Doling out dollars

Christian Century, Feb 22, 2003 by David A. Hoekema

Bush at War. By Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster, 378 pp., $28.00

IN LATE SEPTEMBER 2001, just two weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center, a covert paramilitary team crossed a high mountain pass into northeast Afghanistan to launch the first phase of what President George Bush has called a "war for civilization," a "war without end" and (in a June 2002 speech) a "titanic struggle against terror." On the floor of their Russian-made CIA helicopter was a large metal suitcase containing $3 million in nonsequential $100 bills. The team's leader told Bob Woodward that he laughs whenever he sees undercover agents on television who are supposedly carrying $1 million in a slim attach6 case--he knows from experience that it won't fit.

Doling out a million here and a million there is routine work for a CIA operative, "Gary" told Woodward. (CIA operatives are identified in the book only by their first names; even their relatives back home probably think they are organizing Junior Achievement clubs in New Delhi.) What was unusual this time was not the amount of money he had been given but the freedom he had to dole it out as he wished to local warlords of the Northern Alliance.

Most were already on the American payroll, but without their knowledge they had just received a handsome raise. Here is Woodward's reconstruction of the team's meeting with the head of intelligence and security for the Alliance:

   Gary nodded and placed a bundle
   of cash on the table, $500,000 in
   ten one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He
   believed it would be more impressive
   than the usual $200,000, the
   best way to say, "We're here, we're
   serious, here's money, we know you
   need it."

      "What we want you to do is use
   it," he said. "Buy food, weapons,
   whatever you need to build your
   forces up." It was also for intelligence
   operations and to pay sources
   and agents. There
   was more money
   available--much
   more. Gary would
   soon ask CIA
   headquarters for
   and receive $10
   million in cash.

In his remarkable and often gripping account of the Bush administration's decision to attack the Taliban, investigative journalist Woodward brings us within earshot of key players as they debate alternative options, in or out of the public eye. There is a good deal of journalistic license involved in putting quotation marks around dialogue reconstructed long after the fact, and Woodward's penchant for reporting not just words but thoughts is occasionally annoying. Yet the range of sources that Woodward was able to draw on is truly astonishing.

All told, more than 100 informants contributed pieces of the story. Woodward was permitted not only to read but to quote from the transcripts of secret National Security Council meetings and to conduct interviews on the record with agency staff members and with military and paramilitary commanders. The president sat with him for nearly four hours in two interviews. More time, and a historian's scruples, will eventually provide a more nuanced account of the events that led to the ouster of the Taliban, but in the meantime this hastily assembled compilation of firsthand accounts pulls aside the curtain and reveals many aspects of this new kind of war.

That the initial weapons of the war in Afghanistan were suitcases full of currency is not its only unusual feature. President Bush himself asked his advisers, "Can we have the first bombs we drop be food?" Blankets, food and clothing were distributed along with cash and weapons to Northern Alliance allies. Bush told Woodward, "I was sensitive to this [accusation] that this was a religious war, and that somehow the United States would be the conqueror. And I wanted us to be viewed as the liberator." He added, "There is a human condition that we must worry about in times of war. There is a value system that cannot be compromised--God-given values. These aren't United States-created values. There are values of freedom and the human condition and mothers loving their children.... It leads to a larger question of your view about God. We're all God's children."

The war in Afghanistan was waged almost entirely from cockpits and bomb ports high above, after early strikes knocked out a few dozen defensive sites and gave American pilots unchallenged control of the air. Only 110 CIA officers and 316 Special Forces personnel were on the ground, Woodward reveals. He provides no statistics on Americans killed in action, but news sources suggest that the numbers did not reach two figures. Casualties on the other side, and among Afghan civilians, were hundreds of times higher, but estimates differ wildly among various sources.

Woodward does provide one hard number that is worth pondering. Cash outlays to reward friendly warlords and buy off Taliban sympathizers totaled $70 million, which the president considered "one of the biggest bargains of all time." That amounts to something like $2,000 per Northern Alliance soldier, less than a month's wages for the average American worker but equivalent to 20 times the average cash income in Afghanistan, according to United Nations figures.