Bergen: Bin Laden, CIA links hogwash

CNN ^ | August 15, 2006 | CNN, Peter Bergen

[GeorgiaYankee]

Q: If it's true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn't still? Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada

BERGEN: This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.

The story about bin Laden and the CIA -- that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden -- is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.

The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.

Q: How is it the richest country with the most powerful military machine ever to walk this Earth cannot locate and eliminate a single man? Steven Harper, Arlington, Washington

BERGEN: A good response to that is Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park bomber, evaded capture for five years and he was captured about five miles from where he was living in the first place -- meaning if you have somebody who is motivated and you have a support network and you don't make stupid mistakes, you can evade capture anywhere inside the United States.

Bin Laden, of course, isn't in the United States. He's most likely in Pakistan, where the U.S. military isn't even allowed to go in. So, the problem of finding one person is much harder than you might imagine.

[Calpernia]

Link?

[Reily]

The Taliban is a creation of the Pakistanis !

[ASA Vet]

Regarding your #2.
It isn't worth excavation when the result is already known.

[vbmoneyspender]

History of Afghanistan since 1992

[garjog]

Any one have a scholarly source showing that the CIA didn't work with Osama?

[vbmoneyspender]

Taliban legend has it that in the spring of 1994, upon hearing of the abduction and rape of two girls at a Mujahidin checkpoint in the village of Sang Hesar near Kandahar, local Mullah Omar, a veteran of the Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islami faction of the Mujahidin, gathered thirty other Taliban into a fighting force, rescued the girls and hanged the commander of the Mujahideen. After this incident, Taliban legend goes, the services of these pious religious fighters were in much demand from villagers plagued by unruly Mujahidin, and thus the Taliban were born.

Following this incident, Omar fled to the neighboring Balochistan province of Pakistan, from where he emerged in the fall of 1994, reportedly with a well-armed and well-funded militia of 1,500 followers, who would provide protection for a Pakistani trade convoy carrying goods overland to Turkmenistan. However, many reports suggest that the convoy was in fact full of Pakistani fighters posing as Taliban, and that the Taliban had gained considerable arms, military training, and economic aid from the Pakistanis.

After gaining power in and around Kandahar through a combination of military and diplomatic victories, the Taliban attacked, and eventually defeated, the forces of Ismail Khan in the west of the country, capturing Herat from him on September 5, 1995. That winter, the Taliban laid siege to the capital city Kabul, firing rockets into the city and blockading trade routes. In March, the Taliban's opponents, Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hikmatyar ceased fighting one another and formed a new anti-Taliban alliance. But on September 26, 1996, they quit the city of Kabul and retreated north, allowing the Taliban to capture the seat of government and establish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Upon taking Kabul, Taliban forces took former PDPA president Mohammad Najibullah, who had been residing in a UN compound, and hanged him and his brother from a traffic light post.

See Link

[donmeaker]

I just want to point out that in the several years prior to 9/11 the Taliban were at war with the Northern Alliance. A civil war, if you will.

We provided aid to the Northern Alliance, in the 1980s which consisted mostly of Uzbeks and Tajiks, and who had successfully fought against the Soviets.

The Taliban were invented in the 1990s, as a client of Pakistan Intelligence in an attempt to increase the influence of Pashtun tribes IN PAKISTAN!!!, while the Northern Alliance was the recognized government of Afghanistan. When we (US and Northern Alliance) drove out the Taliban, it was with the help of the Northern Alliance soldiers on the ground, Northern Alliance mortars, Northern Alliance cavalry, with US bombers providing fire support and Special Forces on the ground providing the integration.

After the Taliban were driven out of 90 percent of the country and the major cities, by coordinated air land operations with a total of 500 special forces, and key Pashtun leaders were rented, the Marines were airlifted into Khandahar.

[Calpernia]

Then who were the Mujahideen Avrakotos armed?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gust_Avrakotos

Gust L. Avrakotos (1938 – December 1, 2005) was a secret agent for the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Avrakotos is best known for the massive arming of Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Avrakotos's partnership with Charlie Wilson in this operation was chronicled in the book Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, by George Crile. Avrakotos is an alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh.

[vbmoneyspender]

The CIA-Bin Laden Myth

Losing bin Laden

[donmeaker]

First, scholarly sources are secondary sources. Primary sources would be Bin Laden, who isn't talking about that, and the US CIA agents who may have provided said support.

Sources that something didn't happen are always in short supply. That is why usually we presume that nothing has occured unless there is evidence that it did. Conspiracy theorists turn that on its head, and make all kinds of bogus conclusions.

[Calpernia]

That didn't answer my question.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1687121/posts?page=17#17

[vbmoneyspender]

I don't understand your question. The Taliban didn't come into existence until 1994 so they couldn't have been funded as part of the war against the Soviets. Ås for funding bin Laden, the two links I have provided to Miniter's work on bin Laden should serve to rebut this contention as well

[oolatec]

It is NOT true. We did not fund or assist Bin Laden in any way. We worked with the Mujahadeen, who eventually became the Northern Alliance. While some of the Afghani Muj joined the foreign Jihadists, they were the ones we aided against the Soviets. And as you know, the Afghani Muj eventually became the Northern Alliance, who fought against Bin Laden's group.

Never at any time did we give any assistance to Bin Laden.

[Calpernia]

Ok. Maybe they weren't called Taliban then. Maybe they were just called mujahideen.

My links I've posted rebut yours also.

[Calpernia]

I'm sorry. My post 17 doesn't say anything about Bin Laden. So what is not true in my post 17?

[BIGLOOK]

The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.

Hmmm......1996. I always wondered what the CIA knew and when they knew it. Now we know they didn't know?

[donmeaker]

Your reference was irrelevant to the discussion. Yes the US provided help to the Mujadeen, but the Mujadeen were not Taliban, but rather were the people that the Taliban fought against.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Geez, 11-12 million is the figure so doubling it does not help the case you are trying to make.

[KC_Conspirator]

I am speaking about the liberal liars which try to pin this on us. If anyone knows the history, OBL showed up in Afghanistan years after the Muhajaddin were on their way to victory.

[xkaydet65]

The mujahadeen the CIA financed became the Northern Alliance, whose leader was assasinated om 9/09/01. CIA never gave money, weapons, or training to the so called Arab Afghans like bin Laden.

Even if they had, what complaint can anyone have. The money and weapons to the mujahadeen helped destroy the Soviet Union and end the Cold War in our favor. To complain about that then one would have to denounce the 8,000 tanks, 12,000 aircraft, a quarter million trucks, and 4,000 locomotives we sent to Joe Stalin in WWII. Of course we could have let him lose and faced four times the numbers of German troops on D Day.