Decision Points

removing the Taliban, denying sanctuary to al Qaeda, and helping a democratic governmentemerge. I asked Tommy a lot of questions: How many troops would we need? What kind of basing would be available? How long would it take to move everyone? What level of enemy resistance did he expect?
    I did not try to manage the logistics or the tactical decisions. My instinct was to trust the judgment of the military leadership. They were the trained professionals; I was a new commander in chief. I remembered the Vietnam-era photos of Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara poring over maps to pick bombing targets for routine missions. Their micromanagement had an impact throughout the chain of command. When I was in flight school, one of my instructors who had flown in Vietnam complained that the Air Force was so restricted that the enemy could figure out exactly when and where they would be flying. The reason, as he put it, was that “the politicians did not want to piss people off.”

    One area where Tommy needed help was in lining up support from Afghanistan’s neighbors. Without logistical cooperation from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, we would not be able to move our troops into Afghanistan. I didn’t know the leaders of these former Soviet republics. But Russia still had tremendous influence in the region, and I knew Vladimir Putin .
    Putin and I had met for the first time that June in a Slovenian palace once used by the communist leader Tito. My goal at the summit had been to cut through any tension and forge a connection with Putin. I placed a high priority on personal diplomacy. Getting to know a fellow world leader’s personality, character, and concerns made it easier to find common ground and deal with contentious issues. That was a lesson I had picked up from Dad, who was one of the great practitioners of personal diplomacy. Another was Abraham Lincoln. “If you would win a man to your cause,” Lincoln once said, “first convince him that you are his friend.”

    At Camp David with Vladimir Putin.
White House/Eric Draper
    The summit with Putin started with a small meeting—just Vladimir and me, our national security advisers, and the interpreters. He seemed a little tense. He opened by speaking from a stack of note cards. The first topic was the Soviet-era debt of the Russian Federation.
    After a few minutes, I interrupted his presentation with a question: “Is it true your mother gave you a cross that you had blessed in Jerusalem?”
    A look of shock washed over Putin’s face as Peter, the interpreter, delivered the line in Russian. I explained that the story had caught my attention in some background reading—I didn’t tell him it was an intelligence briefing—and I was curious to learn more. Putin recovered quickly and told the story. His face and his voice softened as he explained that he had hung the cross in his dacha, which subsequently caught on fire. When the firefighters arrived, he told them all he cared about was the cross. He dramatically re-created the moment when a worker unfolded his hand and revealed the cross. It was, he said, “as if it was meant to be.”
    “Vladimir,” I said, “that is the story of the cross. Things are meant to be.” I felt the tension drain from the meeting room.
    After the meeting, a reporter asked if Putin was “a man that Americans can trust.” I said yes. I thought of the emotion in Vladimir’s voice when he shared the story of the cross. “I looked the man in the eye,” I said, “…   I was able to get a sense of his soul.” In the years ahead, Putin would give me reasons to revise my opinion.
    Three months after our meeting in Slovenia, Putin was the first foreign leader to call the White House on September 11. He couldn’t reach me on Air Force One, so Condi spoke to him from the PEOC. He assured her that Russia would not increase its military readiness in response to our move to DefCon Three, as the Soviet Union would have done automatically during the Cold War. When I talked to Vladimir the next day, he told me he had signed a decree declaring a minute of silence to show solidarity with the United States. He ended by saying, “Good will triumph over evil. I want you to know that in this struggle, we will stand together.”
    On September 22, I called Putin from Camp David. In a long Saturday-morning conversation, he agreed to open Russian airspace to American military planes and use his influence with the former Soviet