CURRENT AFFAIRS: Bob Woodward's insider story of the first 100 days of the Afghan campaign is a quick and easy read writes Patrick Smyth. However the narrow focus on the war and the lack of analysis are a little frustrating.
Bush at War. By Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster, 376pp. £18.99
In the end it took just 87 days from September 11th to the fall of Kandahar and the effective overthrow of the Taliban/al-Qaeda regime. Instant war for a world of instant gratification. Of course, the war was not over, and still isn't, and Osama bin Laden's scalp has still not been secured. But it was no mean feat, and all accomplished, on the part of the US at least, in this strangest of asymmetric wars, by 110 CIA agents, 316 Special Forces personnel (some willing and able to lead cavalry charges) and massive air power.
Oh, and some $70 million in CIA money to buy arms and allies, and a regiment of spin doctors.
As Bob Woodward records in this insider's story of the first 100 days of the Afghan campaign, Bush at War, the war cabinet joke was "you can't buy an Afghan, but you can rent one". And that, in a nutshell, is his story.
Woodward, the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, has consolidated a reputation acquired during Watergate with a series of books on what might be termed Great American Institutions. Using the extraordinary access his name has given him - being a Great American Institution himself - he has written about the Supreme Court, the High Command, the CIA, the Fed. And all with pacey, intimate dialogue that suggests Woodward was in the room at all crucial times.
To be fair, he is far more scrupulous in sourcing attributed sentiments than some purveyors of "faction" - he interviewed most of the key figures, including President Bush, and was given access to the contemporaneous notes of some 50 National Security Council and other meetings - and the words attributed are plausible. But by putting quote marks round the notes taken by participants at meetings, in the interests of immediacy, Woodward sacrifices authority, and often the conversations acquire a disconnectedness that is a feature of precisely such note-taking.
Woodward's access is the book's strength and weakness. His perspective is very much that of those who spoke most to him, and reflects one of the features of the current Administration, the willingness of leading figures or their acolytes to brief against each other but, significantly, not against a President who values loyalty above all.
Thus, Bush emerges as a resolute, driven president with sound instincts - we keep hearing about those instincts from the President himself, but the reiteration of their soundness serves only to emphasise the lack of anything else in his make-up. Education? Intellectual engagement? The vision thing? No.
The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the head of the CIA, George Tenet, who clearly briefed at length, emerge as the two heroes of the book. Powell, calm, far-sighted, with the former soldier's wariness of war, is shown in the last chapter - a sort of afterthought - out-manoeuvering the Rumsfeld/Cheney axis to persuade the President to give the UN one more chance on Iraq.
But, for Woodward, the Afghan story is really that of Tenet and his man on the ground, "Gary", with, literally, a suitcase of dollars (the going rate for a warlord, apparently, is $50,000; that of a lower-level commander with up to 20 acolytes, $10,000). The CIA's ability to put Gary and a team of 10 into the north of the country by September 26th, and Tenet's speedy development of a coherent strategy for the war's conduct, involving the co-opting of local warlords supplemented by special forces and air support, served to redeem the dramatic failure of intelligence pre-9/11 - a matter not touched upon at all - and to pave the way for the extensive new powers the agency would acquire from Bush. It also exposed dramatically the leaden- footedness of the military.
"The military, which seemed to have contingency plans for the most inconceivable scenarios, has no plans for Afghanistan, the sanctuary of bin Laden and his network," Woodward observes.
To Defence Secretary Rumsfeld's growing irritation and embarrassment it would take the military until October 19th to get its own Special Forces' "boots on the ground". And, repeatedly, Bush is told that the US air campaign in the north of the country is being held up because of the failure to secure search and rescue facilities in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The military and the administration were adamant that they could not commit forces without such back-up, for fear of prisoners being taken and the dread "hostage situation". Visions of Carter and Iran.
That dithering is for me the most interesting insight of a book surprisingly short of new perspectives. The administration's hawks clearly understood immediately that 9/11 had revolutionised the US's ability to engage militarily abroad, and Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were pushing for an attack on Iraq, without any evidence of a link, within three days.
But all seemed to accept, in my view mistakenly, that the public's willingness to support military action did not mean a willingness to take casualties. Caution was the watchword.
The paradox of US power lies in this curious asymmetry between its unrivalled technical ability to wage war and its vulnerability, perceived or real, both domestically and to a lesser extent internationally, to public sensitivities.
The truth is that the world's only superpower is far more constrained, to the frustration of the likes of Rumsfeld and the neo-conservative right, than many European commentators admit.
Woodward's book, though a quick and easy read, is ultimately frustrating. Its narrow focus on the Afghan war and its lack of analysis leave huge lacunae. How engaged was Bush in the massive but largely fruitless domestic security clampdown? How come the anthrax crisis is barely mentioned? What of the domestic political scene, and the capitulation of the Democrats? And the frustrations of the Americans in their dealings with Saudi Arabia?
As a first draft of history, definitely Guinness Light.
Patrick Smyth was until recently the Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times and was previously European Correspondent