At Camp David, Advise and Dissent

The first called for a strike with cruise missiles, a plan the military could execute quickly if speed was the president's overriding priority. The missiles could be launched by Navy ships or Air Force planes from hundreds of miles away. The targets included al Qaeda's training camps.

The problem, Shelton said, was that the camps were virtually empty and therefore the missile attacks would not be that effective. Clearly, Shelton was not enamored of this idea, nor were the others. Bush had brushed off the possibility from Day One that his response would be an antiseptic "pinprick" attack.

Option Two combined cruise missiles with manned bomber attacks. Shelton said Bush could initially choose a strike lasting three or four days or something longer, maybe up to 10 days. The targets included al Qaeda training camps and some Taliban targets, depending on whether the president wanted to go after the Taliban militarily at the start. But this too had limits. As Cheney had said the first night of the crisis, there were few high-value targets in Afghanistan, a country devastated by two decades of war. Another disadvantage was that it could reinforce perceptions that the United States wanted a largely risk-free war on terrorism.

Shelton described the third and most robust option as cruise missiles, bombers and what the planners like to call "boots on the ground." This option included all the elements of the second option along with U.S. Special Forces, the elite commandos, and possibly the Army and Marines being deployed inside Afghanistan. But he said it would take a minimum of 10 to 12 days just to get initial forces on the ground -- in reality it took far longer -- because bases and overflight rights would be needed for search-and-rescue teams to bring out any downed pilots.

If there was already a consensus to go to war, the discussions that followed many of the morning's presentations underscored to the participants the complexity and uncertainty of their undertaking.

Bush and his team faced a far different situation than Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, had 11 years earlier, after Iraq had invaded Kuwait in 1990. On Saturday, Aug. 4, 1990, again at Camp David and in the same lodge, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, then commander of the Central Command, had presented a detailed, off-the-shelf proposal for military action. It was called Operations Plan 90-1002, and it was the basic military plan that would be executed over the next seven months to oust Iraq from Kuwait.

In the case of Afghanistan, a military plan would have to be devised quickly, once the president made decisions about the shape of the war, the initial focus of the campaign and the relationship between the CIA and the Pentagon.

Based on the recollections of many of the participants and some notes taken at the meeting, the topics that morning included the politics of the region -- Afghanistan and the surrounding countries; the shaping of a coalition; the need to think unconventionally about fighting the war; and whether Iraq should be included in the war's first phase.

At one point, as they discussed the inherent risks of any operation in Afghanistan, someone said this was not likely to be like the Balkans, where ethnic hatreds had occupied the Clinton administration for most of its tenure. Rice said the problems of Afghanistan and the surrounding region were so complicated, "We're going to wish this was the Balkans."

The ideal result from this campaign, the president said, would be to kick terrorists out of some places like Afghanistan and through that action persuade other countries that had supported terrorism in the past, such as Iran, to change their behavior.

Powell noted that everyone in the international coalition was ready to go after al Qaeda, but that extending the war to other terrorist groups or countries could cause some of them to drop out.

The president said he didn't want other countries dictating terms or conditions for the war on terrorism. "At some point," the president said, "we may be the only ones left. That's okay with me. We are America."