Inside The War Room

(5 of 10)

Now, almost two years later, Bush needed no help remembering the general's name. Behind a huge pane of bulletproof glass that Secret Service agents had wheeled in front of the window of the presidential suite at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City, Bush was finally sitting down for his first face-to-face meeting with Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf. "You were in an extraordinarily difficult position," Bush told him, describing his guest's decision to join the anti-Taliban coalition a month before. "And you made the right choice." Musharraf, however, wanted something in return, something that would signal long-term support for Islamabad. Bush, he said, should approve the delivery of F-16 fighter jets that had been held up after the U.S. applied sanctions to Pakistan almost a decade ago. "We're not ready to talk about F-16s right now," Bush replied. "But this is a long friendship."

Bush was leaving the door open, but Musharraf was driving at a larger point. "How do we know the United States won't abandon us?" he asked. "You tell your people," said Bush, leaning forward and raising his finger as if testing the wind, "that the President looked you in the eye and told you that he would stick with you."

Bush came into office without his father's overseas Rolodex or fascination with the globe. He had traveled little, and though his family had belonged to the internationalist wing of the G.O.P. for years, his conservative bent gave his foreign policy instincts a marked unilateralist swagger. Until the war, Bush's most notable actions in foreign affairs had had a controversial, go-it-alone feel--developing missile defenses, withdrawing from the Kyoto treaty on global warming, undermining peace talks between the Koreas--and had earned him the unease of allies across Europe and the world.

After 9/11, some of Bush's starchy unilateralism and a lot of his indifference to foreign affairs went out the window. Bush had to have Pakistan in his corner if he was to isolate bin Laden. The country's 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan had to be shut to keep al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters from fleeing across it--no easy task, and a goal that wasn't achieved. And the Pentagon would need Pakistan's airspace for military overflights and its bases for refueling planes and staging assault troops and rescue operations. "You just look at the area, and you think, 'Well, there is one country that we really must have to make this work,'" says Rice of the war council's early deliberations. "And that's Pakistan."

Bush was at a disadvantage with Musharraf from the start. In eight months in office, he had never spoken to the general. But on the night of the attacks, in what aides said later was the key diplomatic decision of the war, Bush told Secretary of State Powell that Pakistan would have to choose sides, just like everyone else. "They're either with us or against us," Bush said. Asked later how he knew he could count on Musharraf to be an ally, Bush told TIME, "Because I trust Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld."