Avoiding Armageddon: America, India, and Pakistan to the Brink and Back

6. Bush, Mush, and Sonia

137 CHAPTER SIX BUSH, MUSH, AND SONIA PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH was a man in a hurry, pacing the Treaty Room of the White House. The Treaty Room, on the second floor of the mansion, is a private study for the president; a large painting hanging there depicts President Lincoln, General Grant, General Sherman, and Admiral Porter in a meeting in early 1865 to decide the final offensive campaigns of the Civil War. The room is usually a place of refuge, but on that day the usually relaxed president was agitated. He was eager to get the war started. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda had destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon. Now it was October 7, almost a month later, and the American military response was set to begin in Afghanistan. The government of Afghanistan—the Taliban and its leader, Mullah Omar—had refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership. America was poised to invade Afghanistan, a landlocked country on the opposite side of the planet, with a handful of CIA officers and the U.S. air force. A short list had been prepared by the National Security Council of key foreign leaders who were to get a heads-up call from the president just before the military campaign was to begin. I was with the president in the Treaty Room when he called Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since his half-brother 06-2408-7 ch6.indd 137 1/3/13 5:16 PM BUSH, MUSH, AND SONIA 138 King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995. Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries—Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates were the others—that had diplomatic relations with the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden was, of course, a Saudi. The conversation with the crown prince was short. The president informed him that America and a coalition of allies including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia were about to begin air strikes on Taliban targets in Kabul, Kandahar, and other locations. He did not tell the prince that CIA teams were already on the ground, working with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s enemy, to help locate targets for the strikes. Bush did ask for Saudi support for the operation, especially in getting Pakistan to break its long-standing ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda completely. Abdullah promised Saudi support and assistance . The president thanked him and closed the call quickly. The war that he was so eager to get started became the longest in American history. Begun with a lightning campaign, it would turn into a stalemate. The Taliban were evicted from Afghanistan within a few months but then gradually regained their footing in Pakistan, with the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Within five years, they again controlled much of the eastern and southern parts of the country. At the start of a new millennium, George W. Bush became the forty-third president of the United States. His new team called him “43” to differentiate him from his father, called “41,” who had been the forty-first president. However, there were many other differences between the very experienced elder Bush and his son. During the election campaign, 43 could not name the president of Pakistan when asked by a journalist. In office he would fail to take note of the growing threat of catastrophic terror based in South Asia until it literally smashed into America on 9/11. He would then fail to bring the perpetrators of the attack to justice, allowing them to hide for years in Pakistan. He would be lied to by the Pakistani dictator, Pervez Musharraf, whose name Bush did not know when he was a candidate. But Bush did shut down Pakistan’s 06-2408-7 ch6.indd 138 1/3/13 5:16 PM BUSH, MUSH, AND SONIA 139 proliferation of nuclear technology to a host of bad actors, from Libya to North Korea. Bush would also preside over a significant further improvement in America’s relationship with India. He would sign a landmark civil nuclear power treaty and shepherd it through Congress, something that probably only a Republican could have done. Like his father and Clinton, Bush would help prevent nuclear war in South Asia by helping to defuse another Indo-Pakistani crisis. Like Clinton , he would have a...