Posted on 08/02/2002 6:21:03 AM PDT by robowombat
Wall Street Journal August 2, 2002 Pg. 1
A Once-Stormy Terror Alliance Was Solidified By Cruise Missiles
Al Qaeda Had Sour Days in Afghanistan, But a U.S. Attack United bin Laden, Omar
By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins, Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal
KABUL, Afghanistan -- In April 1998, shortly after Osama bin Laden called on Muslims everywhere to slaughter Americans, a group of senior U.S. officials traveled to the Afghan capital to try to break the ice with the Saudi exile's Taliban hosts.
The Taliban gave the Americans a brisk tour, showing off a concrete traffic booth from which they had hanged a former Afghan president. Then they drove their visitors past a ragtag honor guard waving rifles to a shabby hall equipped with a multivolume set of Thomas Jefferson's writings. The Taliban were trying, in their way, to please: It was a Friday, the day for public executions and amputations in the football stadium, but on this Friday, the Taliban gave the executioners the day off.
"The whole thing had a certain surreal quality," recalls Karl Inderfurth, who was an assistant secretary of state and part of this first, and last, senior U.S. mission to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
The most surreal feature of all, though, remained carefully hidden. Behind a facade of Islamic solidarity presented to the visitors raged a bitter struggle between two standard-bearers of radical Islam: the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar and Mr. bin Laden.
A relationship that appeared smooth and even symbiotic to the outside world was rent by disillusionment, anger and petty one-upmanship. A country the U.S. considered a terrorists' paradise was, in the view of many of the terrorists who arrived there from other lands, more like a hell: They couldn't trust the locals, the food was bad, they considered the Taliban leader a bumpkin, and their work was stymied by the near-medieval backwardness of the place.
"This place is worse than a tomb," wrote a bin Laden associate from Egypt to comrades back home, after checking out Afghanistan. The country, he said in a message stored on a computer found by The Wall Street Journal in Kabul, "is not suitable for work."
The Taliban, in turn, grumbled that Mr. bin Laden was arrogant, publicity-seeking and disrespectful. The rift ran so deep that some of his entourage of Arab revolutionaries expected to get booted out of Afghanistan, as they had been earlier from Sudan. Indeed, by the summer of 1998, according to a former Saudi intelligence chief, Mullah Omar had agreed to send Mr. bin Laden packing.
But then came the 1998 lethal bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, to which the U.S. replied by raining down cruise missiles on a bin Laden camp in Afghanistan. The retaliation had fateful consequences. It turned Mr. bin Laden into a cult figure among Islamic radicals, made Afghanistan a rallying point for defiance of America and shut off Taliban discussion of expelling the militants. It also helped convince Mr. bin Laden that goading America to anger could help his cause, not hurt it.
Today, thanks to the war in Afghanistan following Sept. 11, Islamist militants have lost their arid haven for training, networking and plotting. U.S. bombs have flattened the Afghan camps that trained fighters for battle in Kashmir, Chechnya and other local conflicts. Yet, in another paradox of American response to terrorist violence, the rout has forced what many Arab militants wanted all along: relocation away from a treacherous backwater. Those targeting the West didn't need shooting ranges so much as access to reliable electronic communications, false documents and the "infidel" countries in their sights.
Mr. bin Laden first took refuge in Afghanistan in May 1996, bringing his three wives, 13 children and troop of bodyguards after Sudan expelled him. His protector was a friend from the anti-Soviet struggle of the 1980s, a warlord named Yunis Khalis who was loosely allied with the Taliban. But Mr. bin Laden quickly began to irritate more-moderate Taliban officials, who had no interest in a global jihad and favored rapprochement with both the wider world and the Taliban's remaining foes in the north.
Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, then Taliban intelligence chief, says he told the al Qaeda leader that Afghanistan wanted peace, not more conflict, and "he should just go somewhere else. He got mad and we never spoke again."
Mullah Khaksar, who now supports the U.S.-backed Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, says many Taliban officials were unhappy with the Arab and other foreign militants, but most kept quiet. "Some were afraid for their position," he says, "some for their incomes, and some for their lives."
By 1998, Mr. bin Laden had also fallen out with Mullah Omar, despite efforts to curry favor with the Taliban's paramount leader by building him a villa in Kandahar.
Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistan journalist who met with Taliban and al Qaeda leaders many times, says Mullah Omar, a taciturn village cleric who lost an eye fighting the Soviets, particularly resented Mr. bin Laden's flamboyant grandstanding -- his blood-curdling declarations against America, phony fatwas for which he had no religious authority, and news conferences scripted to exaggerate his power. Taliban leaders, Mr. Yusufzai says, were "very bitter in private."
The Pakistani attended one of Mr. bin Laden's press events in May 1998, at a camp in the Afghan region of Khost. Smuggled into the country by Mr. bin Laden's followers, the reporter was kept waiting for several days and then driven for five hours over trackless terrain to an encampment swarming with armed men. Mr. bin Laden made a dramatic entry in a Japanese-built pickup, protected by about two dozen bodyguards, and, after a burst of celebratory gunfire, delivered a tirade against the U.S. and Israel.
It was impressive, the Pakistani journalist remembers, but also "total theater." He says the place they ended up was just a short distance from where they started -- the five-hour journey a ruse to make it seem Mr. bin Laden controlled a remote and secret stretch of Afghan territory. The throng of armed men, he adds, weren't al Qaeda fighters but local Afghans recruited as extras. "I speak the language so I could talk to them. They were ordinary Afghans," he says. Mr. bin Laden had "stage-managed the whole thing."
The press event infuriated Mullah Omar after he learned of it from a BBC report. Mr. Yusufzai says he got a phone call back in Pakistan from the Taliban leader, who grilled him about how he had entered without a visa and about what Mr. bin Laden had said.
"How can he hold a press conference without my permission? There is only one ruler. Is it me or Osama?" the journalist remembers Mullah Omar demanding. Mr. Yusufzai says Mr. bin Laden later apologized to Mullah Omar and promised not to hold any more news conferences without permission.
Some Arab militants, meanwhile, were voicing dismay at their chiefs' choice of real estate. One deplored Afghanistan's remoteness, bad roads and poor telephone lines, many of which, he said, were bugged. "A leader can't follow up company activities from there," he wrote, in an Arabic-language message stored on the PC found in Kabul last fall.
The "company," as activists called al Qaeda and its affiliates, set up a Web site but had to use a server in China -- Afghanistan had none. Equipment was brought in from Britain and the U.S. Even the spiritual guides who provided religious cover for terror were elsewhere: in London, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
A top lieutenant, Morgan al-Gohari, complained that the Afghans "change their ideas and positions all the time" and "would do anything for money." His letter to Ayman al-Zawahri, the No. 2 al Qaeda boss, asked, "Is it safe to live among these people? ... Can any of your work be done there in view of the lack of facilities?"
Far more suitable, operatives suggested, was Europe. Britain seems to have been a particularly popular destination: Dr. Zawahri issued an order ruling that "a brother may travel to London" to collect funds, but "may not stay there or seek asylum."
Tariq Anwar, a militant normally based in Yemen, wrote a mocking account of trying to make a telephone call during a trip to Afghanistan. "The first stage involves arranging a car (as we don't have a car).... The second stage involves waiting for the car (the car may be hours late or it may arrive before the agreed time)." The next stage, he wrote, "is the trip itself, in which we sit like sardines in a can. Most of the time I have one-eighth of a seat and the road is very bad." The final stage was reaching "a humble government communications office," where "most of the time there is some kind of failure, either the power is off [or] the lines are out of order."
The complaints about the penury masked a deeper suspicion: that the village mullahs heading the Taliban were too unlettered to run Afghanistan on their own. Arab militants looked down on the Afghans because they didn't speak Arabic, the language of the Quran, and therefore could embrace Islam only "emotionally," says Abdel-Fattah Fahmy Ahmed, a veteran Islamist released from jail in Cairo earlier this year. He says Mr. bin Laden and Dr. Zawahri saw Afghans as "a simple people with a simple culture.... They didn't believe the Taliban had an ability to grasp contemporary reality, politics and management."
Mr. bin Laden's grandstanding made already-tense relations with the locals worse. A July 1998 letter from two Syrian Islamists who had moved to Afghanistan, written in Arabic and stored on the computer found in Kabul, said the al Qaeda chief "has caught the disease of [TV] screens, flashes, fans and applause."
His "obstinacy, egotism and pursuit of internal battles," they continued, had alienated the Taliban leader and strengthened a "corrupt stream" within the Taliban that was keen to do a deal with the Americans. The writers mocked Mr. bin Laden's promises to use his money to build roads and revive the economy. The Taliban "got only promises which the wind blew away," said the two Syrians, Omar Abu Mosaab al-Suri and Abu Khaled al-Suri. "You know the truth."
The long letter said that Mr. bin Laden's "troublemaking" had so frayed relations with Mullah Omar that the Taliban had shut down one Arab camp. And "talk about closing down [all] the camps has spread." In short, it said, addressing Mr. bin Laden, "We are in a ship together, and you are burning it."
Americans following Afghanistan saw none of this. They sometimes picked up rumors of friction between the Arabs and Afghans but had no way to confirm them, says Mr. Inderfurth. Bill Richardson, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. who led the 1998 delegation to Kabul, says he tried to persuade the Taliban to hand over Mr. bin Laden and make peace with their foes but got nowhere, even though at the time he called his visit a "breakthrough."
"The Taliban basically said, 'We will not turn him over, but we will keep an eye on him for you,' " Mr. Richardson says. "My sense was that there was some kind of collusion between the two."
In fact, Taliban/al Qaeda relations were near a breaking point.
Two months after the U.S. visit, Mullah Omar had a secret visit in Kandahar from Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of intelligence for Saudi Arabia, one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban government. Prince Turki says the Saudi government, angered by Mr. bin Laden's fiery proclamations, had "decided that enough is enough." It asked Mullah Omar to hand over the al Qaeda leader so he could be put on trial in Saudi Arabia for treason, a crime punishable by death.
Mullah Omar, the prince says, assented to the Saudi demand, asking only that the two countries first set up a joint commission of Islamic scholars to formulate a justification for the expulsion. A month later, Prince Turki says, the Taliban leaders sent an envoy to Saudi Arabia to reaffirm the deal. In preparation, the Taliban replaced Mr. bin Laden's team of Arab bodyguards with Afghans loyal to Mullah Omar.
But shortly afterward, the plan came unstuck when the U.S., in retaliation for the bombing of its embassies in East Africa, fired 79 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan, Mr. bin Laden's previous sanctuary. President Clinton, then mired in the Monica Lewinsky mess, returned to Washington from a Martha's Vineyard vacation for a televised address, telling the nation: "Our mission was clear, to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden."
Even before he spoke, Dr. Zawahri got on the phone to Mr. Yusufzai in Pakistan to declare himself and Mr. bin Laden safe.
Mr. bin Laden was not only safe but also more secure -- and an international celebrity, his face and cause suddenly famous from Karachi to Kansas. The U.S. strike helped turn a loose association of Soviet-war alumni and other militants into a magnet for funds and recruits, says Hani al-Sebai, a London-based Islamist. Before, he says, "there was no al Qaeda."
Saudi Prince Turki says that, accompanied by the head of Pakistan's intelligence agency, he visited Afghanistan again less than a month after the U.S. raid -- and found the Taliban attitude had "changed 180 degrees." Mullah Omar, he says, was "absolutely rude," insulting the Saudi royal family as American "lackeys" and refusing to discuss Mr. bin Laden. Prince Turki stormed out of the meeting. The deal to send Mr. bin Laden back to Saudi Arabia was off. Also void was Mr. bin Laden's pledge to curb his thirst for publicity.
The al Qaeda chief soon held another of his media spectacles, this time with the Taliban's support. The U.S. had used missiles, Mr. bin Laden said derisively, because Americans were "too cowardly ... to meet the young people of Islam face-to-face."
Al Qaeda hatched plans to milk the missile attack for propaganda and profit. A promotional video featuring the area damaged by the raid soon went on sale in Islamic bookshops in Europe and the Mideast. Al Qaeda's military chief composed letters to ABC, CBS and CNN offering to sell footage of Mr. bin Laden "openly threatening America." Though the computer found in Kabul contains copies of the letter, it's not clear it was ever sent; the networks say they didn't receive it.
Three months after the U.S. retaliatory attack, the Taliban said they had examined the U.S. accusation that Mr. bin Laden was behind the embassy bombings and determined he was "a man without sin." All hopes they would expel him were gone.
A year later, after Gen. Pervez Musharraf took over Pakistan in a military coup, the State Department's Mr. Inderfurth paid the new Pakistani leader a visit and asked him to intercede with the Taliban. Mr. Inderfurth says Gen. Musharraf said he would go to Kandahar and stay until Mullah Omar agreed to curb Mr. bin Laden, "even if this means taking a backpack and sleeping on the floor." Gen. Musharraf never went to Kandahar. A Pakistani embassy spokesman in Washington says Mr. Musharraf sent a number of emissaries to try to get Mullah Omar to sever ties with Mr. bin Laden, but when he refused, the Pakistani leader decided not to go personally.
Mullah Khaksar, the former Taliban intelligence chief, says Washington also dropped the ball. He says that while visiting Pakistan in 1999 for treatment for an old bullet wound, he made contact with the U.S. consulate in Peshawar and said he wanted to talk about ways to rid Afghanistan of Mr. bin Laden and other terrorists. Mullah Khaksar says an American diplomat told him the U.S. didn't want to get involved in internal Afghan politics. Mr. Inderfurth and Michael Sheehan, who was the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, say they know nothing of such an exchange.
These were times of much tension inside Afghanistan. A truck bomb blew up outside Mullah Omar's Kandahar compound in August 1999, wounding his brother. Taliban troops in the field suffered setbacks against the Northern Alliance forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud, who controlled one corner of Afghanistan. And the U.N., at America's behest, ordered the Taliban's foreign assets frozen and its airline grounded until it evicted Mr. bin Laden.
The foreign militants took advantage of these troubles to draw closer to their hosts. Mullah Khaksar says the truck bomb, which many blamed on Mr. Massoud, "was a good opportunity for Osama. He went to Mullah Omar's house and promised that [al Qaeda] would take revenge on his enemies."
Foreign militants rallied to help the Taliban's troops. "If there was a piece of territory the Afghans couldn't conquer, the Arabs would do it for them," says Mullah Khaksar. "They never cared for their own lives."
The U.S., with no embassy in Kabul, labored to keep open channels of communication. U.S. officials met with Taliban envoys in Islamabad, New York and Washington to demand Mr. bin Laden's surrender, and one managed to get the reclusive Mullah Omar on the phone. The conversations, says Mr. Sheehan, "grew more and more harsh, more and more blunt." After the U.S. uncovered plans for millennium attacks by Mr. bin Laden's confederates, Mr. Sheehan phoned the Taliban foreign minister with a stern message: "If you have an arsonist in your house, you become responsible for his actions."
Al Qaeda, meanwhile, was working to poison Taliban attitudes. An unsigned Arabic letter addressed to Mullah Omar in 2000, found on the Kabul computer, urged the Afghan rulers to shun all contact with "infidel" nations.
Al Qaeda's propaganda department churned out reports attacking the U.N., the Taliban's main contact with the wider world. It denounced the U.N. charter for promoting equality between the sexes and among countries, asking: "How can Muslim and non-Muslim states be equal?" Another text was titled "Critique of the U.N. as an Infidel Agency."
Mr. bin Laden began a simultaneous campaign of flattery. He hailed Mullah Omar as Islam's new caliph -- a lofty title not used since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire -- and Afghanistan as the kernel of a new caliphate, a vast and pure Islamic state that would embrace central Asia and beyond.
Cloaking their Afghan presence in religion, al Qaeda chiefs claimed to be following the example of Muhammad, who led his followers in a hijrah, or migration, from Mecca to Medina in the seventh century. Dr. Zawahri wrote to radical clerics abroad urging them to "migrate" to Afghanistan, to "the land of glory and freedom, where the dear mujahideen gather, to the school of faith and jihad."
He appealed to an Egyptian Islamic scholar named Dr. Fadl, who, disgusted with Islamist infighting, had retired to herd goats in Yemen. Dr. Zawahri pleaded with him to come to Afghanistan and lend his authority to the world's "largest gathering of contracting companies" -- jihad jargon for terror operators. Dr. Fadl, who had once accused Dr. Zawahri of plagiarizing his writings, declined.
While big-name Islamic scholars stayed away, hundreds of youthful Islamists answered the migration call, enrolling in Afghan training camps affiliated with Mr. bin Laden, though not always controlled by him. A questionnaire inquired about their affiliations. "The applicant must give correct information," said the form, stored on the Kabul computer, adding that al Qaeda "reserves the right to take all steps if information given is incorrect."
Over tea in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a 24-year-old Islamist recently told of visiting Afghanistan three times before Sept. 11, meeting Mr. bin Laden and several of the Sept. 11 hijackers. The activist, asking not to be named, said he picked up tips on poisons and explosives, but most important was the camaraderie. "In Afghanistan, everything changes. Your mind opens up. You begin to think globally," he said.
This rapture could also turn rancid. "The food was always bad. People got sick. People were always tired," said the Saudi, who said he fell seriously ill from the water. Discipline was harsh. He said two militants who were discovered having a homosexual affair were executed.
Al Qaeda's bosses mostly shunned fraternization with the locals, shuttling between houses in Kabul's embassy district, an enclave in Kandahar and camp colonies in the outback. Concern with security shaded into paranoia. An al Qaeda report in June 2000 said training camps should have two types of security officers: one to supervise the head of each camp and a second to monitor the first -- known only to the organization's overall chief.
Wahid Dullah, a Kabul shopkeeper living opposite a walled compound that Arab militants rented early in 2001, says the first thing they did was reinforce the door. Then they built a concrete security booth. They made calls from a long-distance telephone office, whose owner says they argued over payment and accused him of cheating them.
Some foreign recruits, far from home and distressed by the hardship, seem to have snapped under the strain. A Malay-speaking militant wrote a rambling, barely coherent appeal to fellow Muslims that was stored on the Kabul computer: "Don't forget to wash the plaque [from your teeth] otherwise it will smell and people around you will faint.... Alas, defender of the faith, let's go to war. Fight everywhere, even in the toilet. But don't get carried away ... ha ha ha."
With al Qaeda's ties to the Taliban improving after battles with the Northern Alliance and the U.S. missile strike, members of Mr. bin Laden's entourage began to enjoy privileges denied to ordinary Afghans. One was the right to roam the country with weapons. A travel pass signed early last year by Mullah Abdul Jalil, the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, reads, "This armed Arab guest ... has the right to go everywhere (including secret offices) as he pleases. Nobody has the right to stop him."
Mullah Khaksar, the former Taliban intelligence chief, says that in the last year Mr. bin Laden held numerous secret meetings with Mullah Omar, who had become "so influenced by Osama that he was ready to sacrifice his people, his country, everything for him." They sealed the bond with an act of dramatic vandalism: the destruction of ancient Buddhas carved into a cliff.
The Taliban had taken potshots at the giant stone figures before but managed only to dislodge a hand. The Arab militants lobbied for a mightier assault and, in March 2001, took part in an operation that blasted the 1,500-year-old monoliths to oblivion. A video of the destruction, with a soundtrack of joyous chanting, is stored on the Kabul computer.
Al Qaeda chiefs congratulated Mullah Omar on the elimination of "dead, deaf and mute false gods." They urged that he work to liquidate as well a "living false god," identified as the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: Russia, China, France, Britain and the U.S. "Thus we call upon you to reject this living false god ... and destroy it just as you previously destroyed its dead brother," says a message stored on the computer.
A militant Kuwaiti cleric, writing on al Qaeda's Web site early last year, offered a simple defense of the country that was offering sanctuary to the militants. Afghanistan's worthiness was self-evident, he argued: After all, it had been hit by American missiles and survived.
In the end, the distrust, discomfort and sometimes despair felt by many al Qaeda militants failed to derail the relationship between Mullah Omar and Mr. bin Laden. Fused together by U.S. missiles and common hostility to the outside world, the university-trained Saudi millionaire and the barely educated Afghan village cleric had become one.
-
- Hugh Pope contributed to this article.
In the same year, Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, reputedly came up with a scheme to capture bin Laden on his own; after consulting with the Taliban he flew his private plane to Kabul and drove out to see Mullah Omar at his HQ. The two men sat down, as Helms recounts the story, and the Saudi said, "There's just one little thing. Will you kill bin Laden before you put him on the plane?" Mullah Omar called for a bucket of cold water. As the Saudi delegation fidgeted, he took off his turban, splashed water on his head, and then washed his hands before sitting back down. "You know why I asked for the cold water?" he asked Turki. "What you just said made my blood boil."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.