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| VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY | |
 October 12, 2001  |
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In the final part of his interview, Vice President Cheney outlines how the strikes against targets in Afghanistan are proceeding, how the military and diplomatic decisions are being made and whether America will get an "all clear" message from the government.
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VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I think it has. I think the reports we're getting back show that we're clearly having a significant impact on the Taliban. There are reports now of defections, of areas of Afghanistan that are pulling away from the central Taliban government. We've clearly done significant damage to Taliban military capabilities - what aircraft they had -- and the airfields have all been shut down, that sort of thing. We have done a lot of damage to training camps that Osama bin Laden operated. They probably were empty or didn't have very many people in them at the time that we hit them, but he won't be able to use them again for the purposes of training terrorists from around the world. We'll continue aggressively, for example, on the financial front. I think we've had a significant impact there. We've got over $40 million now that we've been able to freeze in terms of assets. I think in the intelligence area our work as well with the - the tribes, the Taliban opposition, if you will, the Northern Alliance and some of the other groups inside Afghanistan all possess great potential, both in terms of the damage they can do to the Taliban but also the damage they can do to Osama bin Laden, because he, in effect, has found a sanctuary with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and has a number of fighters that he's contributed to the Taliban.
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| The war began on September 12 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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JIM LEHRER: Help me on the decision-making process that's going on now within the government. The president made the decision on Friday to launch the air strikes. Was that a decision that went like, all right, Secretary Rumsfeld and the military, you go do air strikes, and then come back and tell us what's happening every day, or whatever, or is a new decision made every day by the president - okay, let's continue another day. How is that working? VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: We had the events of September 11, and we began almost immediately to respond. Diplomatically, you can see the efforts almost immediately - as people began to line up and working through State, they worked through diplomatic strategy - the president spent a lot of time on it himself, calling people, meeting with foreign leaders and so forth, so that piece was up and running.
The military takes longer because you have got to deploy forces and we didn't have that many forces immediately on the scene, but we knew military action was likely to be required, so early on the president directed the secretary to begin deploying forces to the region. We got General Franks up, who's the CINC - the commander in chief who runs that part of the work force, who in and met with the president and myself and a few others and began to develop plans, what kinds of activities -- to look at Afghanistan as a target, figure out what you'd want to do and how you'd want to do it. We began to coordinate between the intel people and the military people in terms of selecting targets and that sort of thing. The actual onset of military actions, the time set by the president - he makes those decisions -- he'd signed off on the campaign plan; they'd reviewed their targeting strategy with him and what they were going to go after and when they were going to go after it. All that's personally signed up to by the president and then they'll take that campaign and go execute it. But staying in very close. He receives reports at least twice of a day on the status of those activities, and the thing to emphasize is the campaign is all of this. It is not just military. A lot of people said the war didn't start till you started bombing Afghanistan. No, it started back here on about September 12. |
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VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Well, the capabilities are all pretty much signed up to in advance. I mean, you know you're going to have an intelligence piece of it; you know you're going to have a military piece that's probably going to involve air, maybe some special ops, so-called boots on the ground, et cetera. But the pieces are interrelated in the sense of what you do, for example, with respect to your intelligence collection may inform your targeting. In turn, if you go after targeting and hit your targets, how they move and shift, what the opposition is doing on the ground can generate new targets, so there's a process -- it's a dynamic process. And it's not as though you sit down on day one and you know what you're going to be doing on day thirty-one. JIM LEHRER: Got it. VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: But you know you're going to work these tracks and they are interrelated and what pops up over here will have an effect here, and you take advantage of your opportunities. JIM LEHRER: I think what I'm getting at is who's making those decisions -- is the president making decisions every day, every two days on -- VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Every day JIM LEHRER: Every day. That involve the specifics of what we do?
JIM LEHRER: How involved have you been in all of this? VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I've been very involved; I've been in virtually all of those meetings, a regular participant in not only NSC meetings but what we call principals meeting - principals is everybody but the president. It's all your senior NSC decision-makers. Lots of times we'll have a pre-meeting, if you will, and tee up issues, work issues before we're ready to take something to him for a decision. Those meetings, we always have an NSC meeting just about every morning and a principals meeting just about every evening at the end of the day to wrap things up, lots of meetings in-between. Participation on my part with the president when he meets with a lot of foreign leaders that come in - other cases I have my own private separate meetings with him. I hosted lunch in this room the other day, for example, with the emir of Qatar, when he was in town. He's an old friend and involved in this area and we've got forces based in Qatar. |
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| "Where's Cheney?" | ||||||||||||||||||||
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JIM LEHRER: One of the questions that came up when you were in your secure location was "Where's Cheney? Is Cheney involved in this?" When you were in your secure location, how did you involve yourself in this process?
JIM LEHRER: What's that like? VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: You've got a TV set -- a big screen that's divided up into at least four segments so you've got State, Justice, CIA, Defense tied in over at the Situation Room at the White House and from my secure location, and it's all real-time video - good, high quality video - where you have a conversation; the only difference is the participants aren't necessarily all around the same table; that's the way we oftentimes do the evening meeting at 6 o'clock is through these - the secure video conference hookup, and so then a series of meetings like that during the day. The other day George Robertson was in town; the NATO Secretary-General, old friend; I had a session with him; he was in the Sit Room and I was at the secure location; we were hooked up by videoconference. That was right after he sat in the Oval Office and talked to the president. So the communication is working out. JIM LEHRER: The reason, of course, this is relevant -as you know, Mr. Vice President, during the presidential campaign even then-Governor Bush's own supporters said, well, the governor does not have that much experience in defense, national security area, but don't worry about it, Cheney is going to be there right by his side the whole time and a lot of people - looked around and you weren't there - should we not be concerned?
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VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: It's possible for individual short-term pieces, but I'm reluctant to say to the country or to the American people that a week from now or a month from now you're going to be able to totally relax, no more problems, because I think it's going to take a long time. I think we're going to have to get a lot tougher in terms of how we deal with some of these problems in terms of guaranteeing that we are protected here at home; we're going to have to achieve success overseas, both against the terrorists themselves as well as the states that support terrorists, and I simply can't say to everybody, you know, this is a war like the Gulf War, it'll be over as soon as we run Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and then they boys come home we'll have a great parade and everything will be hunky dory again. No, this is going to last for a long time. We are vulnerable as a society to these people who wish us ill and are willing to die in the effort, and so we're all going to have to make some changes and possibly accept some limitations we'd rather not accept, but it's necessary unfortunately in the time we live in. JIM LEHRER: But on this specific alert, it's very unlikely that on, say, Monday morning, Tuesday morning, a week from Thursday, the FBI will say, the threat, this immediate threat has lessened, or anything - there will be no further communication --
JIM LEHRER: Mr. Vice President, thank you very much. VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Thank you. |
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JIM
LEHRER: Thus far, has the military action in Afghanistan against Osama
bin Laden's network and the Taliban, has it had a measurable effect,
do you think, in terms of their ability to function both as a terrorist
network and a supporting of a terrorist network?
In
another sense - and a phrase that I thought the other day was very descriptive,
what we had in Afghanistan isn't state-supported terrorism - we had
a terrorist-supported state, a terrorist who came in - Osama bin Laden
- with lots of money, maybe $100 million to the Taliban directly, with
training, with weapons, with troops to supplement their own forces with,
in effect took over, if you will, a big part of Afghanistan. So everything
we do to take down that organization, to reduce their capability to
provide him sanctuary, weakens him, makes him more vulnerable, and I
think ultimately will lead to his demise.
He
had the intelligence piece of it up and running fairly quickly. Afghanistan
is a country we know a fair amount about from an intelligence perspective;
we've got a lot of people who spent time there back in the '80's. So
there is a residue of capability there as well, too. So that was up
and running fairly early on, although we don't talk about a lot of the
details. The financial efforts were cranked up through the Treasury
Department, again, the president directing each of these. 
JIM
LEHRER: But did he sign off on a master plan, in other words, go, this
phase one, the bombing, and there's another phase, which has been talked
about, not in specific terms but there's going to be -- there is probably
going to be, if it hasn't already begun - some stuff on the ground here
and there. Was it all of a piece or does he say, here's phase one, the
bombing - and I will tell you when we start phase two, whatever? What's
the process?
VICE
PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Every day he's involved in - yeah -- I'd say
just about every day signing up to various pieces of it, authorizing
various activities, sometimes diplomatic, send General Powell out to
Pakistan and India, Rumsfeld off to the Gulf states. That's diplomacy
and military overlay. Signs up to a deployment order in terms of the
following forces are authorized -- the secretary is authorized to deploy
those to the region and turn them over to the sync. In terms of the
strike packages and so forth he personally has signed off on the overall
approach on what the priorities ought to be and they come in and brief
and say, you know, this is what we went after, we went after 31 targets;
we're confident we've destroyed 17 of those - partial damage to these
others, we'll go back and restrike those. He gets a daily assessment
from the secretary as to how those operations are going.
VICE
PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: A day there was just about a day here in the
sense that I'd begin every day with my intelligence briefs, my CIA briefer,
sometimes a team would come to that location and give me the same brief
I got every day at the residence here before I come in and that he gets
every morning in the Oval Office. And then I'd tee up a session with
my chief of staff, who was with me at this location, and he'd been working
with the deputies' committees - he's a member of that - and then we'd
go to the videoconference on the NSC sessions.
VICE
PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I was there, but via telephone and video conferencing.
But the president doesn't need me. He has got a great team of advisers
there; he has old pros like Rumsfeld and Powell; Condi Rice has been
around a good deal on the NSC staff and on the Joint staff. I mean it's
a skilled crew and lots of times - you know Don may be off in the Gulf
or Uzbekistan and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz sits in. If Colin is off
traveling to Pakistan and India next week; he'll be represented at the
table by Rich Armitage, his deputy. So it's a good team all the way
around. Steve Hadley, for example, the deputy NSC adviser, is a skilled
a hand as you're going to find anyplace, and most of these people know
more than I do about this stuff anyway, so my role is to function as
an adviser, somebody who's been through some of these things before.
But I'm just one more voice at the table and whether I am there or not
there, he's still very, very ably served by the people around him. But
I am there through the wonders of modern telecommunications.
JIM
LEHRER: Finally, to return to the alert, is it going to be - is there
going to come a time when it will be over, in other words like the air
raid warnings in World War II - an all clear will be sounded and this
particular alert that's in effect now as you and I are speaking?
VICE
PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: It's possible; it's possible that we'll take
that extra step. It's possible for example that we may be able to --
because there are ongoing efforts here at home as well - lots of times
to wrap up the people we think are in fact planning these kinds of activities
that happened before. We headed off the bombing of LA Airport here a
couple of years ago, the so-called millennial attacks. So there are
a number of success stories out there, and if we're successful in dealing
with what we believe was the threat, then I think that will become public
at the right time.
