Inside The War Room

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Perhaps most distinctively, Bush trusts the people around him. "When military details were brought to him, he'd say, 'Don't bring this to me. I've given you a task, and I have full confidence in you to carry it out,'" says a senior U.S. military officer. "That was a big change." Tenet was so sure he had Bush's confidence that he never made the ritual offer to resign after 9/11; he didn't even apologize. And when Tenet came under fire from Republicans, Bush was there with the hoses. "We cannot be second-guessing our team," Bush told a group of lawmakers aboard Air Force One on Sept. 27, "and I'm not going to. The nation's at war. We need to encourage Congress to frankly leave the man alone. Tenet's doing a good job. And if he's not, blame me, not him."

BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Early in the administration, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld had a conversation with his boss. "A lot of people in the world had come to conclude that the United States was gun-shy, that we were risk averse," Rumsfeld told TIME. "The President and I concluded that whenever it occurred down the road that the United States was under some sort of threat or attack, the United States would be leaning forward, not back."

So everything was on the table at Camp David when the war council gathered on Sept. 15. After Tenet briefed the team on his infiltrate-the-spooks operation, General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, laid out four military options for Bush. A quick cruise-missile response was ruled out as ineffective; White House chief of staff Andy Card called this the "pound sand" alternative. Another was more or less a full-scale invasion. Two other options called for different combinations of cruise missiles, bombers, tactical air strikes and special forces, one heavier than the other. "It was pretty clear that cruise missiles and bombers we're gonna do," recalled someone who attended. "There was the discussion of boots on the ground. Pretty quickly, most everybody thinks you've gotta do it, you've gotta show that level of seriousness."

The Pentagon brass, which wasn't keen on a CIA-led operation to start with, was skeptical of the agency's main scheme: that the U.S. could put its faith--and its people--in the hands of an opposition force that had shown little skill in fighting the Taliban in the past. The Northern Alliance's charismatic leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had just been assassinated. The question wasn't whether the U.S. could buy the loyalty of the rebels but whether they would stay bought. It wasn't certain that U.S. troops would be allowed to stage in nearby Tajikistan and Uzbekistan--or whether the Russians would stand for it. To some Pentagon hard-liners, the uncertainty in the country made a more traditional ground force more appealing.

But deploying too many G.I.s, even highly trained commandos, was a risk too. The terrain could be withering in good weather, and winter was approaching. A full-scale force would heighten fears in the rest of the Muslim world about a Western war against Islam. "There was nothing on the shelf for this kind of war," says Rice.