Inside The War Room

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And so on, down the line. Powell leaned heavily on his deputy and close friend Richard Armitage in dealing with Pakistan. Armitage, in turn, went for advice to Anthony Zinni, the retired Marine four-star general who had come to know Musharraf well when he had the Centcom post before Tommy Franks, general to general. Zinni assured Armitage that Musharraf could survive the upheaval that an alliance with the U.S. would cause. Musharraf, Zinni said, would "stick."

Two days after the terrorist attacks, Armitage met with Lieut. General Mahmood Ahmed, the head of Pakistani intelligence, who just happened to be in Washington. Armitage, in a tone that he himself described as scorching, dictated the U.S. terms: Seal the borders, provide overflight and basing rights, sever diplomatic relations with the Taliban, and cut off the flow of oil and gas to Kabul. In return, the U.S. would lift sanctions, encourage loans by the International Monetary Fund and--together with its friends in Europe and Asia--shower Musharraf with more financial aid than he would know how to spend. The U.S. would also quietly provide Musharraf with intelligence information about his enemies in the Pakistani government and military. "We gave him an offer, and he decided he could not refuse it," Powell said later.

Although Bush was willing to trade money and intelligence for Pakistani cooperation, aides say he initially resisted a long-term commitment to the region. Bush had long before written off nation building, with all its messy and unpredictable demands, and he was not interested in getting the U.S. mixed up in policing a postwar Central Asia. Besides, he asked, "what does this do to help me get al-Qaeda?"

Aides argued that Bush could show the Afghans and everyone else in the region that the U.S. was not going to install an occupation force or pick a puppet leader the way the Soviets had 20 years before. But the U.S. was not going to abandon Kabul either. Those combined assurances, they said, would promote stability. Slowly, Bush came around. "An end is not, you know, the demise of al-Qaeda," he told TIME. "That's not the end. The end is a stable government [in Afghanistan]."

Eventually Bush came to see Pakistan as a model for other Islamic countries to follow. Bush now envisions a bold--some would say idealistic--transformation in Islamic attitudes toward the U.S., the kind of big-vision realignment he once dismissed as mushy-headed nonsense. "Pakistan has the hope of becoming a Muslim state with which Western nations can develop good and strong relations," Bush says. His faith in the general he once could not name has become a mantra he repeats to other foreign leaders he is trying to buck up. "Musharraf was firm." Bush tells them. "He led, and then there were no protests."

THE WAR AT HOME