroft had handed out assignments to the relatively few White House officials who knew of the planned invasion of Panama. The White House didn’t even inform members of Congress until 10:00 P.M., just three hours before the operation was to get under way.267
US forces found the Panamanian leader on December 24, hiding in the Vatican’s embassy in Panama City. General Noriega surrendered two weeks later and was immediately taken to Miami, allowing the United States to install a new government. The American public approved: Bush’s job performance rating rose to 80 percent, according to a Gallup poll taken in early January 1990. It was a graceful recovery from the White House’s earlier mishandling of an attempted coup against Noriega on October 3, 1989—a failure that led the White House to make critical refinements in the NSC process, paving the way for the success of the later Panama invasion.268
Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno had been in contact with US officials since the Eisenhower administration; he became a paid CIA informer in the early 1960s. Although he was off the US payroll during the Carter administration, by the early 1980s he was receiving between $100,000 and $200,000 a year from the CIA. The relationship permanently soured after 1986, when Noriega’s role in the torture and assassination of Panamanian opposition leader Hugo Spadafora was publicized by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times. It was also revealed that Noriega was dealing drugs and colluding with the Medellín cartel, and in 1988 he became the subject of a US Justice Department investigation for drug trafficking. Yet the Justice, State, and Defense Departments couldn’t agree on a course of action, and President Reagan didn’t make a final decision as to how to proceed. Noriega was therefore still in power when George Bush took office.269
President Bush had met Noriega on several occasions and had passed messages to the Panamanian leader. Despite their “dubious relationship,” once he got into office Bush requested a criminal indictment of Noriega and his exile from Panama. He wanted him gone, and issued a presidential finding that endorsed covert action against Noriega. The White House also began to expand its political and psychological efforts to unseat Noriega, carried out under the auspices of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). The president and his advisers even discussed the possibility of kidnapping Noriega should he leave Panama.270
US-Panamanian relations dramatically worsened after the May 1989 election was stolen from Guillermo Endara by Noriega through corruption, fraud, and violence (the opposing vice presidential candidate, Guillermo “Billy” Ford, was badly beaten by Noriega supporters, for instance). Once Noriega realized that the election was “going very badly,” he “stopped the vote count and seized the ballots,” as Scowcroft described it. International election watchers attested to the fraud, and former president Jimmy Carter, who was among the election monitors, told President Bush “how awful it was.” Even Scowcroft—who is not one to exaggerate and wasn’t in favor of interfering in Panama’s affairs—characterized the election as being “hijacked in the most outrageous, confrontational way” and recognized that it “fundamentally changed our attitude toward Panama.”271
The Bush administration refused to recognize the Panamanian government as long as Noriega remained in power, and it encouraged other governments to do the same. The United States also pressured the Panamanian government by holding its assets in escrow.272 Bush ordered the US military to leave Panama, and when SOUTHCOM’s commander, Gen. Frederick Woerner, delayed (at one point blaming the delay on a shortage of cardboard boxes), Baker, Cheney, and Scowcroft unanimously recommended that he be replaced. The president agreed, and on September 30, 1989, Gen. Maxwell “Mad Max” Thurman took over command of SOUTHCOM.273
The coup attempt began just two days later. Maj. Moisés Giroldi Vega of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) and a group of accomplices killed Noriega’s bodyguards, captured the Panamanian leader at gunpoint, and held him at the PDF headquarters. Unfortunately for Major Giroldi, Noriega was able to place a telephone call before Giroldi and his collaborators could take full control. A few hours later, two loyal elite PDF battalions arrived and rescued Noriega. The whole coup attempt lasted just five hours.
The thirty-eight-year-old Giroldi had had the opportunity to shoot “the Maximum Leader of the Panamanian Revolution” but didn’t. Giroldi had been close to Noriega, who was the godfather of one of his children, and he was unable to shoot his friend in cold blood. Noriega had fewer qualms; he had Giroldi tortured and killed. Over the next few weeks back in power, Noriega had hundreds of other PDF officers arrested and executed.
By all accounts, the Bush administration’s response to the coup attempt was confused. President Bush’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, was astounded to learn of the coup from CNN on the morning of October 3 while it was under way, rather than from official White House channels. Scowcroft reached the Pentagon by phone, trying to sort things out. Scowcroft found out that the United States had A-37s (small fighter jets) and helicopters available for surveillance and little else; he didn’t know where Noriega was, and neither did anyone else in the government. Scowcroft had no idea what Giroldi’s motivations were, and expectations for the US forces stationed just outside Panama City were also unclear.274
As the coup continued, Bush and Scowcroft kept to their daily schedule. The president visited with Mexican president Carlos Salinas, attended a farewell ceremony for the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. William Crowe, and then had lunch with senior US government administrators. At 1:30 P.M., Bush and Scowcroft met with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who conceded that he also knew little about the coup, according to Fitzwater, although the Panamanian press was reporting that Noriega had been ousted and that Major Giroldi was heading a five-man provisional government. The president had Cheney order General Thurman to invite the rebels to ask for US support, which would allow the American military to engage (although Scowcroft did worry about how other Latin American leaders would react).275
Things didn’t get that far. A little after 2:30 P.M., Bush, Scowcroft, Baker, Gates, Fitzwater, and others in the administration learned the coup was over. So they informed the press that the rebellion had been suppressed (after having previously told reporters that, while the coup was not a US operation, the administration remained “in very close touch” with the rebels).276
When reporters and members of Congress discovered the Bush administration had missed an opportunity to oust the Panamanian leader, they were outraged. With all the attention the Bush White House had focused on Noriega’s political corruption, brutality, and drug trafficking, they expected a stronger follow-through. “Amateur Hour” was the headline of a Newsweek story; “The Gang That Wouldn’t Shoot” was the title of a U.S. News & World Report article; and several influential editorial columnists, including Richard Cohen, Mary McGrory, and William Safire, castigated the president for his undue caution and passivity. Senator Jesse Helms called Bush and his top advisers a bunch of Keystone Kops, and Senator Sam Nunn criticized the administration for not being better prepared to support an attempted coup—since this was exactly what the administration had encouraged.277
Senator David Boren, the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence and a friend of the administration as a rule, was especially angered at the White House’s inaction. Boren had been able to follow the whole coup proceedings thanks to his aide George Tenet, who had access to the US government’s cable traffic, and he was appalled by how the events had played out. So when he and Scowcroft were asked to appear on national television to debate the coup, they “got into a heated argument” in the green room at the ABC studios, Boren recalled, almost coming to blows. Once he was on the air, Boren declared, “I don’t think it’s right” for the United States, as “a great country, to go out and encourage people to take action, to put their lives on the line, to imply by encouraging them to take action that we’re going to help and not be there when we need them.”278 Scowcroft responded that the senator’s statements left him “astonished.”279
But Boren was just getting started. A few days later, he proclaimed that the administration had “blood on its hands for the lack of courage to reach out to the officers who were doing what they thought America wanted.” When the president heard Boren’s statement, he called the senator, who was then in Chicago for a fund-raiser, and chewed him out. Bush was “furious” and “uncharacteristically ill-tempered,” in Boren’s description, and told him, “I want your ass back here.” Because it was too late in the day for commercial flights, Bush had the military fly Boren to Washington for a meeting the following morning.280
When Senator Boren entered the Oval Office, the president, the vice president, Powell, and Cheney were already there. Bush’s face was “red” and “contorted with rage,” Boren recalled. Powell looked “very uncomfortable,” and Cheney was squirming in his chair. The president then asked how the senator could say he had “blood on [his] hands.” So Boren went over what had gone wrong; he reviewed what he’d learned from the cable traffic and he explained why it would have been easy for the United States to act and help Major Giroldi. After hearing him out, Bush’s whole demeanor changed. He apologized to Boren for making him come down to Washington, and then escorted him from the Oval Office, telling the senator, “These gentleman and I have something to discuss.”281
What the gentlemen had to discuss was how poorly the whole affair had been handled—beginning with internal communications. The Tuesday of the coup, Gates told Marlin Fitzwater that neither Scowcroft nor he knew of the planned coup (although it had been mentioned in the CIA’s daily briefing to the president). So Fitzwater told the press that President Bush, Scowcroft, Cheney, Gates, and others had had no foreknowledge of the coup. But this wasn’t true; Bush, Scowcroft, Cheney, Baker, and the Joint Chiefs had known of the planned coup for a full two days, thanks to an advance warning from General Thurman.
On Sunday, October 1, Major Giroldi’s wife, Adela Giroldi, had told the CIA station chief of the plans for the coup. Giroldi met with CIA officials the next day to confirm that the coup was on, and he requested that US forces block the roads to the PDF headquarters, where Noriega was to be held under guard, and keep the airspace clear of Panamanian aircraft.
Giroldi’s news was passed on to General Thurman and his staff in Panama City, and Thurman in turn informed Powell. Powell called Cheney at 2:30 A.M., and Cheney then called Scowcroft. But Thurman discounted Giroldi’s credentials and doubted the soundness of his plans, and Powell relied on Thurman’s judgment. However, SOUTHCOM never informed Giroldi that they wouldn’t support his coup; instead, they simply did nothing. In his book The Commanders, Bob Woodward attributes the inaction to Powell’s directive that US forces were not to intervene.282
So Bush’s senior advisers had known of the coup, although they didn’t fully commit to supporting it. Yet the coup could have easily succeeded, just as Boren later stated. The US military could have supported Giroldi and prevented the two battalions loyal to Noriega from reaching PDF headquarters by controlling the air space and blocking roads. But Thurman didn’t want to proceed without approval from Washington, Powell and Cheney were unwilling to commit US forces without better information, and Scowcroft and Bush simply didn’t know enough to overrule the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of SOUTHCOM.
The result was an embarrassment—the squandering of a golden opportunity to rid Panama of Noriega. Making matters worse, Bush’s advisers tried to cover up their indecision, dissembled, and offered contradictory excuses for the administration’s inaction.283 One explanation was that the coup might be a trap set by Noriega (it wasn’t). Another was that this was an intra-PDF dispute, with one strongman merely replacing another (though Giroldi was not seeking political office for himself). Yet another was that the United States didn’t know if Giroldi was committed to democratic government (he did want to see a popular government installed in Panama). And still another was that Giroldi had refused to hand Noriega over to US forces (he had refused at first, but later reversed himself). Scowcroft himself blamed interference by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by Congress more generally for preventing the White House and Pentagon from taking action (also inaccurate).284
These excuses were just that, excuses. The underlying problem was that the intelligence on the coup hadn’t been clearly relayed up the chain of command or integrated across the government. What the State Department, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and SOUTHCOM each knew wasn’t aggregated within the government and shared with the relevant personnel across departments and agencies. Thus timidity and caution carried the day. “We did not act very decisively,” Scowcroft said with characteristic understatement.285
The military’s caution was no doubt an aftereffect of the Vietnam War, but other factors also played their parts. After the Iran-Contra affair, the Bush administration was wary of being overzealous and courting needless clashes with Congress. William Webster was now running the CIA, not the swashbuckling Bill Casey, and Generals Thurman and Powell were both new on the job and wanted to proceed cautiously. Furthermore, the NSC’s Latin American specialist, Everett Briggs, had resigned just two days before the coup attempt.286
Whatever the reasons for the failure, Scowcroft took it hard. After the failed coup, he “sat slouched and dejected in his West Wing office,” his press secretary, Roman Popadiuk, recalled. “Stoically and without comment, he read the reports of what State Department officials were telling the press”—and how they were passing the blame, as Popadiuk observed. “In particular, Scowcroft was being fingered for the lack of coordination of the administration’s effort.” Scowcroft conceded the administration “didn’t do particularly well” in handling the crisis, and the misadventure gave him and his colleagues “a great sense of unease.” “We were sort of Keystone Kops,” Scowcroft admitted ruefully.287 “You shouldn’t minimize October 3,” Scowcroft later said, adding, “It was probably my fault.”288
But the president didn’t blame Scowcroft. At a news conference a few days after the coup attempt, Bush told the press he hadn’t “lost any confidence in our top people that are handling these matters, including—and I want to repeat it here—our military officers in Panama. None at all. And certainly not General Powell.” But Powell “knew full well that such a sentiment was articulated when it was in question,” as Bob Woodward points out. “The decisive factor at 10 to 11 A.M. on the day for the coup,” one SOUTHCOM officer well recognized, “was US inaction.” In vain, he and his fellow officers stationed in Panama waited for instructions from Washington.289 Scowcroft vowed the administration wouldn’t “make that same mistake again.”290
The NSC convened a few days later to conduct a brief postmortem of what had gone wrong. It also reviewed the new contingency plans and discussed further options, such as having constant visible tracking of Noriega and prohibiting the entry of Panamanian-flagged vessels into US ports. Cheney and Powell also tightened up the chain of command so as to ensure that military communications would flow better up and down the hierarchy. “All of us,” Baker notes, “vowed never to let another such opportunity pass.”291
Bush, Baker, Cheney, Scowcroft, and Powell soon began planning for a full-scale military operation against Noriega and Panama. This would become Operation Blue Spoon, later renamed Operation Just Cause.292
Perhaps the chief innovation to come out of the fiasco was Scowcroft’s decision to rely more on the Deputies Committee in order to coordinate executive action in foreign policy and handle crises. Scowcroft found “that the State Department had its intelligence sources, Defense did, JCS did, CIA did, but all of these intelligence reports were going straight up to their principals and there was no cross communication.” As a result, everyone at the Monday NSC meeting had “had a very different idea about what was going on in Panama, which is not too surprising, because it was extremely confused.”293
Although the Deputies Committee had met before the coup attempt, it had been “catch as catch can,” in Gates’s description, when it came to handling crises. Now it was to have more decision-making responsibility, handle day-to-day crisis management, and clear decisions before forwarding them to Baker, Cheney, and Scowcroft or to the NSC. Gates “never went into a Deputies Committee meeting” thereafter “without knowing where we wanted it to come out. And Brent and I would figure out how to make it happen,” Gates said. Scowcroft “diagnosed the problem and reimposed order,” Powell writes.294
Much of the credit for the effectiveness of the Deputies Committee meetings goes to Gates. Daniel Poneman, who was on Scowcroft’s NSC staff, recalled that Gates would “grind through” stacks of folders before he’d call a meeting, and each folder “of itself represented a huge complex rats’ nest of an issue.” He wanted each meeting to produce a decision and not to last more than sixty minutes. At the pre-briefing, he’d say, in effect “Okay, I think there’s basically three issues: This. This. And this. State is going to say this. Defense is going to say that. I want to turn to activator and say this, and if I do it this way, I’m going to get this result. What have I missed? And you would say, ‘Could you go over that again a little more slowly this time?’” Gates, Poneman said, was “unbelievable.”295
The lessons from Panama enabled the Bush White House to handle the attempted coup on Philippine president Corazon Aquino better than it might have otherwise. The coup began on December 1, 1989, when President Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft were on their way to Malta, and Quayle immediately convened the NSC, with Robert Kimmitt (and later Lawrence Eagleburger) representing Baker and with Gates representing Scowcroft. (Cheney, who disagreed with Quayle chairing the meeting, called in sick.) Scowcroft followed the discussion with a telephone in each ear, thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean. The group agreed to a solution proposed by Powell: US aircraft would fly a “cap . . . over the airport” rather than bombing the airport or shooting down aircraft hostile to President Aquino’s government. They figured that just the threat of military action would deter hostile aircraft from taking off. Scowcroft was pleased that the administration had been able to come to a clear decision—although he had to awaken a sleeping President Bush to get his approval.296 The strategy worked: the two F-4s flying above the palace spoke volumes about the US presence, and the coup failed.
Two and a half months later, a new crisis redirected the focus toward Panama. A small group of PDF soldiers shot two US soldiers, assaulted a Marine lieutenant, groped his wife, and threatened her with rape. President Bush decided the time had come to put Operation Just Cause into action.297
Scowcroft disagreed, thinking it made little sense for the United States to indict foreign officials over whom it had no jurisdiction. Nor did he believe that invading Panama and seizing Noriega would be sound strategically or enhance US relations with other Latin American states. Baker, too, thought the president was making a mistake, as did Cheney and Powell. But once the president had made it “abundantly clear” what he wanted to do, his advisers fell into line.298
In any event, Operation Just Cause was “extremely” successful. More than twenty-five thousand troops, including fourteen thousand assembled in just twenty-four hours, began by hitting twenty-seven targets simultaneously. By starting the invasion in the dead of night, the US military was able to use its technological advantages to move quickly and take few casualties. As the head of US Special Operations Command, Gen. Carl W. Stiner, boasted, “We own the night.”299
The president had skillfully preempted negative responses from other Latin American leaders by repeatedly talking with them over the preceding summer and fall, “a minimum of a half dozen times about Panama, about Nicaragua, about Salvador, on and on and on,” by Scowcroft’s account. Bush continued his personal diplomacy once the invasion was under way, spending the small hours of Tuesday, December 20, calling foreign leaders such as Colombian president Virgilio Barco, Mexican president Carlos Salinas, Venezuelan president Carlos Pérez, Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, French president François Mitterrand, Spanish prime minister Felipe González, and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In the phone calls, Bush explained—sometimes through interpreters—why he’d finally lost patience with Noriega and why the United States had to act. Thanks to Bush’s efforts, there was little more than a pro forma protest by the Latin American leaders; as Scowcroft put it, things “quieted down amazingly well.”300
Not so quiet was Powell’s reaction to what he considered Scowcroft’s undue interference, what he regarded as micromanaging. He disagreed with Scowcroft’s orders that the Panamanian government’s broadcast tower “had to go,” for instance, seeing little point in destroying a structure that the newly instated president, Guillermo Endara, would soon be needing. Both General Thurman, the commander of the US invasion of Panama, and General Stiner were “mad as hell at being over-managed from the sidelines,” he later reported, “and for being ordered to take a pointless objective.”301 Powell attributed Scowcroft’s action to public pressure—the “press heat” presumably becoming “too great” for the president and the national security advisor to resist.302
However, Scowcroft wasn’t alone in his judgment. The State Department also wanted the tower taken down, and, Baker reports, “Powell and Cheney readily agreed” to the decision, even if “some in the Pentagon had different ideas.”303
Powell also disagreed with Scowcroft’s insistence that the military rescue “several correspondents . . . trapped in the Marriott Hotel in Panama City. ‘We’ve got to put troops in to rescue them,’ Brent said.” Powell, though, didn’t think so:
“They’re in no danger,” I pointed out. “I’ve checked. . . . They’re safe in the basement of the hotel. The fighting will soon sweep right past them.”
I thought I had convinced Brent until I got a second call. He was taking terrific pressure from bureau chiefs and network executives in New York. “We’ve got to do something,” he said.
“We shouldn’t do anything,” I reiterated. “We’ve got a perfectly competent commander on the ground. He’s got a plan, and it’s working.” Were kibitzers supposed to direct the fighting in Panama from executive suites in Manhattan? I reminded Brent that there were 35,000 other American citizens in Panama, and we were trying to ensure the safety of all of them. Only a few minutes passed before Cheney called. There was no discussion. Do it, he said. No more arguments.
Again I reluctantly called Thurman and Stiner. “I hate to tell you this. . . . But get those reporters out, and I’ll try to keep Washington off your backs in the future.”304
After the mission, Powell complained to Cheney, telling him he didn’t want to have to pass along any more such orders in the future. “If the press has to cover a war,” he said, “there’s no way we can eliminate the risks of war.” He then requested that the secretary of defense ask Scowcroft to refrain from issuing “any more orders from the sidelines.”305
Powell remarked that Scowcroft had “an irritating edge” to his manner, one “that took getting used to.”306 Powell’s prickly reaction may be explained in part by the fact that he was Scowcroft’s immediate predecessor as national security advisor and a four-star general with considerable command experience. At the same time, Powell recognized Scowcroft’s ability, his “obvious intelligence,” and his “admirable” intentions. He appreciated the fact that Scowcroft didn’t sugarcoat the possibility of American deaths when reviewing the plans for Operation Just Cause with President Bush, for example, and that he rightly held the chairman of the Joint Chiefs accountable for the soundness of the military’s plans and for the anticipated number of US casualties.307 He also recognized what one of Scowcroft’s colleagues called “the ribbon of steel” that lay underneath his cordiality, poise, and expertise. “Brent has a temper,” Powell acknowledged, and he argues his positions “forcefully” and “can get mad.”308
The tensions between the two men derived in large part from their different responsibilities. Scowcroft had to navigate between the State and Defense Departments, coordinate intelligence, and ensure that military operations were being conducted with long-term foreign policy objectives in mind—all while taking Congress, the media, and the American public into account. Powell, by contrast, was responsible solely for military affairs. Given these different roles, it is no wonder they sometimes clashed.
The president’s decision to forcibly remove Noriega from office met with widespread approval, but it exacted a price, claiming the lives of twenty-three American soldiers and costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, five hundred Panamanians lost their lives and the widespread destruction in Panama City residential areas displaced tens of thousands of people from their homes. The successful invasion, coming on the heels of the 1983 invasion of Grenada, also set a precedent—rightly or wrongly—for Somalia in 1992 and Kosovo in 1994.309
US-Panama relations during the Bush administration must also be seen as part of the broader story of US policy in Latin America. Baker and Scowcroft felt that President Reagan and his advisers had made a mistake battling Congress over Latin American policy. So they sought to remove Nicaragua and the rest of Latin America as points of controversy and to “try to co-opt Congress” instead.
Their efforts were largely successful. “Today, for the first time in many years,” Bush announced on March 24, 1989, “the President and Congress, the Democratic and Republican leadership in the House and Senate, are speaking with one voice about Central America.” The United States, the text of the Bipartisan Accord on Central America read, was now committed to democratization for Nicaragua, “an end to subversion and destabilization of its neighbors,” and “an end to Soviet bloc military ties that threaten U.S. and regional security.” Furthermore, Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress and both branches of government were “united on a policy to achieve those goals.”310
In practice, the policy wasn’t easy to follow “because people kept jumping out of positions,” Scowcroft remarked, with “the El Salvador assassinations of the nuns” and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega saying he wasn’t “going to continue with the cease-fire, etc.” The Bush administration nonetheless managed to remove Nicaragua and Latin America as points of contention with Congress—helped by Violeta Chamorro’s victory over Ortega in the February 1989 election (with help from the Contras and, more quietly, the United States). The new US policies allowed the administration to use Latin America as “a barometer of the Soviet Union and its changes,” Scowcroft said, to see how Soviet actions matched their rhetoric.311 Ten years later, on December 31, 1999, the United States handed the Panama Canal over to the Panamanian government, according to the terms of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty—a successful transition to a new and better relationship between the two countries.
A BREAK FROM the past wouldn’t be as easy with another difficult issue confronted by the Bush administration upon taking office: Afghanistan.
The United States had a three-part agenda with respect to the Soviet Union: conventional and nuclear arms control; US-Soviet bilateral issues; and a set of regional issues, where the Bush administration wanted to stop the Soviet Union’s support of Afghanistan, Cuba’s support of communist governments in Angola and Mozambique, East Germany’s aid to Eritrea, Cuba’s activities in Central America, and Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia. By the end of the administration, the Soviet Union had stopped its aid to Afghanistan and Cuba, Cuban forces had withdrawn from sub-Saharan Africa (a necessary condition for the end of apartheid in South Africa and the transition to the presidency of Nelson Mandela), East Germany no longer existed, and Vietnam was out of Cambodia (UN Security Council resolution 668, passed in September 1990).312 Nonetheless, the situation in Afghanistan would remain a troublesome one for the United States.
Sandwiched between Iran and Pakistan, Afghanistan is located in a highly strategic region at the cultural and religious crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia.313 Notwithstanding its diverse and mountainous terrain—the result of British-made boundaries—it has been subject to numerous invasions over the centuries. And its inhabitants—which numbered 11 million or so as of 1990, with almost 6 million more refugees in Pakistan, Iran, and the West as a result of the Soviet occupation—are members of several ethnic groups living in areas that straddle national borders. The Pashtuns, for example, who constitute about 40 to 50 percent of the Afghan population, are also the second-largest ethnic group in Pakistan. Likewise, the Tajiks, who make up about one-quarter of the Afghan population, make up about two-thirds of the population of Tajikistan; the Uzbeks, almost 10 percent of the population, are also about 80 percent of the population of Uzbekistan; and the Turkmen, a minute proportion of the Afghan population, constitute about 85 percent of the population of Turkmenistan. These ethnic groups are, in turn, divided into tribes and further subgroups.314
The United States’ covert war against the Soviet-allied government of Afghanistan had begun in 1980 under Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Carter administration and then escalated under President Reagan. The Reagan administration and the CIA wanted to aid the Afghan mujahedin leaders based in Peshawar, Pakistan, in their fight against the Soviet military and communist regime in Kabul, but they wanted to do so discreetly and indirectly. DCI Bill Casey therefore channeled money and weapons through the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
The 1986 introduction of Stinger surface-to-air missiles, which were deadly against Soviet helicopters and ground-support aircraft, shifted the balance in Afghanistan in favor of the mujahedin. And with the Soviet Union having suffered more than thirteen thousand military fatalities in Afghanistan and more than thirty-five thousand soldiers seriously injured, Gorbachev didn’t want to up the ante.315 He began looking for a way out.
The way out was the Geneva Accords, signed under UN auspices in April 1988. The agreement, which provided cover for the Soviets to withdraw, set the groundwork for a policy of noninterference between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the Soviet Union and the United States to act as the agreement’s guarantors; none of the Afghan mujahedin groups were a party to the Geneva Accords. The Soviet withdrawal on February 15, 1989, represented what many considered to be the United States’ most impressive Cold War victory while simultaneously leading Polish, Czech, and other East European leaders to doubt the fortitude of the Soviet leadership.316
Almost everyone in the intelligence and diplomatic communities in Washington and in the large US mission in Islamabad thought it would just be a matter of weeks before the government of President Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai went down. Meanwhile, with the Afghan economy already in shambles, US officials, UN personnel, and NGO staff in the region braced themselves for a flood of Afghan refugees and other possible humanitarian crises.317
Three years later, Najibullah was still in power. Not until April 1992, following the Peshawar Accord, was the Kabul government replaced by a coalition of Afghan mujahedin, who proved unable to form a viable government.318 Consequently, Afghanistan was divided into dozens of semiautonomous provinces under the command of old mujahedin and new warlords, many of whom turned to taxes, extortion, smuggling, opium production, and heroin trafficking—or some combination thereof—for income.319 The city of Kabul, which had survived the Soviet occupation and the Najibullah government, was largely destroyed by the 1992 civil war among the mujahedin. Furthermore, the mujahedin as a group were not representative of the Afghanistan population: most professionals, many women, and many of those who were more educated didn’t identify with the politics, ideologies, or religious extremism of most of the mujahedin.
The Bush administration did almost nothing to address these dangerous developments in Afghanistan. During the 1989–1992 period, the attention of Bush and his senior advisers was almost always directed elsewhere. And once the Najibullah government fell and the mujahedin took over, the Bush administration simply walked away from Afghanistan, eager to be done with what they regarded as a relic of the Cold War. Meanwhile, in the provinces, young radical Muslims were arriving from around the world, having been recruited for religious education and military training for future wars against the infidels of the West.
The bill for the Bush administration’s neglect came due in the years that followed. Less than a week after the Bush administration left office, on January 25, 1993, a young Pakistani killed two CIA officials outside CIA headquarters in Langley and injured three others. A month later, on February 23, 1993, came the first World Trade Center attack. The Taliban (meaning “students”) emerged in 1994, and in September 1996 the Taliban seized Kabul, captured and hanged Najibullah—who had been staying in the UN compound—and gave sanctuary to a Wahhabi extremist named Osama bin Laden. Five years later, the blowback from the United States’ aid to radical Muslims culminated in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
How did the Bush administration stumble so badly in Afghanistan? It’s a complex story of foreign-policy inertia and of what today would be called “limited bandwidth”—the inability of the Bush administration to process information and make decisions on policies in an area that Scowcroft, Bush, Baker, and their top aides considered to be of secondary importance once the Cold War wound down.
In early 1989, with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan nearing an end, Scowcroft tasked a policy coordinating committee with reviewing the country’s political and economic prospects, its internal and external politics, the Soviet Union’s continuing interests in the region, and the likely behavior of Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia following the withdrawal. He also wanted to know what the United States’ options were, what tools were at its disposal, which resources it should deploy, and which Afghan factions it should support.320
The review, drafted by Richard Haass, was released on February 7, 1989, but broke no new ground. According to the US ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Oakley, the Bush administration planned simply to continue to assist the Pakistani-based Afghan mujahedin against the Soviet-installed Najibullah regime.321 For a time, there was hope that the United States and the Soviet Union would simultaneously reduce their commitments to the Afghan resistance and the Najibullah regime, but several meetings among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council failed to produce a working plan for what US officials called “negative symmetry.” (UN ambassador Thomas Pickering blamed the Soviets, who, he said, had no interest in solving Afghanistan.)322
From mid-1989 through most of 1991, State Department officials worked repeatedly on finding a peaceful resolution of some kind for Afghanistan. Under Secretary of State Robert Kimmitt headed what Peter Tomsen, then the US special envoy to Afghanistan, termed the Kimmitt Group, which was to sort out how to deal with Afghanistan. Kimmitt allowed that the United States wouldn’t be opposed if Najibullah wanted to run for office against other Afghan leaders to form a post-Soviet government.323 But the efforts of the State Department and the United Nations were handicapped by the Bush administration’s refusal to negotiate with Najibullah. When the Soviet Union proposed convening a UN conference on Afghanistan, the United States and Pakistan rejected the idea. Neither did the administration pursue an international settlement with much vigor, since to do so would have antagonized Pakistan.324
So the Soviet Union kept reinforcing the Kabul government with arms, fuel, funds, grain, equipment, and other resources (totaling $4 billion annually), and the CIA, via Pakistan and the ISI, kept supplying the mujahedin.
The Kabul government lasted much longer than expected not only because of Soviet aid but also because Najibullah helped his own cause by abandoning communism, cultivating broader popular support, and using money and other incentives to attract the support of several of the Afghanistan warlords and local militias.325 Notwithstanding these changes in the Najibullah regime, the Bush administration refused to recognize the Kabul government. Najibullah had been installed and was now being maintained by the Soviet Union, and he and his regime remained anathema to Washington and the Afghan mujahedin; too much brutality had taken place, too many Afghans had been slaughtered, and too many villages had been “cleansed.”
For the United States to recognize and negotiate with Najibullah would have betrayed the mujahedin, who for all intents and purposes had been allies of the United States since 1980. Neither would several important members of Congress, including New Hampshire senator Gordon Humphrey and Texas representative Charles Nesbitt “Charlie” Wilson, approve of recognizing the Najibullah government. (Hence the nickname “Charlie Wilson’s War” for the American program of support to the mujahedin.) Others in the Bush administration remembered the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 and feared they might lose Iran’s neighbor, Afghanistan, to Shi’a radicalism.326
Also adamantly opposing any recognition of the Kabul government were Pakistan’s leaders, who wanted an Afghanistan they could dominate—the idea of so-called strategic depth for Pakistan in Afghanistan. “We have earned the right” to have in Afghanistan a “very friendly” power, President Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq said in 1986, and “we will not permit a return to the prewar situation. . . . The new power will be a real Islamic state, part of a pan-Islamic revival, that will one day win over the Muslims in the Soviet Union.” With Pakistan’s seven-to-one population advantage over Afghanistan and with what Pakistanis viewed as their greater sophistication and cultural superiority, Zia thought they could establish an allied government in Kabul.327
President Zia didn’t live to see the fruits of Pakistan’s efforts. Zia, along with his army chief of staff Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman, the US ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel, and other Pakistani and US political advisers and military aides died on August 17, 1988, when their airplane crashed on a return flight to Islamabad. Although India, Iran, the Soviet Union, and other states—including Israel and the United States—all had reasons to want one or more of the airplane’s passengers dead, neither Pakistani nor US investigators ever found a probable cause for the crash of the normally reliable C-130 Hercules.
According to UN special envoy Diego Cordovez, Zia had been willing to consider a proposal for Najibullah to step down in favor of a transition government for Afghanistan, and it is possible that Zia might have been able to get the mujahedin, the Soviets, and the Americans to go along. But with Zia’s death, the chances of reaching such a settlement quickly worsened.328
Throughout 1989, 1990, and 1991, the White House repeatedly ignored overtures from President Najibullah and his representatives to normalize relations. When Najibullah wrote President Bush on March 10, 1989, reporting infiltrations from Pakistan of heavily armed Afghan groups, the deployment of the Pakistani army in border areas, and plans under way for “wide scale armed attacks on a number of eastern frontier cities of Afghanistan . . . with the direct participation of Pakistan,” the White House didn’t bother to respond.329 The “major impediment” to “a rational, democratic, and just solution to the Afghan crisis,” Scowcroft wrote, was “the current illegitimate government in Kabul.” Only when it was gone could “an independent government . . . based on self-determination” be established.330 For Bush and Scowcroft, Najibullah “was the symbol of what was wrong in Afghanistan.” Furthermore, “the US-backed Mujahedin had made clear that they would not stop fighting until he was gone.”331
But the administration didn’t invest in alternative plans for Afghanistan, either. Consumed by other issues, Bush, Baker and Scowcroft spent negligible time on central Asia. Only 7 of the 461 Deputies Committee meetings and 2 of the 77 NSC meetings held during the Bush presidency had Afghanistan as their topic. Indicatively, the NSC met several times to discuss what the CIA’s Bruce Riedel identified as the “greatest problem” Washington thought it had in Afghanistan: the appearance of Stinger missiles on the international black market. (The administration consequently authorized a CIA program to buy the Stingers back.)332 In the words of the Washington Post’s Steve Coll, Afghanistan was a “third-tier” foreign policy issue for the Bush administration.333 This inattention to the region is mirrored in Bush and Scowcroft’s A World Transformed, Baker’s The Politics of Diplomacy, Quayle’s Standing Firm, and other accounts of US foreign policy during Bush’s years in office. All mention Afghanistan and Pakistan very briefly, if at all.334
Meanwhile, the CIA continued to provide covert assistance to the mujahedin, under the assumption the Afghan rebels would force Najibullah from office and be able to reclaim their homeland. This marked the continuation of “Charlie Wilson’s War” under DCI Casey, President Reagan, and a handful of members of Congress.
In late 1989, the White House and congressional conservatives persuaded the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to fund $280 million in secret aid to Afghanistan. The covert aid continued in 1990 ($250 million) and 1991 ($200 million) and was supplemented by Saudi matching funds. After the Gulf War, the administration had the CIA transfer $30 million worth of captured Soviet-made weapons to the mujahedin. And even after US aid stopped as of the end of 1991—over the opposition of the CIA—Saudi Arabia and private sources in the Gulf continued to furnish about $400 million a year (total Saudi aid to the ISI and the mujahedin in 1989 and 1990 exceeded aid by the United States).335
The CIA quietly assisted the mujahedin with planning the attacks against the Najibullah government, provided them with sophisticated radio equipment and Toyota four-wheel-drive trucks, and helped them with clandestine operations to disable or destroy Najibullah’s supply lines from the Soviet Union.336 For years, the CIA let the ISI handle the funding and distribution of weapons, funds, and other supplies, despite the fact that the ISI, the Pakistani army, and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki heavily favored the religiously extreme and ethnic Pashtun warlords. Only after the Soviet departure did the CIA begin to question the ISI and Pakistan’s imbalanced allocation of aid and in secret began to provide separate, extra payments to Ahmed Shah Massoud (“the Lion of Panjshir” and the foremost military leader among the mujahedin)—$200,000 a month in cash as well as military supplies—to counterbalance the larger amounts the ISI and Saudi Arabia were channeling to radical Sunni mujahedin such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.337
The practical effect was that between February 1989 and April 1992 the Bush administration operated at cross-purposes. The CIA’s aid to the mujahedin subverted diplomatic attempts to resolve the situation in Afghanistan. It’s not clear to what extent Scowcroft or Baker challenged the CIA-led initiative, despite the detrimental effects of the United States’ support for the Afghan resistance on US-Soviet relations and on the prospects for peace and a stable government in Afghanistan.338 Perhaps indicatively, on September 23, 1991, Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, UN Ambassador Pickering, and others met with UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and his aides at the United Nations, with Pérez de Cuéllar stating that he had met with the presidents of Iran and Pakistan and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. “Recent US-USSR statements have been extremely good,” the secretary-general said. “The Soviets are now saying that Najibullah is prepared to step down during a transition process. . . . I am preparing to call a meeting in Geneva of all Afghan factions.” Baker reassured Pérez de Cuéllar that the United States was trying to persuade the Pakistanis to support the UN’s effort, but nothing came of the initiative.339
Bush, Scowcroft, and other US officials regarded Pakistan as their ally and didn’t want to deviate from their Cold War strategies—including continued support for the mujahedin. Yet Pakistan’s interests didn’t necessarily mesh with those of the United States. General Zia and General Akhtar, the head of ISI, both vigorously promoted Sunni fundamentalism by establishing up to eight thousand official religious schools (madrassas) and another twenty-five thousand unofficial ones.340 Militant Muslims from around the world flocked to Afghanistan and Pakistan, volunteering their services in the CIA-supported jihad. “The Afghan conflict proved to be a training ground for the Islamic militias, which received comprehensive training in the ISI centres that gave them the skills in sabotage, assassination, endurance and other techniques of guerrilla warfare,” one Pakistani scholar summarizes. And the ISI imparted these skills “under the guidance of US CIA, US Special Forces from the famous Green Berets, the British SAS and Chinese weapons instructors.”341
By early 1989, the State Department’s Edmund McWilliams, then serving as the US special envoy to the Afghan mujahedin, concluded that the United States was assisting “a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan.” McWilliams pointed out that Pakistan’s best interests were not Afghanistan’s, and he recommended that the United States fund the more moderate mujahedin leaders instead of Hekmatyar. McWilliams’s analysis wasn’t well received by Ambassador Robert Oakley, however, or by the CIA station chief in Pakistan or CIA officials in Langley, and it would soon get him transferred. But for others in the State Department and CIA, McWilliams’s analysis struck a chord.342
Oakley would eventually come to agree with McWilliams. But although Oakley and the State Department recommended that the administration not fund the mujahedin in fiscal 1991, the CIA was divided on the issue, and Representative Wilson and others in Congress insisted on a continued effort. The House, the Senate, and the administration went along, hiding the $200 million in a $298 billion defense bill. Almost single-handedly, Wilson managed to save the CIA’s covert aid program for another year.343
US policy in the region was at cross-purposes in a second sense. During the 1980s, Pakistan had received more US foreign aid than any country in the world outside of Israel and Egypt. Yet at the very same time, many in Congress and the US government wanted to curtail Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. The 1985 Pressler Amendment tried to reconcile conflicting goals by prohibiting any further US economic and military assistance to Pakistan if US officials determined that Pakistan possessed “a nuclear explosive device.” But this set a very high bar on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development. As long as the last turn hadn’t been made on the last screw, as the saying went, the United States could certify that Pakistan didn’t possess nuclear weapons. And from 1986 through 1989 the Reagan and Bush administrations did precisely that—even though Pakistan may have had a crude atomic device as early as 1984 and certainly by 1987.
Reagan and Bush were willing to look the other way, given their dependence on Pakistan. But a number of US officials and influential members of Congress remained concerned about the Pakistani nuclear program.344
“Pakistan [stands] very close to the line,” Scowcroft warned Pakistan’s chief of army, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, in early 1989. Separately, Scowcroft and Powell each told Beg—general to general—that the administration knew of Pakistan’s nuclear program, and they insisted it had to be curtailed. “You have to realize that the administration’s hands are tied on the nuclear issue,” Scowcroft said. “President Bush [will] certify as long as he [can] under the Pressler amendment, but he [will] not lie.” Scowcroft told General Beg he had enough material to make two more nuclear weapons—what Beg said constituted a sufficient deterrent—and proposed the following deal: the US would grant Pakistan its wish list of military aid as long as Pakistan limited its nuclear program. Beg agreed that it was in Pakistan’s best interests to impose a freeze on its nuclear program, thereby allowing US military aid to continue.345
When President Bush met Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in Washington on June 6, 1989, he reinforced the administration’s call for restraint on the nuclear front.346
But US-Pakistan relations quickly went sour. In April 1990, Pakistan and India nearly went to war as a result of Pakistan’s support of Kashmiri insurgents, and US officials held Pakistan responsible for the conflict. Because of concerns over a possible war with India, General Beg and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan decided to reactivate the nuclear program—a fact subsequently confirmed by US intelligence sources. The conflict induced a trip by Bob Gates to both Pakistan and India, and when Gates visited Islamabad in May, he and Oakley privately told President Khan that Pakistan had to stop its nuclear program. Over the next several months Oakley met repeatedly with the president, General Beg, and Prime Minister Bhutto, telling them that they had to “cease and desist.” But none of them appeared to be listening.
That fall, US intelligence officials all concluded that Pakistan was proceeding with its nuclear weapons program.347 Meanwhile, the strategic calculus had shifted. With the Soviet empire collapsing, the United States no longer needed Pakistan to play a role in its Cold War rivalry. In addition to Oakley, others in the State Department, and some in the CIA were becoming increasingly frustrated with Pakistan’s support for the most radical and anti-Western elements among the militia.348 Pakistan was also aiding opium production and heroin trafficking. Making matters worse, American favorite Benazir Bhutto had been forced out of office in August 1990, replaced by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The delicate partnership between the United States and Pakistan was looking less and less sustainable.
The hammer fell. The Bush administration decided that as of October 1990 it was no longer willing to certify that Pakistan didn’t possess a nuclear device. According to the Pressler Amendment, the US government therefore had to cut off all aid—which amounted to $564 million in fiscal 1990—and cancel all existing US-Pakistan military contracts. The United States stopped delivery on some of the forty F-16 fighter jets that Pakistan had already paid for—and, adding insult to injury, Pakistan then had to pay for the storage of those aircraft on a US Air Force base.349
Not surprisingly, the Pakistanis reacted with shock and anger. They felt that after years and years of a special US-Pakistan relationship, the United States was discarding them like a piece of used tissue paper.350 Yet Pakistan’s leaders—President Khan and General Beg—had brought this on themselves in large part by resuming their nuclear weapons program. Furthermore, the ISI, the Pakistani army, and Saudi Arabia had been double-crossing the Bush administration, in effect, by using the US fixation on the Cold War to manipulate the CIA so as to support Muslim fundamentalists such as Abdul Yusef Mustafa Azzam and Osama bin Laden and thereby influence US-Afghanistan policy.351
After the Persian Gulf War, the Bush administration lost what little interest it had in the area. In September 1991, Under Secretary Kimmitt became US ambassador to Germany, and that same month Baker and Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze both agreed to stop supplying military equipment to Afghanistan, effective January 1, 1992. Afghanistan proceeded to vanish from the United States’ radar screen. And while Pakistan, with its 1990 population of 111 million, couldn’t completely stay out of view, no longer was it an American ally—at least not in the short term.352
After years in the thick of the superpower rivalry, Afghanistan and Pakistan were now mere relics of the Cold War. That Afghanistan in 1992 would be taken over by a band of thugs—which was how many viewed the fractious mujahedin—didn’t matter; the $2 billion the United States had devoted to the Afghan mujahedin over the 1980s in the form of money, weapons, and other goods had paid off. After about 1 million Afghans killed as of 1990 (estimating conservatively), 100,000 resistance fighters dead, 500,000 disabled war veterans, and nearly 750,000 widows and orphans resulting from the war, President Bush, Secretary Baker, and Scowcroft simply withdrew from the region. They saw little reason to invest more resources in establishing a viable government in Afghanistan, despite the fact that Baker warned Bush that local rivalries and tribal differences would likely result in a “fragmented and violent” future for Afghanistan.353 Neither did the Clinton administration pick up the ball; it, too, showed a “genuine lack of interest” in the area.354
When later asked about US policy in Afghanistan, Scowcroft said he wasn’t aware “we were at cross-purposes,” although he admitted the idea “wouldn’t surprise me.” He also agreed that “we had overdone our aid” to Pakistan and the mujahedin, and both he and Gates later acknowledged they had been insufficiently attentive to the problem.355 Scowcroft and his staff didn’t give Afghanistan the attention it required or think they had to reconcile the serious interagency differences on Afghanistan and Pakistan—although this was presumably the purpose of the Deputies Committee and interagency review process. Scowcroft conceded the administration hadn’t managed Afghanistan “particularly well”—thus implicitly blaming himself. And Gates admitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the administration had “abandoned” Afghanistan, “only to see it descend into Taliban hands.”356
Scowcroft subsequently acknowledged that the administration had no use for the mujahedin once the Soviets left and that he, the president, and their other top advisers “sort of gave up” on Afghanistan. But that wasn’t quite true, as we know: the Bush administration did continue to use the mujahedin. What was true, though, is that the Bush administration had other priorities once the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, and so it showed little further interest in the region.357 The United States “is only interested in the withdrawal of Soviet troops,” General Zia remarked presciently in 1986, and “doesn’t care what happens to the Afghans afterwards.”358
Within a few short years, Afghanistan would be taken over by the Taliban. Not until January 2002—after the United States went into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, find Osama bin Laden, and set up a new government—did Afghanistan again have a US ambassador. In the intervening thirteen years, there was no US embassy in Kabul and thus no Foreign Service officers, no intelligence personnel, no military attachés, and no one else to represent American interests, evaluate political developments, or furnish information for Washington officials and policy makers.
To some extent, the Bush administration’s inattention with respect to Afghanistan and Pakistan was understandable. There were signs of growing Islamic fundamentalism in the early 1990s, but the Taliban of 1992 was not the Taliban of 1996. And in the early 1990s Osama bin Laden was known simply as an influential and extremely wealthy man from a family in the construction business. He was not exiled from Saudi Arabia until 1990 and did not permanently move to Jalalabad until 1996. (Bin Laden had previously lived in Afghanistan when he fought against the Soviets in the early 1980s and later resided in Peshawar for part of 1986.)
Neither did the United States have much influence on many key developments in the region. Benazir Bhutto’s difficulties as prime minister (from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996) arose partly from the fact that she had no effective control over the Pakistan military and its Afghanistan policy, an arrangement she agreed upon before becoming prime minister and later tried to alter. She was also authoritarian and vindictive (not unlike her father) and, together with her husband, corrupt beyond “acceptable” levels.359 Had she governed differently, the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan might well have played out differently.
Nor did the United States have much leverage over Saudi Arabia’s support for Sunni fundamentalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Although the United States had worked with the Saudis for many years to enhance the ability of Pakistan and the Afghan mujahedin to fight against the Soviet Union and to contain Iran’s influence and the spread of Shi’a Islam in the Middle East and southwest Asia, US and Saudi interests now diverged. The Saudis continued to favor the “fundamentalist” Sunni and Pashtun mujahedin, fearing the influence of Iran and the moderate mujahedin of the north, while the United States viewed the fundamentalists as extreme and potentially dangerous.360
Most important, the United States could not control the rivalries between the mujahedin (especially the blood rivalry between Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud, who would be assassinated on September 9, 2001) or the enmity between the fundamentalists and the more moderate mujahedin. What had united the mujahedin, as the political scientist Olivier Roy points out, had been the war against the Soviets. Once the jihad against non-Muslims ended, regional and factional disputes re-emerged. In the absence of a single compelling leader, the mujahedin were too distrustful and too jealous of each other, and the ethnic, regional, and religious differences among them were too strong for them to cooperate in the formation of a new government.
Even in the best of conditions it would have been hard to establish a stable confederation in Afghanistan. To a large degree, the history of Afghanistan during the Bush presidency was the history of the failure of the “much-romanticized Afghan Jihad” following withdrawal of Soviet forces, as former ambassador Riaz Mohammed Khan writes in his book Afghanistan and Pakistan.361
But the United States could have done better. Richard Haass admitted that the Bush administration—including his Middle East desk—mishandled the situation in Afghanistan. Haass likewise conceded that “Panama was a problem,” one they also didn’t handle “terribly well.” And Yugoslavia “clearly didn’t work out well.”362 All these countries that had once been the focus of Cold War rivalries had fallen way down on the Bush administration’s priority list—and they all suffered as a result. And with Afghanistan not being a priority, policy reverted to the existing players and existing trajectories. In an oral history interview, Haass spoke of the Bush administration’s inertia in Afghanistan: “I found it very frustrating because the CIA was so tied to various characters, and I thought they were extremely slow to transition from the anti-Soviet basis for policy to a post-Soviet basis.”363
By contrast, China was a high priority for the Bush administration and the focus of intensive, highly disciplined analysis and strategic planning by the president and his national security advisor—although the results here, too, were far from an unequivocal success.