To a considerable extent, some of this was overshadowed by the other events going on. Combat actions in Afghanistan continued through the rest of October and into the first week of November. The Pakistanis had an entire infantry brigade in northern Afghanistan supporting the Taliban against the Northern Alliance. We had known about it, and hadn’t targeted them, but once we destroyed the airports and supply depots, they lost all their logistical support, and began driving south and east. We let them go. It was one of the dicier aspects to our operational plan. If I had given enough warning to Musharaf to allow him to yank his troops, I would have given the same warning to the Afghanis and Al Qaeda. In the end we decided that we could chalk any Pakistani losses up to accidents and if they pushed it, ask why they were there in the first place. Their disappearance considerably demoralized the Taliban forces left behind.
No more planes were lost. The BUFF which had gone down had left nothing more than an oil slick and a small debris field in the northern Arabian Sea. We did have more losses though. The Special Forces A-teams we dropped into northern Afghanistan were able to link up with groups in the Northern Alliance on training and support missions. The remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, now joined together, had a time honored technique for handling an infantry assault. They would retreat up the nearest hill or mountain and allow their enemies to try an assault. Since their attackers were irregulars and partisans they couldn’t afford any sort of serious casualties, so the attack would eventually peter out. Enter the high tech world of the American Green Beret. The fighters they were embedded with would make an assault, the Taliban would retreat up a hill, the irregulars would pen them in and make lots of noise down at the bottom, and then the Green Berets would call in an airstrike on the mountaintop. The new JDAM munitions were incredibly precise, and could be targeted right in the Taliban’s laps. Two or three would clear off a hilltop handily.
On the other hand — shit happens. There were two cases of friendly fire, where incorrect coordinates were sent to the orbiting bombers, and A-teams were caught in both cases. I remembered this had happened the first time, too, and the response was similar. Northern Alliance fighters had died, but since the Americans had died along with them, the locals simply considered it the price of doing business and it showed our solidarity and support for them.
Most of the bombing was confined to the first day, but as intelligence began to determine who was still around after the bombing, new targets were added. On the third day we dropped a pair of 1,000 pounders into a mosque being used as an Army headquarters. By then, foreign journalists had begun arriving and reporting from Kabul and Kandahar, and video was making its way out. Ari was questioned on this the next day at the morning press conference, and became combative with the press, much to my amusement. “You don’t want us to bomb a church? Great! Don’t put your soldiers in the basement of the church! And maybe you should stay away from schools and hospitals, too!” Later, after being asked what the civilian casualties were, he gave my response, which was, “The President told me he didn’t ask. Sort of like how Al Qaeda didn’t ask about the civilian casualties on 9-11.”
There was a huge furor about that! How could we be so inhuman as to bomb churches and schools and hospitals?! How could I not care about collateral damage? There were lengthy discussions by the talking heads of whether we were committing war crimes. I got the general impression that I wasn’t getting a Nobel Peace Prize out of this.
Some, but not all, of the complaints shut down two days after that. The Taliban in some shithole named Bamian had decided to use the local clinic/hospital as their headquarters when the doctors and nurses there decided to complain. They were all German and Swiss doctors and nurses working with Doctors Without Borders. The Taliban handled this by simply taking the doctors and nurses outside and putting them against a wall and shooting them, and then broadcast this as part of their jihad. This did not endear them with the Germans, who had been complaining about American imperialism up to that point.
Ari and Josh were watching my approval ratings all during this time, as well. I peaked at 91 % the Friday I was sworn in as President, and then began dropping slowly. I rebounded to 90 % when we began bombing Afghanistan. Ari and Josh loved it, as did the rest of my staff, but I just smiled and shook my head. It would never last. If I didn’t handle the economy and everything else, a war scare wouldn’t keep me where I needed to be to get things done. I would be lucky to stay above 50 % by the time of the 2004 election.
I spoke to John Ashcroft and he came up with names for two lawyers. He was appointing one of them, Patrick Fitzgerald, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Manhattan who was familiar with everything related to 9-11, to be lead prosecutor and investigator on anything and everything 9-11 related. For some reason the name was familiar to me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. That meant he was going to be involved in the Scooter Libby and Able Danger mess. A second name was somebody I had heard of but never met, Robert Mueller, who had been an assistant U.S. Attorney under Reagan and Bush 41, and then had a variety of jobs with either the Justice Department or in the private sector. I knew he had been considered to replace Freeh, but had gone through prostate cancer surgery over the summer, which had delayed the replacement. Now he was healthy and Freeh was gone. Barnwell, the Executive Assistant Director who was one of the Three Amigos, was a good man, and when the 9-11 investigation was over was going to find himself either a U.S. Attorney or Federal Judge down the road, but he was too junior to take over the FBI. Freeh’s Deputy Director hadn’t impressed me, and wasn’t going to be named as Director. I asked John to have Mueller visit to meet me. If I got a decent feeling for the man, we’d send his name to the Senate for confirmation.
The Senate confirmations were moving apace, which meant slowly. In a typical confirmation hearing, the candidate reads some sort of statement to start out with, and then gets questioned by the committee members. On some committees there might be a dozen and a half members, and each and every one of them gets to ask questions of the candidate. After that they vote on the candidate, and if he passes, then the full Senate gets to vote. In happy times this can go quickly. Right now we were benefiting from the need to ‘support’ the President by approving his choices. Colin Powell was a case in point. After his opening statement, each of his questioners started their little session with five minutes of singing Colin’s praises and then a few puffball questions. His confirmation hearing lasted a total of one day.
In unhappy times, or with a controversial appointee, things aren’t as pleasant. The praises are criticisms, and the questioning can go on for days, and the final votes go along strict party lines. If I got lucky I could keep the partisan bickering under control. On the other hand I was dealing with Congress, so intelligent action was not guaranteed. The one thing I had going for me was that the general sense in the Senate was that a President should be allowed employees of his choosing, so even the most controversial people usually got approved eventually. Right now the nation had a feeling of unity, and I needed to exploit it to get the people we needed in place.
It wouldn’t last, that feeling of unity. We were going to get hit with a recession, and once people started losing their jobs, it was all going to be my fault. The airlines were flying again, but were hemorrhaging cash, especially since the price of fuel went up. Meanwhile lawsuits were starting to pile up, and I knew we would need to somehow indemnify the airlines before survivors’ lawsuits broke them. I sat down with the replacement FAA boss and came up with the beginnings of a plan. As I suspected, there was a list of simple solutions that the airlines had all resisted on a cost basis. The easiest, replacing cockpit doors with something bullet proof that latched securely, would cost about $5,000 to install. As ugly as it sounded, even if the hijackers killed every single passenger and flight attendant, if they couldn’t get to the cockpit, they couldn’t crash the airplane. Regardless, the cheap bastards wouldn’t spend the money, and we saw how that worked out.