No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

6 “THE UNITED STATES IS UNDER ATTACK”

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, began like every other day. The night before I’d dined with David Manning, Tony Blair’s foreign policy advisor, after attending the President’s meeting that day with John Howard, the prime minister of Australia.

I arrived at my office around 6:30 A.M. and read through the various news clippings, cables, and intelligence reports. There was nothing remarkable. I was to give a speech later in the day at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

I planned to make a case for missile defense, noting that we had to deal with both the low-tech terrorism threat and the high-tech missile capabilities of rogue states such as North Korea and Iran. To be fair, I did not dwell on the terrorist threat, which was being worked through the NSC system. Steve and I had talked about that and decided that he or I, or maybe the President, would give a speech when we revealed our new strategy for combating al Qaeda. Rather, I concentrated my remarks on missile defense, countering the critics who thought the President to be too focused on the missile threat.

The President was traveling that morning to Florida for an education event. Usually Steve or I traveled with him, but this was to be a short day trip and we sent the director of the Situation Room, U.S. Navy Captain Deborah Loewer, to accompany the President.

Shortly before 9:00 A.M., I was standing at my desk when my executive assistant, then U.S. Army Major Tony Crawford, came in and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. “That’s odd,” I said, thinking that it was probably a small plane that had gone off course. Not too long before, the golfer Payne Stewart had died in a crash when the cabin had depressurized and knocked the pilot unconscious. That was the kind of scenario that immediately came to mind.

A few minutes later, Tony came in and said that it was a commercial airliner that had hit the Trade Center. I got the President on the phone and told him what had happened. “That’s a strange accident,” he said. We agreed that I would be back in touch.

I went down to the Situation Room for my staff meeting. I was going around the table to hear from the senior directors when Tony burst in with a note. A second plane had hit the World Trade Center. People have told me that I said, rather calmly, “I have to go.” Maybe. But at that moment I knew that there had been a terrorist attack, and I was shaken to my core.

The Situation Room at that time (it has since been remodeled) was just a paneled conference room abutted by a kind of operations center staffed by civilians and military officers who monitored intelligence traffic and managed the phone calls for the President and the National Security Council staff. They kept in constant communication with the operations centers at the CIA and at State and with the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon.

I headed into the operations center, where phones were ringing and people were talking loudly while watching multiple television screens playing the footage from New York. I tried to reach the NSC principals. George Tenet had already gone to a safe location at Langley. Colin Powell was in Latin America, and I had a momentary scare because I thought he was in Colombia, then a hotbed of terrorism. Fortunately, he was in Peru attending a meeting of the Organization of American States. I tried to reach Don Rumsfeld but couldn’t. His phones were just ringing, I was told. I turned around and saw on the television screen that a plane had gone into the Pentagon.

Before I could do anything else, the Secret Service came and said, “Dr. Rice, you must go to the bunker. Now! Planes are hitting buildings all over Washington. The White House has got to be next.” I turned to head toward the bunker, and there was suddenly a report (a false one) that there had been a car bomb at the State Department.

The next moments passed quickly. I did stop to call my Uncle Alto and Aunt Connie in Birmingham. “There will be awful pictures from Washington,” I said. “Tell everyone I’m okay.”

Then I called the President. “I’m coming back,” he said.

“Mr. President,” I said, “stay where you are. You cannot come back here.”

Frank Miller, my trusted senior director for defense policy and arms control, was standing next to me. “Tell him he can’t come back.”

“I know,” I said. I then did something that I never did again. I raised my voice with the President and in a tone as firm as I could possibly muster, I said, “Mr. President, you cannot come back here. Washington, I mean the United States, is under attack.” He didn’t answer, and the Secret Service lifted me physically and pushed me toward the bunker.

I know the routes to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) very well. But I don’t remember how we got there that day. The first person I saw and acknowledged was the Vice President who was on the telephone with the President. I spotted Norman Mineta, the secretary of transportation and as decent a public servant as one would ever know. He had been the Democratic congressman from a district not far from my home in northern California. He is Japanese American with one of those amazing personal histories of a family that remained loyal to the United States despite despicable treatment by the U.S. government during World War II.

Norm was seated at the corner of the long table with a legal pad; he was tracking the tail numbers of aircraft! We had no idea how many planes had been designated to crash into buildings, so the first task was to get every plane out of the air and onto the ground as fast as possible. There was enormous confusion as several planes were reported to be “squawking” inappropriately, meaning that they were not giving the standard response when air traffic control contacted them. Other aircraft would appear in the communications and then disappear. At one point a plane was said to have taken off unauthorized from Madrid, headed for the United States. A few minutes later it was said to have landed in Portugal, then supposedly it was still in the air headed for New York, then inexplicably back in Madrid. Commercial airliners had become weapons, and we needed to know the location—and intention—of all 4,500 planes in U.S. airspace that day.

The Vice President had contacted the President and asked what he wanted to do if a plane did not identify itself. Should we shoot it down? The President gave the order, which the Vice President transmitted to the Pentagon: if a plane did not “squawk” properly, treat it as a foe and shoot it down. That was a chilling prospect. The President had just made the unthinkable decision to have the U.S. Air Force shoot down a commercial airliner, killing its innocent passengers. That, though, was the kind of Hobson’s choice that we suddenly faced. Really, no choice at all.

Sometime after the order was given, Norm was told that a plane had disappeared from the air traffic control radar. It was United Airlines Flight 93. For a few awful minutes we all thought that we had shot it down. The Vice President was on the line with the Pentagon. Steve Hadley established a second contact with the National Military Command Center. “You must know if you engaged a civilian aircraft,” the Vice President kept saying. “How could you not know if you engaged a civilian aircraft?” It took what seemed like an eternity to get an answer: no, the air force had not shot down a civilian aircraft. We learned later, of course, that the passengers and crew of Flight 93 had driven it into the ground so that the terrorists could not destroy another building—most likely the Capitol or perhaps the White House. Those brave souls had saved hundreds of their fellow citizens.

A year later I went to a memorial service in Pennsylvania for the victims of Flight 93. One of the families was African American, a group of sisters who reminded me of my own relatives. Their brother LeRoy Homer, Jr., clearly the apple of their eye, had been the copilot on that flight. I told them that I wanted them to know that their brother had quite possibly saved my life, along with many others.

On 9/11, though, I do not remember feeling any sense of personal danger. I’ve been asked many times whether I was frightened, but frankly I didn’t have time to entertain such thoughts. Rather, I fell into a mode consistent with all that I’d been taught and that I had taught myself about crisis management.

Not long after I got to the bunker, it occurred to me that we should contact the Russians. Russian military forces operate worldwide and sometimes in close proximity to our own. There was always a concern during the Cold War that raising the alert level of U.S. forces would spark the Soviet Union to do the same, causing a dangerous spiral of alerts.

As it turned out, Putin had been trying to reach the President, who by now was somewhere between Florida and a secure location in Louisiana. I asked to speak to Sergei Ivanov, but Putin got on the phone. “Mr. President,” I said, “the President is not able to take your call right now because he is being moved to another location. I wanted to let you know that American forces are going up on alert.”

“We already know, and we have canceled our exercises and brought our alert levels down,” he said. “Is there anything else we can do?”

I thanked him, and for one brief moment the thought flashed through my head: the Cold War really is over.

Another priority was to make sure that the world knew that the United States was still functioning. I could imagine the pictures being viewed in other countries around the world and the uncertainty provoked by the silence of the U.S. government. With buildings going down in New York and an attack on the Pentagon in Washington, we needed to send a message to friend and foe that the United States of America had not been decapitated: our leadership was intact, and we were functioning properly. Steve Hadley asked the State Department to send a cable to all posts to convey those important facts.

In retrospect it is amazing that we functioned as well as we did. There were certainly difficulties: we learned that the screens in the bunker could display the Situation Room or television channels but not both simultaneously. There was a moment when there were so many people in the room that the oxygen level dropped precipitously and we had to expel a number of “nonessential” personnel.

In the first few hours, we also failed to communicate convincingly with the outside world and, more important, the country. That was in large part due to the President’s being out of Washington. Looking back, I can see that the first statement by the President, which Karen Hughes cobbled together with Ari Fleischer, was neither informative nor reassuring. But at the time no one wanted to say too much or too little about what might happen next.

In the final analysis, we just kept going. We were all veterans of the Cold War. I was grateful that I never had to use my training in nuclear war survival for the purpose for which it was intended. But it sure helped to have those instincts kick in reflexively when I was suddenly forced to deal with a different kind of “unthinkable” event.

The remainder of that day was a blur. The President arrived at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and then decided that we had insufficient secure communications there. He was transferred to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where we held a video-conference meeting of the National Security Council at about 3:00 P.M. Colin Powell was still in the air, returning from Peru, so Rich Armitage represented State. Don and George managed to get to the White House. The meeting was brief, with the President saying only that this was an act of war and that combating terror was the new priority of his administration. At the moment, though, the most important task was to protect the country from further attack and deal with the injured. The victims in New York and at the Pentagon were to get any and all help they needed, but we were surprised at how few injured there were. The attack had been so devastating that most of the victims had never had a chance.

A few hours after the meeting, the President called me. “I’m coming back,” he said. “And I don’t want to hear any argument about it!” I knew it was fruitless to say anything more.

The President landed on the South Lawn of the White House by helicopter at about 7:00 P.M. I walked out toward him and he asked, “Where’s Laura?” She was in the emergency operations center. He headed to the Oval and then immediately down to see the First Lady. When he returned, he joined Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer, and me in his small private dining room located off the hallway from the Oval. We’d told the networks that the President would speak to the nation at 9:00 P.M., and a CBS crew was already in the process of transforming the Oval for the broadcast.

Mike Gerson had done a draft of the speech, which said what one might expect: the President was at once mourning the dead and reassuring the nation that the United States would be just fine. But the question arose regarding what to say about the terrorists. Though we could have a more considered policy discussion later, the first message would be read everywhere, particularly in the circles of al Qaeda and those who would do us more harm.

The statement said categorically that we would find the terrorists and bring them to justice. But the important issue was what to say about the state sponsors that supported them. One of the problems with terrorists is that they have little at stake in a conventional sense. Unlike states, they have no territory to threaten and no sovereignty to lose. We could, however, send a message to the states that supported them.

Thus we decided to put state sponsors on notice: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” The President paused over that line and looked at me. I asked him if he felt that he needed to say that now. He said that he did but asked if I had a different view. I told him that I thought he had to say it in the first message because later on it would lose its impact. I consulted with the Vice President and called Colin and Don and read the line to them. Everyone agreed, and that line became known as one of the most important elements of the “Bush Doctrine.”

After the President delivered his address, we held another meeting of the National Security Council, which ended at about 10:00 P.M. Colin had returned from Peru and attended in person along with the other principals. Each principal gave a brief situation report, and George Tenet said that he was sure that al Qaeda had been the culprit but would wait until the next morning to make a definitive call.

I was struck that the President didn’t even look tired. He was determined to keep everyone focused on what we needed to do in the immediate aftermath. He kept saying that we would punish those who attacked us. That, however, was a matter for another day. I remember thinking that he was absolutely in control and showing no strain whatsoever.

I’d been told earlier in the evening that the Secret Service didn’t want me to go home to my Watergate apartment. I did not have a security detail, and their agents would assign me one the next day. Until then it was better that I stay at the White House. I didn’t question them on this point and had planned to just sleep in my office. But the President nicely invited me to stay in the residence, so I asked a member of my staff, Sarah Lenti, to go to my apartment and pick up a change of clothes for the next day. From that time on, I kept a packed suitcase in my office, just in case I needed it again.

After the NSC meeting, Steve Hadley and Andy Card joined me in my office. I was finally tired. Bone tired. We were about to outline the tasks for the next day when a Secret Service agent burst into the office. “Go to the bunker! Another plane is headed for the White House!” We jumped up and walked quickly back toward the emergency operations center. The first “evacuees” I saw were Barney the dog and then Spot, the other dog. I then noticed the President’s brother Neil, who happened to be staying at the White House, Maria Galvan, the Bushes’ housekeeper, and then Laura and the President. Laura was in her bathrobe and, she later told me, without her contacts—so she couldn’t see. The President was dressed for bed in a T-shirt and shorts. It was a motley crew.

It turned out to be a false alarm, but in solemn tones the Secret Service agent said, “Mr. President you should sleep here tonight.” They had planned for him to sleep on a creaking, moth-eaten pullout sofa bed that looked as though it hadn’t been opened since the 1960s. The President took one look at it and said, “I’m going to bed,” whereupon he turned and started upstairs, Laura and the family and pets trailing after him. Steve, Andy, and I followed. It was for me a moment of comic relief. “No one would believe this,” I whispered to Steve.

I went upstairs to one of the bedrooms on the residential floor. I turned on the television, which was playing the attack over and over, but I didn’t really watch. Though I was really tired, I slept only a little, maybe a couple of hours. At about 4:30 A.M., I gave up, got dressed, and went downstairs to my office.

When I arrived, I had a message from Nicholas Burns, our ambassador to NATO. I returned his call, and Nick said that the NATO allies wanted to vote an Article V resolution: “An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” I choked back tears at that one and told him that we would welcome the action. As a longtime student of NATO, I knew immediately that it would be the first time that NATO had ever invoked the collective-defense clause that was the essence of the Alliance. When the North Atlantic Treaty, which established NATO, was signed in 1949, Article V was the source of much debate because it committed the United States to defend Europe at a time of great tension and what was believed to be almost certain conflict with the Soviet Union. Now, ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Alliance was expressing the highest form of solidarity with us. I was deeply moved. It’s really good to have friends, I thought.

As time went on, the allies felt frustrated that they hadn’t been fully included in our response to 9/11. I have wondered many times if we somehow missed an opportunity to make the declaration of Article V have meaning for the Alliance. It is true that we were capable largely on our own to initiate war against the Taliban. It is also true that, after years of neglecting their military capabilities and concurrent failure to modernize for the war we’d eventually fight, most members of the Alliance were unable to move their military forces quickly. And we were single-minded, bruised, and determined to avenge 9/11 and destroy al Qaeda and its dangerous sanctuary as quickly as possible. Nonetheless, I’ve always felt that we left the Alliance dressed up with nowhere to go. I wish we’d done better.

THAT’S THE PHRASE that has always come to mind when, over the years, I’ve tried to explain the impact of the attack on the Bush administration’s thinking and on me personally. No security issue ever looked quite the same again, and every day our overwhelming preoccupation was to avoid another attack. The United States was the most powerful country in the world—militarily and economically. And yet, we had not been able to prevent a devastating attack by a stateless network of extremists, operating from the territory of one of the world’s poorest countries. Our entire concept of what constituted security had been shaken. The governmental institutions simply didn’t exist to deal with a threat of this kind. And so in the first days and months ad hoc arrangements had to fill the void.

For the first time, the FBI director and the attorney general attended the President’s intelligence briefing along with the CIA director. The divide between domestic and foreign intelligence was for a while bridged, literally, in the Oval Office. The threat report was hair-raising because overnight every conceivable threat, no matter how unlikely, seemed to come to the President. Having missed the attacks, the intelligence agencies were determined not to be wrong again.

That morning of September 12, George Tenet briefed us on the evidence of al Qaeda’s complicity in the attacks. The President listened to the recitation of the case against al Qaeda and let the War Council know that we’d crossed a Rubicon and we would destroy them. The most important task, however, was to make sure that it could not carry out another attack.

I remember being struck by the President’s clarity concerning priorities. First, secure the country. Second, reassure the American people and get the country back to normal as soon as possible. If America’s way of life ground to a halt, the terrorists would have won. Third, plan to destroy the terrorist networks and give their sponsors a choice to be with us or against us. Fourth, prepare to go to war against al Qaeda in a meaningful way—that meant destroying its safe haven in Afghanistan. There would be no spasm attack, lashing out with cruise missiles into empty tents. He wanted an option for boots on the ground. We would go after al Qaeda at a time of our choosing.

THE PRESIDENT’S clarity stood in stark contrast to the chaotic decision-making structures supporting him. After calls to several world leaders and the intelligence briefing, the President called the NSC together in the Cabinet room. The attendance had been expanded dramatically because of the multifaceted nature of the problem we faced. In addition to the NSC core—State, Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA—there were several other agencies present: the FBI and the Justice Department to deal with domestic intelligence and security; Treasury and the National Economic Council (NEC) to deal with the shock to the economy; Transportation to deal with the airports and highways.

There seemed to be people everywhere, and the more clarity the President sought, the more chaotic the meeting became. The Australian prime minister, John Howard, was stuck in the United States and needed to get back home. We needed to get Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, back from Europe. The President wanted to know how soon he could safely open the airports. How long would it be before Wall Street and the banking system were up and functioning? Did we have any plans for protection of power plants, which had been named as a target in the threat reporting? Who was dealing with the forty-seven governors whose states had not been hit but who were desperate to hear from the White House concerning what they should do? I looked around and thought, I’m the national security advisor. I’m supposed to make sense of this for the President!

A second meeting that afternoon was only marginally better. New problems had arisen. We’d essentially closed our borders, and it was already evident that economic activity was grinding to a halt. The integrated nature of our industrial supply chain with Canada was evident as calls began to come in from Detroit that GM and other automakers, shut off from their Canadian suppliers, would soon cease to produce. The President was pushing very hard to reopen the airports and to find a way to assure the American people that it was safe to fly.

Josh Bolten, the deputy chief of staff, Steve Hadley, and I decided to develop “pods,” groups of officials who would take responsibility for different elements of the response. Josh took over domestic issues and relations with the states. We turned to Larry Thompson, the deputy attorney general, to develop a plan for the protection of critical infrastructure. Larry Lindsey of the NEC took charge of trying to coordinate the many aspects of economic survival and then revival. Steve and I turned to managing the suddenly overwhelming work of the War Council. Years later, Larry Thompson and I were having lunch. “Why did you assign me critical infrastructure?” he asked. “I didn’t know anything about it.” I told him that no one knew how to protect critical infrastructure. He was capable, and everyone trusted him. In the immediate days after 9/11, that was enough.

On the afternoon of September 12, I accompanied the President to the Pentagon. As we drove toward it, we could see where the plane had slammed into the side of the building. Where there had once been a wall, now there was just a gaping hole of twisted metal and concrete. There were rescue workers still there, and the President wanted to thank them. I walked alongside him for a while and then broke off and began to talk to the doctors, nurses, and other first responders who’d pulled victims from the rubble—both those who could be saved and those who’d already perished. I was shaking when I got back into the motorcade. I returned to the White House and worked until after ten that night. When I got out of the car at the Watergate, I thought, What is that smell? It was my clothes, deeply penetrated by the soot and smoke of the Pentagon.

I just kept going the next day, not devoid of emotion but holding my feelings in check. There was work to be done. But slowly my emotions were emerging. I tried to ground myself by going back to some of my daily routines, such as exercising. I finally set aside time to get a long overdue haircut. As I sat there, John Lennon’s “Imagine” came on the radio. I choked back tears, went back to the White House, and focused again on my work. I left that night at 11:49 P.M.; seventeen-hour days were now routine.

When I woke up the next morning, I turned on the TV. The scene was from London, and the Coldstream Guards were playing in the square outside Buckingham Palace. It took me a moment to focus, but then I realized that they were playing our national anthem. I broke down and cried.

I HAVE always felt as if I operated in a kind of fog, a virtual state of shock, for two days after 9/11. That was my state of mind on September 14 as we prepared for the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance service at National Cathedral. The presidential motorcade felt like a funeral procession. I was in the “control” or communications car with Andy Card; the national security advisor and chief of staff always rode together, along with the President’s military aide. As we made our way up Massachusetts Avenue, I spotted a man holding a sign that said, “God Bless America. We will not be terrorized.” We passed the Russian Orthodox church, where the priests were ringing the huge bells. Slowly we pulled into the circle in front of the cathedral. Entering the church, I saw an exceptional gathering: former presidents and Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, the military, all there together in a national day of mourning. It was an interfaith service with the three great monotheistic religions represented, including Islam. The nation’s preacher, Billy Graham, was very frail, but he rallied to deliver a sermon at the service.

Just before the President spoke, the magnificent mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves sang the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t see how the President would get through his remarks without breaking down. At the Cabinet meeting preceding the service, he had been emotional. Colin Powell, seated next to him as the secretary of state always is, passed him a note that said, in essence, “Dear Mr. President, don’t break down at the service.” The President, relating this to the Cabinet, said that he would be okay. He was right. He delivered his remarks sensitively but was completely in control. I thought to myself that I could never have done that.

The service was cathartic. I am the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and my mother was a church organist. Music has been at the center of my life since I was born. I cannot to this day sing “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” without flashing back to National Cathedral. I focused on the music and the extraordinary words of our great national songs. What had begun as a day of sadness ended, for me, with a sense of rising defiance. The last hymn was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The original words of the Civil War hymn had been “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” Over the years congregations (hoping not to sound offensive, I guess) had changed the words to “As he died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.” Much to my surprise, we sang the original version. As the military choir sang the climatic “Amen, Amen,” I could feel my own spirit renewed. We’d mourned the dead. Now it was time to defend the country.

THE PRESIDENT left for New York after the service. I had asked if I should accompany him, but he said that he wanted me to go directly to Camp David to meet the Vice President, Colin, and Don. I flew up to Camp David with Don on a military helicopter. That evening the four of us had a dinner of buffalo steak (a favorite of the Vice President’s) and discussed how we’d organize the next morning’s session with the President. We all knew that the outcome would be a declaration of war against the Taliban and an invasion of Afghanistan. But the discussion was useful in teasing out questions the President would need to address.

For the first time, though, I felt a bit out of place. These men, who collectively had accumulated decades of experience in government, had known one another for years. They’d been through numerous crises separately and together. The enormity of what had happened on 9/11 and the sheer weight of the challenge that we now faced hit me very hard. These were not normal times and not exactly what I’d envisioned doing that March day in Austin, Texas.

The next morning the President called at about 6:30, as he often did when we were at Camp David. He asked how the evening had gone and said that he would listen to the presentations from the various Principals and then decide what to do. We came up with the idea of a morning session for presentations, an afternoon break, and then a wrap-up session for recommendations. He was worried about how people were doing under the circumstances. I assured him that the night before had been relaxed despite everything. I asked how he was doing. He said that he was just fine.

The President’s phone call also steadied me. He was relying on me, and I was determined to be there for him. I had to set aside any personal doubts and fears and get on with doing my job.

After the President’s daily intelligence briefing in the Laurel Lodge conference room, the NSC members and their deputies gathered. We put a map down in the middle of the huge oak conference table. There it was: Afghanistan, the place where great powers go to die. Not only was Afghanistan surrounded by troubled and hostile neighbors (in some cases, such as Iran, hostile to us), its rugged terrain was immediately obvious. On the other hand, I thought, a successful campaign in Afghanistan could help redraw the map of the region.

South-Central Asia, starting at the southern tip of India and continuing through Pakistan and Afghanistan and into the “stans” (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and, most important, Kazakhstan), formed the spine of the region. It in turn opened out to the Middle East and Iran on one side and western China on the other. An American military presence in Afghanistan and surrounding states—necessitated by the events of 9/11—could ultimately contribute to stability in South-Central Asia. And the emergence of a friendly government in Afghanistan and stronger relations with the “stans” would anchor American geostrategic influence in what had once been called by Zbigniew Brzezinski “the arc of crisis.” I told Steve Hadley that we should start to think of the area as an arc of opportunity instead.

But getting to that point would take a lot of work over many years. Afghanistan had been ravaged by decades of warfare. When the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979, Arab fighters joined local resistance forces who had set aside tribal and ethnic differences to form a loose alliance that became broadly known as the mujahideen. With the assistance of U.S. and Saudi funding and weapons funneled through Pakistan, the mujahideen succeeded in defeating the Soviet forces in the late 1980s.

In the absence of a common enemy, however, the rivalries among feuding warlords resurfaced, and their militias plunged the country into civil war. In the midst of this fighting, the Taliban, a group of Islamist militants led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, swept through the Pashtun South and in 1996 seized control of Kabul.

As the Taliban consolidated its control over the capital city, Osama bin Laden arrived in eastern Afghanistan. Having left Sudan and with his Saudi Arabian citizenship revoked, bin Laden returned to the country where he had once fought in the anti-Soviet resistance to build a base of operations for his terrorist network. Sharing some degree of ideological kinship with the terrorist leader, the Taliban condoned and at times supported bin Laden’s efforts to establish al Qaeda training camps and recruit extremists to his cause.

For its part, Pakistan had trained extremist militants who fought in the resistance against the Red Army in Afghanistan, and it maintained ties to many of them after the Soviet withdrawal. As the Taliban rose to power, officials within Pakistan’s military and security forces, particularly its elite Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), reached out to the group and developed bonds that grew over time. The links were generally ethnic in origin, uniting Pashtuns across the borders that the British had drawn with little regard for cultural or tribal identity. Pakistan largely paid lip service to U.S. demands, dating back to George H. W. Bush, to relinquish ties to the extremists.

The immediate problem we faced after 9/11 was to find a strategy to defeat the Taliban. We were all conscious of the Soviet experience there, and the Pentagon’s presentation of military plans noted the importance of a “light footprint” for U.S. troops. That would turn out to be a crucial decision. The United States would not fight a big ground war in Afghanistan, even though we needed “boots on the ground.” We would rely largely on Afghan fighters and U.S. Special Forces, intelligence and airpower. The U.S. commitment would contribute to a historical narrative in which we helped the Afghan people gain their freedom from the Taliban, not another foreign invasion of Afghanistan. The discussion was orderly, noting the need to turn Pakistan into an ally in the war on terror and to secure basing rights in Central Asia.

After a series of presentations and some discussion of how to proceed, Don Rumsfeld suddenly turned the floor over to his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who started talking about Iraq. His argument was not without merit, focusing on the relative strategic importance of Iraq over Afghanistan. Saddam was clearly an enemy of the United States and had supported terrorism. The war in Afghanistan would be so much more complicated than a “straightforward” engagement against a real army such as Saddam’s.

The problem was that everyone had come into the room knowing that our war would be in Afghanistan, which had been the staging ground for the attack on the United States. I remember thinking that Paul’s comment was a huge distraction when there was so much to be done. The President listened but did not comment.

As planned, after several hours the President called for a break. He told everyone to go to lunch (spouses had been invited) and then to take a couple of hours off. “Go for a walk, exercise, clear your minds,” he said. We would reconvene at 4:00 P.M., and he would ask for recommendations.

After lunch, I asked the President what he wanted from me. Did he want my recommendation in the meeting or privately? “Privately,” he said. I also overheard the President tell Andy Card to call Paul aside and tell him not to interject in that way again; he expected to hear from his principal advisors, not their deputies. I don’t know what Andy said, but in the afternoon session, Paul said nothing.

After the break, the President asked each member of the War Council for a recommendation. Colin said that we would, of course, have to go to war. He suggested that the Taliban be given an ultimatum because no decent country goes to war without warning the other side. Indeed, there was a lot of discussion of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and a desire to avoid a “sneak attack.” We needed to deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban and then issue a declaration of war. Colin took on the task of giving the Pakistanis a choice: would they be with us or against us? There was no middle ground. Colin was fundamentally opposed to action in Iraq. He warned that the time was not right and that it would fracture the very strong coalition against the Taliban.

Don never really made a recommendation. He just asked rhetorical questions that made it clear that he believed in the war option. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hugh Shelton, reassured the President that the military could develop a plan for boots on the ground but emphasized the importance of regional cooperation. George Tenet, appropriately for the CIA director, did not express an opinion. Andy Card said that the American people would expect us to go to war against Afghanistan, not Iraq.

The President turned to the Vice President, who also affirmed the war option and the need for an ultimatum. Then, gently rebuking Paul, he joined Colin and Andy in dismissing the idea of war against Iraq as a part of the response to 9/11. Despite all that has been written about the Vice President and his claims concerning Iraq and 9/11, he was resolute at Camp David in his belief that Iraq would be a distraction in the aftermath of the attacks.

The President said that he would let everyone know on Monday morning what he’d decided. He needed some time to mull over what he’d heard. The United States had been grievously injured, but he would not just lash out. The response had to be considered, and this time al Qaeda had to be defeated.

That night before dinner, Attorney General John Ashcroft played spirituals on the piano and we all sang. Contrary to type, John plays wonderful gospel piano, while I play Brahms and Mozart. So John provided the accompaniment and I sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” The comforting song proclaims that God’s eye is on the sparrow and “I know He watches me.” It was a deep, mournful moment. At dinner, the President asked me to say the prayer. “We have seen the face of evil but we are not afraid,” I prayed. “For you, O Lord, are faithful to us.”

The church service at Camp David was, of course, devoted to 9/11. There were prayers for the victims and for the country. The Camp David chapel is very special, completed during George H. W. Bush’s presidency as a place of worship for the President during stays at Camp David. The congregation is made up of the military people and their families stationed there. Thus the President and his family and aides worship side by side with the officers and enlisted personnel and their families. It is a beautiful expression of American democracy and its egalitarian character. That day, the commander in chief worshipped with those whom he would soon order to defend our wounded country in a most distant land.

After church we returned to the White House. The President asked me to accompany him to his office in the residence. He returned a call to Vicente Fox and said he needed to get some exercise. He asked me to come back at about 6:00 P.M. so that we could talk about what to do. At the agreed hour, I arrived and went back up to the office.

The President asked what I thought. I told him that we obviously had to go to war in Afghanistan but expressed my concern about the difficulty of getting Central Asian leaders to give us the basing rights we needed. When I had finished, the President talked for about thirty minutes without a break. The country had been deeply wounded, he repeated from the Saturday session, but we could not engage in a spasm attack. He needed boots on the ground, but he was worried about fighting in Afghanistan. We couldn’t fail. This was different from any other war in our history. Using a sports analogy (he was fond of doing so), he said that he just didn’t know how many more punches al Qaeda could throw.

As he talked, I felt that he was carrying a weight heavier than any other President, at least since Abraham Lincoln. There had been war presidents since then, but they had not experienced a devastating attack in Washington and New York. It is easy to forget that in those dark days we assumed that another attack was imminent. We had been talking in the Treaty Room, which had for a time been the U.S. Presidents’ office before the Oval Office was built in the West Wing. It is dark, with heavy furniture and gloomy paintings, including Lincoln with his generals during the Civil War. I had never seen George W. Bush so somber.

The President asked me to record formally his decisions that night. He said that he’d distribute the paper at the meeting the next morning. I left him sitting alone and went back to my office about 9:00 P.M. to prepare the document. And then I went home feeling very much the weight of what we were about to do.