Chapter Forty
TERROR
Every presidency has its moments of stark clarity. One of Bill Clinton’s naked moments before history’s gaze came nine months after he left the office. The former president was on a speaking tour in Australia when the first plane struck the World Trade Center. As it happened, his old confidant Bruce Lindsey was just a couple of miles from the disaster. He was visiting the downtown office of Cheryl Mills, Lindsey’s former colleague in the White House counsel’s office and herself one of the Clinton family’s most trusted aides. They quickly called Clinton to tell him about what seemed to be a terrible and freakish accident.
As they were speaking, Lindsey suddenly exclaimed, “My God! A second plane has hit the tower!”
All over America, people experienced similar moments of horror and bewilderment. On the other side of the world, Clinton shared the horror but not the bewilderment. He reached his conclusion in an instant. “Bin Laden did this,” he said with disgust, while the sound of sirens rose in the New York streets outside Mills’s office.
In a day of countless tragedies, Clinton’s reaction that morning hinted at still another. As president, he perceived acutely the threat of terrorism. He had spent his final two years in office focused intently on the threat of Osama bin Laden. Little wonder that he scarcely needed to think before realizing that the Saudi exile was the man behind the great crime of September 11, 2001. Yet in his time in power Clinton never succeeded in conveying the urgency he felt. He sat atop a government populated with subordinates who did not embrace—or responded inadequately to—his understanding of the danger. He stood before a citizenry that slumbered while this danger grew, and could hardly be roused by a president who was himself conflicted about how to respond.
Like many tragedies, this one was laced with irony. One thought back to five years earlier, as Clinton and Dick Morris spent a whimsical Sunday evening playing a historical parlor game, speculating where he would someday rank among the presidents. Only leaders who govern in times of great conflict can vault to the first tier, Morris gently told his client. Yet even then a mortal conflict was building, its early signs visible even as its dimensions were still obscure.
The conflict with Islamic terrorism was a clash of ideologies just as surely as World War II or the Cold War had been. A world of modernity and pluralism, in which people embraced tolerance and accepted the unfathomable distance between God and man, ended the century on what seemed like a triumphant note. In truth, it was in an escalating war with a world of absolutism and violent faith. These new prophets believed themselves enfranchised by God in the same way that Nazis and Bolsheviks earlier in the century believed themselves enfranchised by history and, like fanatics of all eras, felt certain the killings they sponsored served a noble end.
These two worlds had found emblematic leaders in Clinton and bin Laden—one man in the Oval Office, his adversary shuffling between high desert camps in Afghanistan. The contest pitted a man of diverse purposes and vagrant attention against a man of single-minded purpose. One man had an instinctual commitment to moderation and peace, the other an instinctual commitment to zealotry and violence. Clinton was by no means naÏve about human character and its darker corners. He had grown up in a region laboring under the yoke of racism, and had seen brutish behavior in his own home. Yet Clinton had emerged from his circumstances with a belief in the essential benevolence of human nature and indeed of history itself. In a characteristically American way, he saw the planet’s story flowing broadly from dark to light, toward ever greater prosperity and tolerance. These convictions—the opposite of the absolutists’ creed—shaped his approach to the world in most arenas, including the problem of Islamic terrorism.
These pages are not the home for a comprehensive discussion of the Clinton record on terrorism. The aim instead is to suggest the common threads that tied his approach to this problem to the larger story of his presidency. In the four years since he left office, the argument about Clinton’s role in confronting terrorism centrally occupied two major governmental inquiries, both of which produced thousands of pages of documentary evidence and conclusions. The debate has been further enriched by numerous memoirs and journalistic investigations. This vast record tells a complicated story. It showsa president through the 1990s growing steadily more aware of the terrorist threat, and responding with policies that devoted substantially more money and effort to the challenge. Those policies yielded some successes. The catastrophe of September 11, in any event, cannot be placed principally on a former president’s ledger. Still, the record shows that all during Clinton’s time in office, the terrorist threat grew steadily. The response of the federal government did not grow with commensurate effectiveness. The understanding among most Americans that they were living in a dangerous new age grew hardly at all. A leader’s task is to perceive the character of one’s times, describe it in vivid terms, and summon people to meet the challenges. As the twin towers burned that day, this aspect of Clinton’s leadership could only be judged a failure.
This judgment should be rendered with restraint. Few people—and very few among Clinton’s partisan and ideological critics—viewed terrorism on September 10, 2001, with the vivid comprehension that they would the next morning. Even more, no one can know where paths not taken might have led. The principal indictment against Clinton’s terrorism record is that he did not give preeminence to the fight against bin Laden and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that gave him and his al Qaeda network safe haven. Instead, Clinton let this fight compete with and often fall subordinate to other priorities. But those other priorities were hardly casual affairs. Clinton reasonably perceived the bin Laden menace as linked to two other urgent problems in a troubled neighborhood: the challenge of fashioning peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and preventing the escalation of a frightening conflict between two nuclear-armed foes, Pakistan and India. For reasons of both strategy and temperament, Clinton gravitated to the task of waging peace in these places more than he did to the task of waging war against bin Laden.
Clinton’s terrorism record bore all the signatures of his leadership style as it had emerged from his earliest days in office. One reason Clinton was a survivor is that he lived by an ethic of contingency and improvisation. By no means did he see himself this way. He regarded himself as a strategic thinker, pursuing large goals with clear principles. As a practical matter, however, his goals were so spacious, and his principles so often in tension with one another, that governance and political survival were usually matters of day-by-day maneuver. Here was a president who came into office leaving both the spenders and the deficit hawks wondering which side he was really on, deep down. Amid this ambiguity he maneuvered to one of his administration’s greatest successes. He was also a man who resisted opportunities to dispatch the Paula Jones controversy while it was still a nuisance. Here the preference for ambiguity and improvisation carried him to disaster. Now, his presidency nearing its close, contingency and improvisation were again his guideposts as he pondered the problem of Osama bin Laden. Clinton wanted the man dead or in American custody, if the right opportunity arose. But as he contemplated the risks this pursuit demanded, there were always reasons to wait for a better day.
These reasons seemed all the more compelling in the aftermath of Clinton’s first and boldest stroke against bin Laden and his network, the August 1998 missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan. These strikes missed bin Laden, and ignited controversy over whether the White House had been right to strike the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which it maintained—on disputed evidence—was involved in the production of chemical weapons. The failure of that strike did not end the desire to kill bin Laden. With a series of memorandums of notification, Clinton sought to steadily expand the authority under which the United States would be justified in killing or capturing bin Laden in a covert action or a direct assault. Two navy submarines were on permanent station on the shores of Pakistan, able to land a cruise missile anywhere in Afghanistan within six hours of a White House order. Even so, the disappointment of that first strike—and the speculation it inspired over whether an embattled president was acting in part to draw attention away from his sex scandal and imminent impeachment—did chasten Clinton and his chief subordinates. The national commission investigating the 9/11 attacks perceived “a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against bin Laden.”
There were several such future decisions, some of which prompted agonizing deliberations at the White House, all of which ultimately were made against another attempt. Clinton knew the threat had not receded. Though he rarely mentioned bin Laden’s name in public—not wanting to raise his international profile any further—he began receiving frequent reports specifically about bin Laden after the embassy bombings. Several times a week, the intelligence briefings given to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger would include the latest information about the al Qaeda network, and the most provocative reports would also go directly to Clinton in his own PDB—the president’s daily briefing. Clinton was an avid consumer of intelligence, though he generally preferred to get it in written form, so he could assimilate it on his own schedule, rather than the oral briefings that some other presidents have preferred. On December 4, 1998, a Friday while the impeachment controversy was still churning, the PDB included a particularly alarming item. “SUBJECT: Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” Noting that some members of al Qaeda had received hijack training, the memo asserted that the apparent aim was to hold hostages in order to demand the release of terrorists in U.S. custody. These included Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, a car bombing just five weeks after Clinton took office in 1993. (Yousef and his confederates were not then linked directly to bin Laden and al Qaeda, but they later would be.)
Amid these alarms, from time to time the CIA also would bring promising information to the White House: intelligence about bin Laden’s expected whereabouts. Each time, these reports would prompt debate about whether the information was reliable enough to allow another attempt to kill him with cruise missiles. These decisions were made vexing by multiple layers of uncertainty. The first was the fragmentary nature of intelligence itself. The CIA often produced information about where bin Laden had been, or even where they thought he might be at a given moment. But information about where he would be next—to allow the several hours to land a missile—was rare, and even then was freighted with speculation and doubt. Berger was of the view, shared by Clinton, that to attempt to kill bin Laden and fail would only make the leader stronger and more attractive to many eyes in the Islamic world. And if a strike also killed innocent civilians, as was probable in any strike, the backlash against the United States across the world could be severe.
Clinton was keenly sensitive to this last factor, for both strategic and humane reasons. Once, he later explained, he rejected an option for missile strikes on Kandahar, Afghanistan, upon learning that its chance of killing bin Laden was 40 percent, at a compound where many families lived. “I could just imagine the news report: ‘US bombs Kandahar, hundreds of women and children killed; Bin Laden press conference to follow,’ ” Clinton said.
Clinton’s caution on this and other matters echoed through the bureaucracy, even in ways that he apparently did not intend. An example was the question of whether the president had authorized covert action that would allow Afghan tribes working with the Central Intelligence Agency to kill bin Laden if a capture operation was deemed infeasible. Clinton and Sandy Berger, as they later testified, believed that the president had signed a memorandum of notification on Christmas Eve 1998 that made clear their intent: They wanted bin Laden stopped, and would have been quite satisfied if CIA-supported Afghans did the job by bullet rather than by capture. Yet the White House’s evident squeamishness about anything that might be interpreted as a presidentially authorized assassination remained obvious to the Central Intelligence Agency. Years later, both CIA director George Tenet and others in the agency testified to the 9/11 commission that it was their clear understanding that there was no authority to kill bin Laden except in the context of a genuine capture attempt.
Little wonder there was confusion. Two months later, in February 1999, Clinton was presented with a nearly identical memorandum of notification extending the new rules—kill bin Laden, don’t worry about a capture—to the Northern Alliance insurgents who for years had been battling the Taliban. Clinton took his own pen to the draft and softened the language to make it more ambiguous. Later, the former president testified that he had no recollection of this episode. His editing might indeed have been done with little conscious deliberation; his discomfort with violence and his political sensitivity about being perceived in the Islamic world as personally responsible for the killing of bin Laden were so ingrained as to be automatic.
No covert operation ever reached the point that the language in Clinton’s memorandums was given a real-world test. But the discomfort radiating from the White House was itself one reason that the sporadic efforts to have Afghan locals carry out the deed against bin Laden never reached full flower.
By no means should Clinton’s caution be confused with complacency.
Far from averting his gaze from terrorism, as some critics later contended, Clinton was at an intellectual level deeply drawn to the issue. There was a professorial bent to his approach to the presidency. He believed—quite rightly—that one of his strengths was an ability to explain complicated subjects in ways that ordinary citizens could understand. He loved holding forth on the wondrous new possibilities of globalization, which trade and immigration and the Internet made possible, but he rarely failed to warn audiences that these changes also carried a “dark side.”
Clinton was drawn to the subject mostly as a matter of authentic conviction. “Terrorism is the enemy of our generation, and we must prevail,” he declared at George Washington University on August 5, 1996, within days after the explosion of a pipe bomb marred the Atlanta Olympic Games, and a TWA jumbo jet disintegrated off the Long Island coast, a disaster that was originally presumed to be the work of Iranian terrorists. He observed presciently, “I want to make it clear to the American people that while we can defeat terrorists, it will be a long time before we defeat terrorism.”
He was also drawn to the subject as a matter of politics. In an age when activist government was on the defensive, terrorism offered an opportunity to make the case for a robust federal role in meeting the problems of a new age. Clinton regularly chided Gingrich’s Republican majority for responding with insufficient haste in passing measures to increase funding and expand law enforcement power to combat emerging terrorist threats.
Finally, Clinton was drawn to the subject as a matter of intellectual imagination. In 1998 the president was transfixed upon reading a fiction thriller with a disturbingly realistic premise. Richard Preston’s The Cobra Event depicts a madman terrorizing New York City with a genetically engineered virus. Not long after, the president gave an interview to the New York Times in which he explained his obsession with the new terrorist threat: “But to me, it’s money well spent. And if there is never an incident, nobody would be happier than me 20 years from now if the same critics would be able to say, ‘Oh, see, Clinton was a kook; nothing happened.’ I would be the happiest man on Earth. I would be the happiest man on Earth. If they could say, ‘He over-exaggerated it; nothing happened. All he did was make a bunch of jobs for scientists and build the Pentagon budget,’ I would be elated 20 years from now to be subject to that criticism because it would mean that nothing happened and in no small measure because of the efforts we’ve made.”
Alas, Clinton hardly anticipated the line of criticism. But his heartfelt words that day suggested a paradox: He had the mind of an activist, but this intellect was harnessed to a governing style that was marked by a certain curious passivity. One of the people who noticed this paradox was the chief official dealing with terrorism on the National Security Council. Richard A. Clarke, a career government official with a fixation on terrorism that many colleagues thought obsessive, was deeply impressed by Clinton’s mind. But on several occasions he puzzled at the way Clinton seemed to issue his commands—an odd combination of complacency and deference to the subordinates who were supposed to be deferential to him. “Clinton would make requests, and just assume these were being done, or that the people around him knew best,” Clarke later recalled. “Perhaps that’s a reasonable thing for a president to expect.” But the reality, as Clarke well knew, was that in government nothing really happened unless somebody at the top was riding herd and imposing his will on the bureaucracy, which would otherwise continue to follow its own institutional interests and rhythms.
Clarke’s method was simply not Clinton’s style. Even when Clinton had strong convictions, he could yield with surprising ease in the face of bureaucratic objections or competing interests. People concerned foremost about terrorism felt it was imperative to use intelligence and technological means to disrupt terrorist finances by covertly freezing suspect accounts. Robert Rubin at Treasury protested that the United States could not in any way be seen as undermining the international financial system, and the proposal died.
Clinton regularly pressed for more imaginative military options against bin Laden, including use of U.S. commandos to make a strike. This would have given more flexibility than launching cruise missiles from hundreds of miles offshore, and more reliability than employing local tribes to covertly do American dirty work. To General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the late 1990s after the retirement of John Shalikashvili, Clinton once said excitedly, “You know, it would scare the shit out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.”
But Shelton and Defense Secretary William Cohen patiently explained that such an operation was high risk and not very practical. The military nearly always had such objections at hand for things that ran against its preferred customs and priorities, and they were usually sensible in any given case. Cumulatively, they represented a refusal to carry out Clinton’s plea for more urgency and more options. Rather than keep pushing, Clinton withdrew.
The most vivid example of Clinton’s willingness to yield rather than confront obstacles within his own government was also the most inexcusable. The relationship between the White House and the FBI—and specifically between Clinton and director Louis Freeh—had turned rancid in the mid-1990s. By the late 1990s, this dysfunction was having serious and adverse consequences on national security. Both Clinton and Freeh regarded themselves as vigilant defenders against the problem of terror, and each regarded the other as thwarting his efforts through arrogance or incompetence. In particular, Freeh believed that the White House was letting its desire for a rapprochement with Iran stall the pursuit of justice for a terrible truck bombing in 1996 that killed nineteen U.S. service personnel at the Khobar Towers military barracks in Saudi Arabia. (Clinton indeed hoped to improve relations with Iran and nudge forward a moderation of the radical theocracy that ruled the country, but he maintained this wish did not hinder the search for justice over Khobar Towers. In any event, Clinton’s desire was frustrated, as what looked like tentative signs of moderation in Iran proved ultimately to be a mirage.) From the White House vantage point, Freeh was increasingly a renegade force within the executive branch. He rarely shared information and was a sullen or absent presence from White House policy meetings. He made only the barest nod to being responsive, much less subordinate, to Attorney General Janet Reno.
On this last question—the problem of FBI accountability—Freeh was emphatically in the wrong. The FBI director’s traditional independence was for the purpose of preserving the integrity of criminal investigations, not for absenting himself from the coordination of federal policy or ignoring a president’s priorities. In the case of terrorism, moreover, better coordination and more effective oversight were sorely needed. For whatever his strengths in some arenas—Freeh was by most accounts a dedicated law enforcer—the record suggests he was overwhelmed as an administrator. The official inquiries in the wake of 9/11 found the defense against terrorism was undermined in the FBI by poor information-sharing both within the agency and between other relevant agencies, antiquated computers and other technology, and rampant diversion of resources intended for counterterrorism to other purposes as local offices deemed fit.
Clinton and his aides have offered as a defense the argument that Freeh had so devoutly cultivated Republicans in Congress, and so effectively positioned himself in the public mind as a watchdog against alleged Clinton corruption, that the president had no ability to either rein in the director or dismiss him without creating a Watergate-style firestorm. Ultimately, this was no defense at all. Freeh’s suspicions to the contrary, Clinton was not a corrupt public servant. But, on matters ranging from Whitewater to fund-raising to Monica Lewinsky, he had followed a pattern of limited disclosure, evasive or false public explanations, and shabby personal conduct that made suspicion far from unreasonable. It would not have been possible for an FBI director to hold hostage a president with a scrupulous personal reputation. Nor should a responsible president have allowed himself to be held hostage—no matter the firestorm that would have resulted. The president’s refusal to assert the authority that belonged to him over the FBI and insist that the agency become a fully cooperative partner in the campaign against terrorism was a critical abdication of leadership.
As Clarke, who despised Freeh and regarded him as a serious obstacle to an effective counterterrorism policy, later concluded, “He should have fired Freeh and just taken the shit it would have caused.”
A more capable FBI or more creative thinking at the Joint Chiefs might well have yielded important tactical improvements in the fight against bin Laden, but these would not have been a remedy to the essential strategic problem. This was the existence of the radical Islamic regime in Afghanistan known as the Taliban, which harbored bin Laden and his training camps. If an outlaw regime was the fundamental problem, the critics asked, why did Clinton not address it in a fundamental way?
One part of the answer is that he would have found precious little sentiment for doing so from any quarter—not within the administration, nor within the Congress, nor among American allies around the world. In the Middle East and through the Muslim nations of Central Asia, an aggressive U.S. effort to topple the Taliban prior to September 11 likely would have produced a backlash more worrisome than the original problem.
The main part of the answer, though, is that Clinton and his top advisers did not regard the Taliban and its links to al Qaeda as the fundamental issue. It was secondary to the problem one country over—in Pakistan. The Islamabad government, particularly its military and intelligence services, was a key supporter of the Taliban regime. Pakistan was a historic ally of the United States, but relations had been troubled for many years, mostly over the problem of weapons proliferation. A U.S. effort to intervene in Afghanistan, the White House and State Department believed, would have turned trouble into crisis. This was not an attractive prospect under any circumstances, but it became much more frightening in May 1998. That was when India, Pakistan’s bitter enemy, surprised Clinton and the rest of the world by conducting underground nuclear tests. This was a critical step in turning its long-standing theoretical capability into a working nuclear arsenal. In a series of urgent meetings and phone calls, Clinton pleaded with Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, not to reciprocate by letting the Pakistani military perform nuclear tests of its own. These appeals were to no avail; Pakistan tested. Suddenly, the rivalry between India and Pakistan, which previously had been a bothersome regional issue, was a global security problem of the first order—a contest between two belligerent nuclear-armed powers in which the actual use of such weapons in a conflict was all too easy to imagine.
Clinton’s efforts to manage this problem in the late years of his presidency merit attention, both as context for the terrorism issue and as an illumination of his leadership style. The record on bin Laden revealed a leader recoiling from a conflict that deserved escalation in order to defeat a menace before it grew. The record on the India-Pakistan conflict showed a man reveling in the task of conflict de-escalation. As anyone who had known Clinton from a young age could have testified, he was by talent and temperament a peacemaker. It was in his nature to get along and try to coax others to do the same. In the spring and summer of 1999, he had occasion to put these traits to use.
For fifty years, India and Pakistan had staked competing claims to the province of Kashmir. This was no mere argument; there were constant firefights along a tense line of control between two militaries, and there had been three full wars over the decades. Over time, however, the conflict had settled into certain routines and expectations. One of them was that each winter the militaries would draw back from their most forward positions, high along ridgelines in the Himalayas, which were difficult to maintain amid blizzards and avalanches. It was understood that both armies would return in the spring, and in the interim neither side would try to take advantage of the seasonal change in deployment patterns.
In the winter of 1999, however, Pakistan violated this custom by moving Kashmiri militants and regular army units into the evacuated Indian positions above the small Kashmiri town of Kargil. The Pakistani cheating was curious, as Sharif previously had been regarded in Washington as a benign force who had responded productively to moves by Indian prime minister Atal Vajpayee to begin a thaw in relations with Pakistan. Why would Sharif do something like this? The answer, it seemed evident, was that Sharif was only nominally in control of his own government, and that the Pakistani military—led now by General Pervez Musharraf—was really steering the conflict. Outraged, India fought back hard, and by the spring a furious military campaign—replete with air strikes and artillery fire—was under way. Confronted with the prospect of a full-scale war that Pakistan was likely to lose, in late June a panicked Sharif appealed to Clinton for help. Clinton had to intervene to prevent a catastrophe, the prime minister pleaded, proposing that he come to Washington immediately to meet with Clinton and discuss a negotiated resolution of the conflict. This was an awkward request. The administration did indeed want a peaceful settlement, but Pakistan was plainly the culpable party in this dispute. Clinton replied that he was happy to see Sharif, but there would be nothing to talk about unless Pakistan was prepared to unilaterally withdraw forces back to the original line of control. Sharif, Clinton suggested, needed to think hard before coming. Without committing to withdrawal, Sharif said he was on his way. The summit between Clinton and Sharif was scheduled at Blair House, across the street from the White House, on the Fourth of July. As Sharif traveled, the situation grew more dire. For one thing, the prime minister had brought his wife and children with him on the plane. This was a clear indication that his grip on power was so tenuous that he might be overthrown before he could return. Even worse, the administration received intelligence indicating that Pakistani military forces were preparing their nuclear missiles for possible use. On the streets outside the White House, hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians and tourists were heading in droves on a sun-drenched day for the National Mall for the annual Independence Day festivities. Inside the White House, Clinton’s briefing for the Sharif meeting began with a dire comment from Sandy Berger. This meeting might be the most important of his presidency, the national security adviser warned, since hundreds of thousands of lives would surely be lost in the increasingly plausible event that the India-Pakistan conflict went nuclear. Clinton had a delicate balance to strike. He needed to push Sharif to withdraw his troops, while offering enough dignity and political cover to avert a revolution in Pakistan and allow Sharif to actually implement a withdrawal when he returned home.
Sharif appeared for his session with Clinton as a pathetic figure—plainly aghast at how events were hurtling out of his control, but just as plainly hobbled by his own weakness. Clinton was warned not to allow Sharif to press for a one-on-one meeting. Bruce Riedel, the National Security Council’s expert on the region and the official note-taker, was to always remain present, lest Sharif or his more belligerent ministers later try to claim Clinton made commitments that he did not. Likewise, Clinton was urged not to speak too candidly around the Pakistani foreign minister, since this official would leak everything to the Pakistani military intelligence service, which was hostile to the prime minister. Clinton began by showing the prime minister a political cartoon from the Chicago Tribune depicting Indian and Pakistani soldiers fighting atop two nuclear bombs. This showed the real danger, Clinton told his guests.
The meeting did not start well. Sharif began as Riedel had earlier predicted he would, with a long rote defense of Pakistani grievances over Kashmir, and an admonishment to Clinton that if he had spent just one percent of the amount of time on this conflict as he did on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the whole problem would have long since been solved. Clinton responded that the United States was happy to help Pakistan but could do so only after a full and immediate withdrawal. It was essential, he added, that the world believe Pakistan got no reward for its nuclear threats, otherwise the signal would go out around the world that this was the best way to command the attention of the world’s sole remaining superpower. “I’m not—and the Indians are not—going to let you get away with blackmail, and I’ll not permit any characterization of this meeting that suggests I’m giving in to blackmail.”
The meeting was stuck in a sullen and inconclusive mood when Clinton reached for a historical analogy. The president had been reading military historian John Keegan’s book on World War I, he explained. The India-Pakistan conflict reminded him of 1914—both sides drifting thoughtlessly toward catastrophe. If Sharif was moved, he could not show it in this larger meeting. Sharif asked for time alone with Clinton, who replied that everyone else could go but Riedel had to stay to keep a record of the conversation. Sharif, sounding by turns confused and afraid, pleaded with Clinton to allow Pakistan some kind of concession in exchange for its withdrawal. Otherwise, he insisted, the military and Islamic fundamentalists at home would revolt, and this would be his last meeting with the American president. Ominously, Sharif seemed caught unaware when Clinton mentioned the advanced state of Pakistani nuclear preparations—quite likely he had known nothing of it. Referring to the Cuban missile crisis, which Clinton remembered well from his own teenage days, he started to tell Sharif that if even one missile fired . . . The prime minister interrupted to finish the sentence: “it would be a catastrophe.”
Soon it became Clinton’s turn to do the imploring. Sharif had requested this meeting, Clinton reminded him, fully aware that the price was unilateral withdrawal, and the Pakistani’s intransigence was setting the session up for failure. If that happened, Clinton was fully prepared to tell the world what had occurred. Then he linked the administration’s foremost priority in the region, averting nuclear catastrophe, with its secondmost, stopping bin Laden. Despite promises, Pakistan had still done nothing to help capture bin Laden. To the contrary, Pakistani intelligence remained supportive of the Taliban and al Qaeda. The meeting showed Clinton in a kaleidoscopic display of different moods and tactics. One moment brought flattery, as he praised Sharif for his earlier gestures toward peace, another brought a raised voice, red-faced anger at the way Sharif had cornered Clinton and himself in such a dangerous place. Above all, the president conveyed sympathy for the political dilemma Sharif was facing, while making clear that he too had political requirements. It was Clinton using every instrument in his toolbox of persuasion.
None of them worked at first. Sharif’s mind was elsewhere. He denied that he had ordered the nuclear preparations, but explained that he was worried not just for his job but for his very life in Pakistan. The two men then took a break. During this time Clinton placed a call to Indian prime minister Vajpayee. Deeply angry at Sharif, who he felt had betrayed him, and suspicious of Clinton’s involvement, Vajpayee responded stonily. When the call was over, the president needed to rest from the day’s tension. He lay down on a couch and closed his eyes.
The day ended happily. During the meeting Berger, Riedel, and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott had crafted a proposed joint U.S.-Pakistani press statement that announced the desired U.S. conclusion. The statement called for the prime minister to agree to an immediate withdrawal behind the line of control, urged a ceasefire once the withdrawal was complete, called for the resumption of the India-Pakistan peace process, and took note of Clinton’s long-standing plans to visit the region. That last item was important. Pakistan had long been eager for the prestige of a presidential visit. Sharif read the statement several times slowly, staring at a precipice in either direction. In the end, he decided the risks of retreat were less than those of confrontation. After some minor tinkering with the language, Sharif accepted the statement. Clinton was effusive. They had tested their relationship this day, he told his visitor, and passed.
Things did not end so well for Sharif. He returned to Pakistan to implement the withdrawal, but within just three months he was overthrown—by General Musharraf. He spent the next year in prison before going into exile.
The Pakistan relationship continued to be tugged by competing alternatives after Musharraf’s arrival. Within several months, Clinton would need to decide whether to travel to Pakistan during a tour of South Asia that would take him to India. One school of thought said that Pakistan should not be honored with a visit so soon after a coup d’état, and after so little progress had been made on the twin goals of counterproliferation and counterterrorism. The consensus on Clinton’s foreign policy team, particularly Berger and Talbott, was that a brief stop in Islamabad after a much longer tour in India would be productive. This was emphatically Clinton’s preference. He nearly always wanted engagement over isolation. In the end, the biggest obstacle was not diplomatic but practical. The Secret Service pleaded against a Pakistan trip, warning in the strongest language they had ever used with Clinton that he risked assassination. Two weeks before the South Asia trip was set to begin, a group gathered in the Map Room to discuss the trade-offs. Berger said he recognized the merits of the Secret Service’s caution but on balance thought the risk was worth taking. Clinton agreed. Then he added, with a wicked smile, “But you, Berger, are definitely coming with me.”
Clinton did go to Islamabad, though he left his wife and daughter behind for this portion of the South Asia trip. He also resorted to subterfuge. He landed fast and low in a small, white unmarked jet—after the officially marked air force plane landed and a man who looked like Clinton hopped out, surrounded by a retinue of Secret Service agents who also hopped out. There were five black limousines, instead of the usual two, as the motorcade headed from the airport into town, an added measure to foil would-be assassins.
The president’s meeting with Musharraf proceeded by rote—right down to its unsatisfying conclusion. Nuclear proliferation and the conflict with India dominated the agenda, though Clinton repeated the long-standing American plea for more cooperation in pressuring Pakistan’s Afghan allies into cracking down on terrorism and turning over bin Laden. “I offered him the moon,” Clinton later recalled, “in terms of better relations with the United States, if he’d help us get bin Laden and deal with another issue or two.”
Musharraf responded with bland and noncommittal bromides. And Clinton’s frustrations continued. He well knew his administration was not responding adequately. The threat remained obvious to him, as indeed it would have been obvious to anyone who read the papers and had the imagination to contemplate that a group which wanted to destroy U.S. embassies in Africa was not likely to stop there. In February 2000, Berger sent the president a memo outlining what was being done on al Qaeda. Clinton sent it back with a scrawl across the top—unsatisfactory, he wrote.
But the old obstacles—bureaucratic sluggishness, competing priorities, just plain bad luck—stayed in place. There was a brief rush of excitement in the late summer when the CIA brought back results from a new tool—an unmanned Predator flying drone which could beam back intelligence images and ultimately be armed with weapons. CIA director George Tenet played a two-minute video clip for Clinton and Berger, showing images of a tall bearded man, fitting bin Laden’s description, surrounded by a large security team crossing the street to a mosque. But the Predator’s promise in trials ended for the balance of the Clinton term when one of them crashed.
Then, on October 12, 2000, the enemy struck again. Seventeen American sailors died when a boat loaded with explosives drove into the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. The probability that this was the work of bin Laden was immediately recognized in the White House. But there was no retaliation, nor effort to reorder al Qaeda’s place among U.S. strategic priorities, as would happen after the attack on American soil now just eleven months away. Clinton and Berger later testified that they would have taken action, but the intelligence services could not establish with sufficient certainty during Clinton’s last weeks in office who was responsible for the attack on the Cole. After he left office, the initial suspicions about bin Laden’s involvement were confirmed. At the time, it seemed to some people laboring elsewhere in the administration that the White House was not particularly eager for confirmation. There was no desire to confront the implications—and launch a military campaign—in the closing days of the 2000 presidential campaign, or in the weeks that followed between election day and the administration’s exit. Clinton believed that a central cause of Islamic rage was the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A new war in Afghanistan would no doubt set back the search for peace there. Clinton was determined to use the falling light of his presidency to keep searching.