We really didn’t want the Taliban to win, so I called in the new Ambassador from Pakistan, Jehangir Karamat. Karamat had been a four star general in Pakistan’s army at one point, so hopefully he would be able to convince his superiors of the folly of poking a tiger through the bars of a cage. I met Karamat with the Secretaries of State and Defense, and told him we knew about the planned ‘invasion’. Of course he denied everything, which was what we expected, and then he called home. Two days later a motorized infantry battalion crossed the border. We waited until they bedded down for the night, and then a pair of B-2s carpet bombed their encampment.
We didn’t broadcast this to the world, hoping the Pakistanis would take the hint and go home. Pakistan is really an army with a country attached, not the other way around. The remnants of the battalion did begin going home, but the Air Force and Navy decided to screw around. A large flight of French-built Mirages and U.S.-built F-16s lifted off from Masroor, near Karachi, and sortied towards the Truman carrier group in the Bay of Bengal. They tried to fly beneath the radar and completely failed. They were picked up almost immediately by airborne radar and warned off. About half turned back then, and the rest turned back when they were lit up by fire control radar from the F-18s which were shadowing them. Smart move.
Not so smart was the captain of the Pakistani submarine Khalid, a French-built submarine that was shadowing the Truman group. She was trying to maneuver into an attack position, though it wasn’t working, since the Scranton, an Improved Los Angeles class American sub was shadowing the Khalid! The Truman launched an anti-submarine equipped Sea King helicopter which positioned itself directly over the Khalid and then hammered her with active sonar to let her know we knew where she was. Unfortunately, that simply rattled the Khalid’s commander, who promptly launched a pair of Exocet missiles at the nearest American destroyer, the Kidd. The Exocets never even came close to the destroyer, but the Sea King dropped a pair of homing torpedoes and sank the Khalid.
We kept the whole thing quiet, to allow the Pakistanis to save face. They backed down, although diplomatically things were very frosty. We lost nobody, and only spent some money on ordnance and fuel. I heard later that Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan, was on thin ice with his ruling junta of generals, and was drinking a lot. Ambassador Karamat was also recalled and replaced.
That was a relatively simple problem. Otherwise, it was becoming trickier, not easier. Condi Rice was good, but she didn’t quite have the gravitas and respect Colin Powell did. Still, I wasn’t going to get rid of her. She and Colin had developed a fairly decent team, and it was she who pointed out to me the problems developing in Iraq. It had been 14 years since Bush 41 had kicked his can down the road, and he was really feeling feisty again. The provocations were becoming more frequent and the rhetoric was becoming noisier. She thought that we needed to get proactive over there.
Since Bill Clinton’s time, we had been enforcing a no-fly zone over both the southern, Shiite, part of the country and the northern, Kurdish, part of the country. Every once in awhile Saddam Hussein would get to feeling aggressive and light up one of our planes with a fire control radar, and occasionally launch a missile at it. Our response was predictable, in that we would then destroy the SAM and radar sites. I had raised the bar, by adding a Tomahawk strike or two at one of Hussein’s innumerable palaces, razing it to rubble. It wasn’t an intentional attempt to kill him, but if he died, I wouldn’t lose any sleep.
Meanwhile, the Kurds up north were busy forging a national identity. Kurdistan was an area of the map that occupied northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria. The heart of it was in Iraq. Still in all those countries they were a generally oppressed minority. Now, under American aerial protection, they were developing an autonomous nation, and the central government in Baghdad was squawking loudly. We said (diplomatically of course), “Up yours!” to Hussein, and sent over a few teams of Special Forces trainers, and Bismarck Myrick as Special Envoy.
After Monrovia had calmed down in the fall of 2003, we had brought Bismarck Myrick back from Liberia to a hero’s welcome. Colin Powell had awarded him the State Department’s Distinguished Service Award, their highest honor, and had given him a nice testimonial dinner. Marilyn and I attended the dinner, as well, and I made sure to make a few nice remarks as well. “Ambassador Myrick, as you undoubtedly learned in both the Army and in the Foreign Service, the reward for a job well done is usually a bigger and tougher job. We haven’t quite figured out what that job is yet, but your nation is not through with you. I hope you enjoy your time here at home, but I can promise you that when the time comes, both Secretary Powell and I will be calling on you again.” By early 2004 I had sent him to the Middle East as my Special Envoy to the Turks and Kurds with a single order — Make peace!
Meanwhile, we extended the no-fly zone coverage to also ban helicopter flights. One of Bush 41’s mistakes after the Gulf War was to limit the no-fly zones only to fixed wing aircraft. He allowed helicopters for humanitarian assistance. Saddam Hussein didn’t have a humanitarian bone in his body, so he simply sent in gunships and troop carriers to kill anybody he didn’t like. We banned them up north (he could kill all the Shiites he liked, and then take it up with the Iranians!) and backed it up by shooting down a flight of three gunships strafing the Kurdish Peshmerga militia north of Kirkuk. That settled things back down again. Meanwhile, Myrick began shuttle diplomacy between the Kurds and Turkey. The Turks and Kurds hated each other, and Turkey was an ally in NATO, and had a Kurdish extremist problem. Myrick’s mandate was to get both sides to calm down and cooperate enough to begin construction of a pipeline carrying Kurdish oil through Turkey. The Turks desperately needed the oil and the jobs, and seemed willing to loosen their restrictions on the Kurdish minority to get the oil. We’d just have to see.
Chapter 159: Katrina
August 23, 2005
Hurricane season officially starts on June 1 and runs through the end of November. Most of the activity is in August and September, but hurricanes in the extremes are not uncommon. Agnes in 1972 was a nasty one, in June, and Sandy in 2012 was in late October and very bad. I knew what was coming, and was not looking forward to it.
It had been a long time, subjectively, since I had witnessed Hurricane Katrina, and while the details were a touch vague, the aftermath was not. Put simply, a massive hurricane blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and took direct aim at New Orleans. Despite all the time in the world to prepare, disaster preparations weren’t all that great, and somewhere around two thousand people died! There was plenty of blame to go around, including George W. Bush, who only days into the disaster had publicly praised his FEMA boss, and then fired him just a few days later. Coming on top of the disasters that the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had become, Hurricane Katrina buried any hope that history would remember George Bush kindly. It stood as a case study in how not to do disasters.
For the last few years I had been beating on Allbaugh and Brown to make FEMA a better agency. While the government is too large for me to actually oversee each and every little operation, I could demand accountability and request realistic and periodic updates. One thing I stressed to them was that they needed to run frequent and realistic dry runs. Get together with the state of California and the city of Los Angeles and practice what you would do during a major earthquake. Go to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, and pick a city to practice a tornado disaster in, and then go to that town and practice what you would do. Go find a city on the Mississippi and practice what would happen when the levees break and it floods.