U.S. stance let terror network grow

The Plain Dealer ^ | 11/06/01 | Mary Pat Flaherty, David B. Ottaway and James V. Grimaldi

[tomball]

- Each year, the U.S. State Department formally rebukes and imposes penalties on governments that protect and promote terrorists.


But since 1996, when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, the nation harboring Osama bin Laden has never made the department's list of terrorist-sponsoring countries.

The omission reflects more than a decade of vexing relations between the United States and Afghanistan, a period that found the State Department more focused on U.S. oil interests and women's rights than on the growing terrorist threat, according to experts and current and former officials.

It was not until 1998, when two U.S. embassy bombings were linked to bin Laden, that officials knew they must directly address Afghanistan's protection of the terrorist's organization.

The lack of a coherent policy toward Afghanistan was part of a broader miscalculation by the United States government, experts now realize.

By allowing terrorism fueled by anti-American rage to take root in Afghanistan, officials under-estimated the danger.

"This is hard to say and I haven't found a way to say it that doesn't sound crass," said former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

"But it is the truth that those [attacks before Sept. 11] were happening overseas, and while there were Americans who died, there were not thousands and it did not happen on U.S. soil," Albright said.

The day after the Taliban seized Kabul in September 1996, State Department spokesman Glyn Davies encountered tough questions from reporters.

Victorious in a fight against rival factions, the Taliban claimed power after castrating and killing former President Najibullah and hanging the corpses of him and his brother at the entrance to the Presidential Palace.

Davies reported the events matter-of-factly and said the United States saw "nothing objectionable" about the Taliban imposing its strict interpretation of Islamic law.

For seven years, the State Department had loosely monitored Afghanistan's civil warfare after defeated Soviet troops pulled out of the country in 1989.

Promising to restore law and order, the Taliban said that refugees could return "without fear." The United States hoped the regime would restore stability.

Davies' comments reflected years of U.S. support for Afghan rebels during the war with the Soviets. The U.S. government had covertly supplied aid to religious fighters known as mujahedeen who wanted to restore an Islamic state.

In those ranks was bin Laden, a scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family. Bin Laden had arrived in Afghanistan in 1982 to fight the Soviets, and stayed through 1990, forming alliances with fundamentalist leaders, including Mohammad Omar, the Taliban supreme commander.

None of this seemed particularly threatening to most of the diplomatic corps at the State Department, which was consumed with events in Iran and Iraq and the brewing nuclear arms race between Pakistan and India.

But there were warnings. Peter Tomsen, a longtime State Department official who was a special envoy to Afghanistan, and a few others insisted that the United States should help rebuild the country to protect it from extremists. "The U.S. mistake was to ignore Afghanistan," Tomsen says today.

After the Cold War, the United States was "weary of Afghanistan," said Robin L. Raphel, the assistant secretary for South Asian affairs at the State Department from 1993 to 1997.

With U.S. officials paying more attention to Afghanistan's neighbors, bin Laden returned to the country. The United States had pressed Sudan to evict him for suspected terrorist activities but did not sustain the pressure when Omar welcomed him.


A terrorist force

A State Department report in August 1996 labeled bin Laden one of the "most significant sponsors of terrorism today."

Throughout the mid-1990s, a U.S. oil company was tracking the outcome of the Afghan conflict. Unocal, a California-based energy giant, was seeking rights to build a massive pipeline system across Afghanistan, connecting the vast oil and natural gas reserves of Turkmenistan to a plant and ports in Pakistan.

State Department officials promoted Unocal's pipeline project in their role of helping U.S. companies find investments in the region, Raphel said.

But Unocal faced fierce competition. Because it was unclear which of Afghanistan's factions would ultimately take control, international oil companies jockeyed to build alliances.

Unocal appealed to the Taliban and received assurances that it would support a $4.5 billion project rivaling the trans-Alaska pipeline.

But Unocal also needed U.S. backing. To secure critical financing from agencies such as the World Bank, it needed the State Department to formally recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's government.

Unocal hired former State Department insiders: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former special U.S. Ambassador John Maresca and Robert Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born former Reagan State Department adviser on Afghanistan, entered the picture as a consultant for a Boston group hired by Unocal. Khalilzad and Oakley had dual roles during this period because the State Department also sought their advice. Khalilzad is now one of President Bush's top advisers on Afghanistan.


Trampling women's rights

In a late 1997 public relations move, Unocal flew Taliban officials to tour the company's U.S. offices. They took a side trip to the beach, then flew to Washington for meetings in the Capitol and at the State Department to press their case for U.S. recognition.

But the visit only fueled the outrage of women's rights groups who were incensed by Unocal's coziness with the regime.

The State Department's human rights division had been chronicling the Taliban's increasingly repressive treatment of women. Women are barred from schools and jobs and are required to wear head-to-toe shrouds known as burqas.

But reports of these and other human rights violations - including stonings, amputations and executions - had little effect until Secretary of State Albright took over in Clinton's second term. She elevated the Afghanistan focus, naming her close colleague Karl F. "Rick" Inderfurth to head the South Asia Bureau.

She also planned a November 1997 trip to meet with Afghan women in refugee camps.

"Despicable," Albright said as she emerged from a mud-brick camp in Nasir Bagh sheltering 80,000 Afghans. She had listened as women and girls described deplorable treatment, including a 13-year-old who told of watching her older sister jump to her death out a window rather than live under the regime.

Women's groups had been agitating at the State Department since the Taliban's 1996 takeover but believed they were not taken seriously. In meetings, Afghan-American women described life before the Taliban, when well-educated, professional women moved freely in some Afghan cities.

But among the State Department's old hands, "there was a lot of putting down, like these women didn't know what they were talking about," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

The women's effort had an important ally at the White House, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.


U.S. sidesteps issue

The issue of international terrorism had no such constituency. A bin Laden decree in early 1998 urged followers to target the United States and its citizens, but the notice was largely ignored by U.S. groups and businesses concentrating on Afghanistan.

Shortly after Inderfurth took over the State Department office dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1997, he posed a question: Why isn't Afghanistan on the list of terrorist-sponsoring nations?

Inclusion would have meant a ban on arms sales, constraints on business and a cutoff of economic aid. The same seven countries had been on the list since 1993 - Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

With Afghanistan, there was a catch. If the Taliban were branded a "state sponsor" of terrorism, that meant the United States would inadvertently be acknowledging the Taliban as the official government. And the State Department had resisted doing so.

Instead, the United States was using other methods to press its case. It leaned on Pakistan to persuade the Taliban to stop harboring bin Laden. Pakistan had developed a close relationship with the Taliban, supplying arms and using camps in Taliban-controlled territory to train its own guerrillas.

Consequently, if Afghanistan made the list, the procedure for designating terrorist sponsors would have argued for also sanctioning Pakistan. "We weren't prepared to totally isolate Pakistan," an official said.

"The whole approach was so absurd," said Phil Smith, a spokesman for Afghanistan's Northern Alliance faction, a Taliban rival.

"It ignored the reality that it was the Pakistani military that had helped to create and maintain the Taliban regime."


Taliban avoid sanctions

The 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, altered the landscape.

The attacks were quickly linked to bin Laden, and President Clinton froze bin Laden's assets and prohibited U.S. firms from doing business with him.

Thirteen days after the attacks, the United States directed missile strikes on terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan.

Doing more, Albright said, would have been a challenge "since we did not have the kind of support we have now for our actions on terrorism. Back then, we were being criticized both for doing too much and for not doing enough."

The bombings abruptly ended Unocal's hopes of a pipeline project. The company backed out on Dec. 4, 1998, citing business reasons.

At the White House, debate resurfaced about adding Afghanistan to the terrorist list. Officials reasoned that they could use the threat of listing to bargain with the Taliban, according to one former adviser.

By 1999, the United Nations imposed the first of two sets of sanctions that cut off Taliban money and arms.

In that same year, the State Department formally named bin Laden's al-Qaida group as a "foreign terrorist organization," which froze its U.S. assets, barred visas for its members and made it a crime to support the group. Still it did not formally single out Afghanistan or the Taliban as terrorist sponsors.

To some analysts, the actions were too little, too late.

"Right up until the embassy bombings, we were willing to believe their assurances," said Julie Sirrs, a former analyst on Iran for the Defense Intelligence Agency who also monitored the Taliban.

"We were not serious about this whole thing, not only this administration, but the previous one," and that holds true until the Sept. 11 attacks, said Richard Dekmejian, a University of Southern California terrorism specialist.

Albright disagrees. She said terrorism "was not a back burner issue at all. We kept pushing it and pushing intelligence agencies - the FBI, CIA - to work on it."




© 2001 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.

[Rudder]

I'm shocked to learn that we have made mistakes in the past, especially during the Clinton years.