That harrowing day two weeks ago is the last time Colin Powell was out of touch with George W. Bush. The gulf-war hero who on Sept. 10 seemed the loneliest moderate in Bush’s right-leaning White House, the sole internationalist in a crowd of America-firsters, is at center stage of the country’s new war. He’s likely to remain there. Cool under fire, the quintessential crisis manager, Powell finds himself the go-to guy, joined by critical players who once seemed ideological foes–especially Vice President Dick Cheney, a gulf-war comrade who also knows a thing or two about building multinational coalitions.
Powell is holding off a slew of hard-liners pressing for tougher, broader action, starting with a strike on Saddam Hussein to accompany the imminent attacks on Afghanistan. The secretary fears this could shatter his efforts to build a worldwide antiterror coalition. The aim would be to pool intelligence on terrorists with “global reach” and to gain police cooperation, which he and another key ally, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, believe is at least as critical to cracking down as military action. It is an internal debate that could rage for months, even as the war on terrorism flashes and wanes on our TV screens.
Despite his dead-or-alive rhetoric, the president seems to be in Powell’s corner–for the moment. On an organizational level, the still-murky war is also being prosecuted with the kind of steely clarity and message control favored by the secretary of State. Absent from any formal decision-making role are Bush’s political advisers, who have sometimes muddied foreign policy by worrying over how U.S. involvement in Mideast politics might affect the Jewish vote, or by bringing the NRA into talks on a small-arms treaty. Bush’s closest aides, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, don’t take part in the key nightly “principals” meetings of Powell, Rice, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The tight focus of this core of senior advisers has enabled the administration to act quickly and decisively. In calls to more than 80 nations, Powell has helped to extract dozens of pledges that might be more difficult to get months from now, when the worldwide sympathy for America may have waned. Among the promises: to share intelligence, crack down on terrorist front organizations and allow borders to be crossed, possibly even for small, quiet raids on terror cells by U.S. Special Forces.
Washington has also won global support for strikes on Afghanistan that could begin in weeks. “The strategy is right,” says a former Pentagon planner. “Go to all the countries of the world you can manage, use the timing of this to force them to take a public position, to declare their soil inhospitable to terrorists. Even Iran has said it.” Despite quiet worries about U.S. unilateralism and some demands for deals–Arab states, for instance, want to see more U.S. pressure on Israel–support for American retaliation against Afghanistan has remained deep. Last Saturday the United Arab Emirates, which, along with Pakistan, was one of the few countries to have recognized the Taliban, announced that it had broken diplomatic relations with Afghanistan’s ruling mullahs. Even Sudan, attacked by U.S. cruise missiles in 1998 for allegedly backing bin Laden, has made terrorist arrests in recent days. Powell also received a pledge of intelligence sharing from China. To quell any doubts, NEWSWEEK has learned, U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are preparing a public white paper laying out evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in the Sept. 11 and previous attacks.
Administration sources portray a smooth-ly operating team that first clicked at a daylong series of meetings at Camp David on Sept. 15. “When you say ‘Why didn’t you go broader [than Afghanistan] at the beginning,’ I think everybody understood–and there was absolutely no division on this–that there had to be a first base,” says a senior Bush official. “As far as what you do next… it’s going to be evolving.”
But in which direction? NEWSWEEK has learned that at a two-day meeting of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, which is chaired by hard-liner Richard Perle, eminent conservatives including Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Dan Quayle and Newt Gingrich reached a consensus that Iraq should be targeted quickly after Afghanistan. “When the U.S. loses what may be more than 6,000 people, there has to be reaction so that the world clearly knows that things have changed,” Gingrich told NEWSWEEK.
Powell and his deputies believe a full-blown military strike on Baghdad would only kill many Iraqis, enrage the Arab world and probably not dispose of Saddam, who has slowly won new allies with promises of oil deals since 1991. “I don’t think Iraq was involved,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a key U.S. ally, said last week. “[Saddam] has no wish to unleash the wrath of the U.S.” Even Britain has hinted that it might not support military action against Iraq.
The strike-Iraq contingent fears American credibility will be damaged if the United States gets bogged down in Afghanistan. It also believes that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction could be used against America next. There is “a recognition that it will be very tough to get bin Laden in the rocky and mountainous terrain of Afghanistan,” said one participant in the Pentagon meetings. “There’s a feeling that we’ve got to do something that counts–and bombing some caves is not something that counts.” The world, indeed, will be watching. Asked why bin Laden finds sympathy among Arabs, a senior Arab League official said simply: “All this military buildup for one man? The Americans are making him famous. Imagine if you don’t get him.”
As the administration moves ships and planes to the region, that may be its deepest fear. The tactics for the war on the Taliban are, in the administration’s new favorite word, “evolving.” But the consensus of U.S. military planners seems to be that the campaign should begin with airstrikes that would either coerce the Taliban into handing bin Laden over or provoke the Taliban’s militias to overthrow the ruling mullahs. (The United States wants to avoid targeting them directly, so as not to inflame the Arab world.) The other objective: to destroy the Taliban’s ability to make war on the U.S.-friendly Northern Alliance. The alliance occupies a small section of Afghanistan and has at least 15,000 guerrillas, compared with perhaps 25,000 to 35,000 fighters whom the Taliban might command, including bin Laden’s core brigade of 700 to 800. A conventional U.S. ground invasion has been all but ruled out, not least because the Afghans have dozens of Stinger missiles that could take out airlift copters. “What the West shouldn’t underestimate is the ferocity of the Afghans,” says a source involved in U.S. military planning. “Their ability to be absolutely cruel is in a sense what is foreign to the United States.” In coordination with the airstrikes, Special Forces could be sent in to capture or kill bin Laden, possibly from bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where several U.S. transport planes landed last Friday. Those moves into bordering nations, coupled with Pakistan’s pledge to close its 1,500-mile border and supply intelligence, could help tighten the noose around bin Laden.
Bin Laden, however, may just as easily slip away. It’s not even clear how helpful the Northern Alliance will be, since its charismatic leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated, allegedly by bin Laden operatives, two days before the attacks on America. In one scenario, Afghanistan’s 88-year-old exiled king, Zahir Shah, who enjoys broad support, could be called upon to unite factions against the Taliban. Last Wednesday alliance officials told reporters that in the previous 24 hours the United States had asked for information on “possible targets, including airports, weapons depots, military headquarters, training camps” and on “troop positions and movements.”
Ironically, even Pakistani intelligence may not be able to help find bin Laden, thanks to Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s public declaration of unity with Washington. Says a former senior Clinton-administration official, “Musharraf basically went on TV and said, ‘Oh, Osama! The Pakistanis aren’t on your side anymore! So don’t trust any of us!’ Bin Laden is now looking around at his own people and saying, ‘I have to make different calculations about who I trust, because they sold me out’.”
CIA officials who have worked in the region say Pakistani intelligence can catch terrorists when it wants to–it handed over to the FBI Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber. As a result, Washington is plying Musharraf–who took power in a coup and a few months ago couldn’t get the U.S. president on the phone–with a broad range of support. It has pledged to end all economic sanctions, restart military-to-military contacts and free up IMF money. By this week the United States hopes to sign bilateral accords on rescheduling Pakistan’s debt relief.
If the attack on Afghanistan bogs down, Powell may have to concede ground on Iraq. Asked about which terror-supporting regimes might eventually have to be “ended,” a senior Bush official who sides with Powell wouldn’t rule out Iraq. “If a regime changes its ways, then there’s no problem… The lone exception is that we have said all along that it’s going to be very hard to have a relationship with the Iraqi regime.” Asked if that meant Iraq was next, the source said, “I’m not going to go there.”
For Powell, as for Bush, maintaining worldwide support while striking effectively will be the test of a lifetime. In the past two weeks the secretary has received messages of sympathy and support from 197 countries or foreign groups, his spokesman says. Invariably foreign ministers would begin the conversation with an expression of condolences. “The first thing he does is offer his condolences back,” says Assistant Secretary Marc Grossman. Why? Because 78 countries have people dead or missing. “It’s an unbelievable, amazing proof of globalization,” says Grossman. For now, the need to exploit that global unity means that the master multilateralist, Colin Powell, has George Bush’s ear.
