Inside The War Room

(9 of 10)

At first the waiting was easy. Americans felt a sense of payback, which goosed the President's already soaring approval ratings. Bush's plan to drop yellow food packages along with all the ordnance was designed to reinforce the message that this was not a war on the Afghan people. Some Islamic extremists took to the street and torched effigies of the President, but by and large the Arab world, not to mention Saddam Hussein, was quiet. Bush, however, was impatient. The special forces charged with pinpointing targets for bomber pilots were slow to take up their positions. And the Northern Alliance, on which the CIA's Tenet had staked so much of his plan, looked as if it was flaking out. Its leader, General Mohammed Qassim Fahim, seemed more interested in taking empty hills than in fighting the enemy. "The truth is that Fahim for the longest time wasn't moving," says a White House official. "He wasn't moving west into Kunduz, and he wasn't moving south into Kabul."

At a mid-October meeting of his war council, Bush began the way he always does, by calling members into account on previous promises. It was Tommy Franks' turn to be on the spot. The Centcom chief had promised several days earlier that by now special forces would have made it into Afghanistan from Uzbekistan, providing the crucial targeting information necessary to wipe out the Taliban's frontline positions. "Has it happened?" Bush asked. Franks did not have the right answer. The weather had been poor, and the U.S. spotters were stranded on the ground in Uzbekistan. The State Department was having difficulty getting permission to use Uzbek territory as a staging site. And the CIA was still seeking assurances from Fahim that U.S. soldiers would be integrated and protected. "We were marrying a First World force with a Fourth World army," says Secretary of State Powell. "It was taking time to connect." Bush, aides said, was unsatisfied and told his team to pick up the pace. Within days, the State Department had pushed Uzbek President Islam Karimov into relenting, and the CIA had worked out its differences with Fahim. After clearing it with Rumsfeld, Franks gave the order to bomb the front lines of the Taliban.

Soon thereafter, things started to click on the battlefield. The special forces were not just on the ground; they were also blending in, riding horses in a cavalry charge while using handheld lasers to guide bombers to their targets. The Pentagon began to bomb the Taliban front lines, north of Kabul--the step that got Fahim moving. As a White House official put it later, "We said, 'O.K., if you won't move till we start hitting targets in front of you, we'll hit targets in front of you.' And we started bombing the valley."

But back in the U.S. it was hard to tell that anything had changed. Pictures of errant missiles and bombed-out civilian targets were starting to fill the airwaves, and the Pentagon could respond only with black-and-white shots of craters being blown in the desert. Making it worse were Afghan opposition leaders who mocked the U.S. bombing as useless. Republicans on the Hill were pressing the White House for action. Murmurs about a "quagmire" and references to Vietnam were growing. The lead story in the Sunday New York Times on Oct. 28 said it all: ALLIES PREPARING FOR A LONG FIGHT AS TALIBAN DIG IN.