War On All Fronts

By Michael Duffy/Washington

The air strikes began much as everyone had imagined: U.S. planes, backed by British cruise missiles, swooped down from the clouds and dropped their payloads on poor, doomed Afghanistan. They came in waves, one after another, trying to hit their targets and dodge antiaircraft fire. But there was more than just bombs falling from the sky. Air Force C-17 cargo planes began dropping pouches of food, thousands upon thousands of "culturally neutral," vitamin-fortified rice cakes, each stamped with the American flag and the words: THIS FOOD IS A GIFT FROM THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

The war on Osama bin Laden is being waged not just with guns but also with butter. To understand the timing and intent of the bombardment, a senior Pentagon official says, look at the back side of a dollar bill. The eagle clutches an olive branch in its right claw and arrows in its left. Food aid and firepower, the official says, are happening together because "We want to send two images to the world at once."

By now everyone knows that little about this war has gone as expected. In less than a month, vengeance yielded to diplomacy, and last week diplomacy met up with charity and military might, and they all set out on the road to Kabul. If it was often hard to keep track of the many messages coming out of Washington, it was because those messages evolved as Bush's overseas coalition was born and took its first steps--and then its first stumbles. The Bush team is settling into a patient, nuanced, two-front war in which humanitarian aid will be used to balm the anger of the Islamic world. As the U.S. gears up to wage war from as many as a dozen staging areas in Central Asia, it is also working on four other continents to mount a coalition to isolate the terrorists politically and economically.

The separate tracks are carefully interwoven: U.S. officials tell TIME that their immediate plan is to scare bin Laden and his aides out of hiding; gather as much intelligence as possible about their whereabouts; deploy commandos in and around Afghanistan to strike quickly if bin Laden can be found; and reassure Muslim leaders constantly that American war aims are limited. And as the President said Saturday, "Full warning has been given, and time is running out."

As the bombs drop, Bush will have one eye on the response from Muslims around the world, even those who reacted with glee at news of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The depth of those feelings, and those of other Muslims who were either dismayed or disgusted by the promise of a U.S. military response, posed an enormous problem for American policymakers from the start and led President Bush to feather his engines longer than he had planned. There seemed little reason to launch any kind of military action against bin Laden's adopted homeland if it was only sure to split Bush's coalition, deepen foreign resentment of the U.S.--and leave bin Laden at large. And so Bush realized that while he was making war on Afghanistan, he had to make love to it as well.

On Thursday at the State Department, the President announced that he would send an additional $320 million worth of food and medicine to the region. "This is our way of saying that while we firmly and strongly oppose the Taliban regime, we are friends of the Afghan people," he said. "We have made it clear to the world that we will stand strong on the side of good, and we expect other nations to join us."

There has rarely been such a sudden and dramatic shift in American policy and tone. An Administration that just a month or two ago emphatically believed in going it alone--walking away from treaties, pushing its missile-defense scheme no matter who said what--has thrown open its arms to embrace the pleasures of multilateralism. The change is expedient, of course--America has a job to do and is taking all the help it can get--but it is also smarter and subtler than Bush's critics ever imagined, or thought him capable of imagining.

Crisis has a way of pulling people together, of wiping away silly disputes, and the Bush foreign policy team has fallen more quickly into line than many thought possible just six weeks ago. Differences between the State Department and the Pentagon still spill into the newspapers, but the terror attacks have sent everyone on the foreign policy squad back to his or her strongest position and turned the group into a team. The need to build a coalition has vindicated Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose taste for multilateral solutions had made him the odd man out among the Bushies. The need for daily decision making has restored Vice President Dick Cheney to his favorite role, as unseen foreign policy adviser to the President. The need to wage war has reinvigorated Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had been fighting a losing battle with his military bureaucracy. All of it has given a new focus and direction to George W. Bush.

Worldwide coalitions are shaky contraptions, and the one Bush is trying to drive now is having to make some unscheduled stops. For all the expressions of solidarity following the attacks, locking in the partnerships needed for a full-scale assault required much more than kind words. The U.S. needed access to Omani and Uzbek air bases and Pakistani intelligence and Indian airspace. And while Administration critics, starting with Israel, warned that all these would come at a cost, the Bush Administration also sensed an opportunity. Officials saw a strategic opening, a chance for a new round of realpolitik, which might knit together the U.S., Russia, China and India in the fight against terror--a partnership, however fragile, that could bear other fruit. A huge dividend came last week, when Russian President Vladimir Putin eased his opposition to NATO expansion.

As Rumsfeld said Thursday, the fight against terror "undoubtedly will prove to be a lot more like a cold war than a hot war. If you think about it, in the cold war it took 50 years, plus or minus. It did not involve major battles. It involved continuous pressure. It involved cooperation by a host of nations. It involved the willingness of populations in many countries to invest in it and to sustain it. It took leadership at the top from a number of countries that were willing to be principled and to be courageous and to put things at risk; and when it ended, it ended not with a bang, but through internal collapse."

So while all the expected hardware kept moving toward Afghanistan, that was only half the picture. The U.S.S. Kitty Hawk steamed out of the Pacific toward the Persian Gulf, rigged not for air operations but as a platform for ground troops. A three-ship Marine amphibious group is on its way from Norfolk, Va. And up to 1,000 light-infantry troops from the 10th Mountain Division left Fort Drum in New York late last week for Uzbekistan, the first U.S. troops to be based in a country of the former Soviet Union.

The diplomats fanned out as well: British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has become a trusted and effective counterpart for Bush, visited Islamabad; State Department troubleshooter Richard Haass paid a call on the exiled Afghan King in Rome, and Rumsfeld spent three days in the Middle East and Central Asia locking down final logistics. He won continued access to Oman's air bases (and promised the Sultan a cache of American military hardware). A week after a secret mission by Under Secretary of State John Bolton, Rumsfeld got the formal go-ahead from Uzbek President Islam Karimov to base 1,000 troops at Khanabad, 125 miles north of the Afghan border. (Karimov said no aerial or ground attacks would be launched from his soil, at least for now.) And while Rumsfeld was taking care of the guns, other Bush aides were working on the butter.

The inside story of how Bush decided to open the humanitarian front begins in the first few days after the attacks. In peace, even the worst Presidents have time to plan; in war, the best barely have time to react. The food-aid idea came together in what an official calls an "organic" fashion, meaning in no particular order at all. But sources tell TIME that the package has its roots in the vengeful attacks on Arab Americans right here at home in the days after Sept. 11.

Many people who watched the buildings explode in New York City and Washington felt an intense desire for revenge. Bush was among them. On Air Force One on Sept. 11, he spoke privately of retaliation, of striking back with lethal force and doing so quickly; his military aides told him the U.S. had no good targets for a quick strike inside Afghanistan, and Bush wisely resisted the urge to launch a futile attack like the one Ronald Reagan ordered in 1983, when the U.S.S. New Jersey shelled the hills above Beirut after a suicide bomber killed 241 U.S. Marines stationed there.

Some Americans were not so restrained. After Sept. 11, as retaliatory crimes against Arab Americans mounted--in which three people were killed--Bush realized he had to do something to stop them. On Monday, Sept. 17, he motored uptown to the Islamic Center of Washington, the city's biggest mosque. He met privately with Islamic leaders, then joined them for a shoulder-to-shoulder statement for the cameras. "These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that."

Bush's message was aimed at the home front, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee reported a sharp drop in attacks against Arab Americans in the days after he spoke. But the impact overseas was even more dramatic. The White House heard instantly from its embassies in the Middle East. Ambassador Margaret Tutwiler, who left the West Wing over the summer to take up her post as U.S. envoy to Morocco, called adviser Karen Hughes from Rabat. "Keep it up," said Tutwiler, whose ear for the right political move is unrivaled. "It's getting incredible coverage." When King Abdullah of Jordan paid a visit to the White House late last month, he privately commended the mosque visit, hinting that similar events would help Arab allies keep a lid on anti-American anger. Around the same time, Bush met with Islamic leaders in the White House. "I have told the nation more than once that ours is a war against evil, against extremists [and] that the teachings of Islam are the teachings of peace and good," Bush said.

Since the U.S. runs second only to Israel as an object of radical Islamic hatred--and since much of the Arab press simply doesn't report pro-American news--Bush knew that a few bighearted photo ops weren't going to have a lasting effect. And the protests in Pakistan and Afghanistan did not abate. Neither did the flood of starving refugees coming over the border from Afghanistan. The situation in Pakistan was already unstable: President Pervez Musharraf was taking huge risks for supporting the U.S. against the Taliban, and as a result had limited American access to Pakistani military bases. But the refugees were making a tense situation even worse. Though the U.S. had lifted economic sanctions against Pakistan and promised $50 million in U.S. aid, the unrest continued. Last week large crowds moved through the streets of Peshawar and Rawalpindi, burning effigies of Bush. "We grossly underestimate the perils to Pakistan that this represents," says Central Asian scholar S. Frederick Starr. "If you attack, you activate the Afghan fifth column in Pakistan, you activate the Pakistani radical and terrorist organizations, you put the educated, globalist modernists in Pakistan extremely on the defensive, and you make almost inevitable a shift further in the direction of the conservative Islamic republic."

Then there was the plain fact that many Afghans are dying of starvation. On average in some villages, 6 out of every 10,000 people are dying each day. At that rate, the villages could lose 30% of their population within a year.

And so two weeks ago, a senior Administration official told TIME, the President asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to tackle the hunger problem. After consulting with Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region, the Bush Administration decided that the most effective way to hold the coalition together would be a campaign to convince skeptical Muslims of America's compassion. "It's one thing to talk about it; it's another thing to do something about it," says a senior White House official.

By Tuesday of last week the Administration realized it could get the biggest p.r. lift by combining the U.S.'s existing $170 million-a-year Afghanistan aid program with a new $320 million package, and rolling it out all at once. "Wednesday we were still making sure we could move the money around and get something big," says an Administration official. "The public impact had to be large, so we went from numbers in the area of $100 million to $125 million, to--bam!--$320 million. Let's do it right." That figure is largely for effect--the U.S. is distributing only $25 million now, and holding the rest until after the start of the bombing.

It was enough money to pose a political problem for Bush. Conservatives are normally cool to foreign aid, especially humanitarian aid in war zones; they fear it will be siphoned off by enemies. To the rescue came Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden knew the G.O.P. would recoil at a large aid package, so he went to Bush with a plan. Early last week, Biden came out for an even larger package, one that purposely dwarfed the still unannounced White House proposal. That way, when Bush's plan leaked, it would look moderate by comparison.

It fell to Agency for International Development administrator Andrew Natsios to coordinate the operation. With help from the U.N., food and medicine could go into Afghanistan by truck from the south or donkeys from the north, but deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where people were starving, only U.S. airdrops would work. The Pentagon immediately raised flags: "We have to make sure the food drops help starving people and don't fall into the Taliban's hands," a senior Pentagon officer said Saturday. "And we can't put our troops delivering the food at too great a risk." Pentagon experts charted routes for the planes to avoid Afghan antiaircraft batteries and planned to destroy those they couldn't avoid. Said an official as the plan was coming together: "It is not a simple operation."

Airlift experts expect it may take weeks to drop the food and medicine in all the right places in Afghanistan, and Washington will want as many Pakistanis and Muslims as possible to hear about the airlift over the coming days and weeks. The U.S. will also fight over the airwaves. The Voice of America beams into Afghanistan, offering programming in Pashtu, Dari and other tongues. At the State Department, the new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Charlotte Beers, a legendary figure in New York advertising, will use her expertise in "branding" to help sell the American effort.

The joint humanitarian and p.r. campaign is likely to be carried out, U.S. officials say, at the same time that air strikes on Taliban positions begin--if not in the same hour, then at least within the same news cycle. Several well-placed officials told TIME that U.S. special forces are ready to move on al-Qaeda at any time; all they need is a solid sighting of bin Laden. "They're waiting for the right moment inside Afghanistan," said a senior U.S. official. "There is no other constraint."

Bush's gambit--filling the skies with bullets and bread--is also a gamble, Pentagon officials concede. The humanitarian mission will to some degree complicate war planning. What the brass calls "deconfliction"--making sure warplanes and relief planes don't confuse one another--is now a major focus of Pentagon strategy. "Trying to fight and trying to feed at the same time is something new for us," says an Air Force general. "We're not sure precisely how it's going to work out."

On the ground in Afghanistan there is some latent, if wary, gratitude for American aid over the years, but no one expects to build a foundation for the Taliban's downfall on a couple of million rice cakes. Abroad, the U.S. may have better luck. At the very least, pictures of U.S. humanitarian airdrops will help steady coalition partners and turn Bush's compassionate words into deeds. The drops won't convince the die-hard militants, but among the pious middle classes across the Islamic world, they may strike a chord. A war in which American G.I.s try to kill one group of Afghans while feeding another group will create some troubling juxtapositions. But there is a critical difference between the two operations. Even if winds over the Afghan mountains blow the rations out of reach of starving Afghans, the image of the U.S. trying to help will be broadcast around the world. But in the shooting war, the Pentagon won't be able to craft images quite so neatly. Only results--the capture or killing of bin Laden and his network--will count.

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Matthew Cooper and Mark Thompson/Washington

To learn more about the military buildup in the Middle East, see time.com/battlefield.com

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Matthew Cooper and Mark Thompson/Washington