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Diplomats
Met With Taliban on Bin Laden Some Contend U.S. Missed Its Chance
Washington Post Staff Writers Monday, October 29, 2001; Page A01 Over three years and on as many continents, U.S. officials met in
public and secret at least 20 times with Taliban representatives to
discuss ways the regime could bring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden to
justice. Talks continued until just days before the Sept. 11 attacks, and
Taliban representatives repeatedly suggested they would hand over bin
Laden if their conditions were met, sources close to the discussions
said. Throughout the years, however, State Department officials refused to
soften their demand that bin Laden face trial in the U.S. justice system.
It also remained murky whether the Taliban envoys, representing at least
one division of the fractious Islamic movement, could actually deliver on
their promises. The exchanges lie at the heart of a long and largely untold history of
diplomatic efforts between the State Department and Afghanistan's ruling
regime that paralleled covert CIA actions to take bin Laden. In the end,
both diplomatic and covert efforts proved fruitless. In interviews, U.S. participants and sources close to the Taliban
discussed the exchanges in detail and debated whether the State Department
should have been more flexible in its hard-line stance. Earlier this
month, President Bush summarily rejected another Taliban offer to give up
bin Laden to a neutral third country. "We know he's guilty. Turn him
over," Bush said. Some Afghan experts argue that throughout the negotiations, the United
States never recognized the Taliban need for aabroh, the Pashtu
word for "face-saving formula." Officials never found a way to ease the
Taliban's fear of embarrassment if it turned over a fellow Muslim to an
"infidel" Western power. "We were not serious about the whole thing, not only this
administration but the previous one," said Richard Hrair Dekmejian, an
expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of Southern
California. "We did not engage these people creatively. There were missed
opportunities." U.S. officials struggled to communicate with Muslim clerics unfamiliar
with modern diplomacy and distrustful of the Western world, and they
failed to take advantage of fractures in the Taliban leadership. "We never heard what they were trying to say," said Milton Bearden, a
former CIA station chief who oversaw U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan
in the 1980s. "We had no common language. Ours was, 'Give up bin Laden.'
They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him up.' " State Department officials assert that despite hours of talks and
proposals that were infuriatingly vague, the Afghan rulers never truly
intended to give up bin Laden. U.S. negotiators started out "very, very patient," one official said.
But over the course of many meetings, the envoys "lost all patience with
them because they kept saying they would do something and they did exactly
nothing." The meetings took place in Tashkent, Kandahar, Islamabad, Bonn, New
York and Washington. There were surprise satellite calls, one of which led
to a 40-minute chat between a mid-level State Department bureaucrat and
the Taliban's supreme leader, Mohammad Omar. There was a surprise visit to
Washington, made by a Taliban envoy bearing a gift carpet for Bush. The diplomatic effort to snare bin Laden began as early as 1996, when
officials devised a plan to use back channels to Sudan, one of seven
countries on the U.S. list of terrorist-supporting states. Under the plan,
bin Laden would be arrested in Khartoum and extradited to Saudi Arabia,
which would turn him over to the United States. But the United States could not persuade the Saudis to accept bin
Laden, and Sudan instead expelled him to Afghanistan in May 1996 -- a few
months before the Taliban seized power in Kabul. The Clinton administration did not begin seriously pressing the Taliban
for bin Laden's expulsion until the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and
injured 4,600. The bombings were "a seminal moment," changing Washington's view of the
Taliban, an administration official said. The attacks convinced U.S.
policymakers that Omar was no longer simply interested in conquering
Afghanistan, but that his protection was allowing bin Laden, a longtime
friend, to engage in terrorist ventures abroad. U.S. officials launched a two-pronged policy to pressure the Taliban
into handing over bin Laden. On the one hand, the United States used the
United Nations and the threat of sanctions. On the other, it began a
hard-nosed dialogue. Within days of the embassy bombings, State Department officer Michael
Malinowski began telephoning Taliban officials. On one occasion,
Malinowski, lounging on the deck of his Washington home, spoke by
telephone with Omar. "I would say, 'Hey, give up bin Laden,' and they would say, 'No. . . .
Show us the evidence,' " Malinowski said. Taliban leaders argued they
could not expel a guest, and Malinowski responded, "It is not all right if
this visitor goes up to the roof of your house and shoots his gun at his
neighbors." On Feb. 3, 1999, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. Inderfurth,
the Clinton administration's point man for talks with the Taliban, and
Michael Sheehan, State Department counterterrorism chief, went to
Islamabad to deliver a stern message to the Taliban's deputy foreign
minister, Abdul Jalil: The United States henceforth would hold the Taliban
responsible for any terrorist act by bin Laden. By that time, bin Laden had been indicted for his alleged role in the
embassy bombings. The officials reviewed the indictment in detail with the
Taliban and offered to provide more evidence if the Taliban sent a
delegation to New York. The Taliban did not do so. Immediately after the U.S. warning, Taliban security forces took bin
Laden from his Kandahar compound and spirited him away to a remote site,
according to media reports at the time. They also seized his satellite
communications and barred him from contact with the media. Publicly, the Taliban said they no longer knew where he was. Inderfurth
now says the United States interpreted such statements "as an effort to
evade their responsibility to turn him over." Others, however, say the cryptic statements should have been
interpreted differently. Bearden, for example, believes the Taliban more
than once set up bin Laden for capture by the United States and
communicated its intent by saying he was lost. "Every time the Afghans said, 'He's lost again,' they are saying
something. They are saying, 'He's no longer under our protection,' "
Bearden said. "They thought they were signaling us subtly, and we don't do
signals." U.N. pressure steadily mounted. In October 1999, a Security Council
resolution demanded the Taliban turn over bin Laden to "appropriate
authorities" but left open the possibility he could be tried somewhere
besides a U.S. court. In response, the Taliban proposed bringing bin Laden to justice, either
in Afghanistan or another Muslim country. One Taliban proposal suggested bin Laden be turned over to a panel of
three Islamic jurists, one each chosen by Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and
the United States. When the United States rejected that proposal, the Taliban countered
that it would settle for only one Islamic jurist on such a panel, a source
close to the Taliban leadership said. Taliban leaders also kept demanding the United States provide more
evidence of bin Laden's terrorist activities. "It became clear that the call for more evidence was more a delaying
tactic than a sincere effort to solve the bin Laden issue," Inderfurth
said. Throughout 1999 and 2000, Inderfurth, Sheehan and Thomas R. Pickering,
then undersecretary of state, continued meeting in Washington, Islamabad,
New York and Bonn to review evidence against bin Laden. They warned of war
if there were another terrorist attack. "We saw a continuing effort to evade, deny and obfuscate," Inderfurth
said. "They had no interest in an international panel, really. Their only
intention was not to hand bin Laden over." Phyllis E. Oakley, head of the State Department's intelligence bureau
in the late 1990s, said her bureau concluded Omar would never give up bin
Laden. Last March, Rahmatullah Hashimi, a 24-year-old Taliban envoy, arrived
in Washington on a surprise visit, meeting with reporters, middle-ranking
State Department bureaucrats and private Afghanistan experts. He carried a
gift carpet and a letter from Omar, both meant for President Bush. Hashimi said he had come with a new offer, but U.S. officials now
dismiss his visit as just another feint. They say Hashimi simply wanted to
know whether the new administration had a fresh idea for breaking the
deadlock. Yet the two sides kept meeting, mostly in Islamabad. Assistant
Secretary of State Christina Rocca saw Taliban ambassador Abdul Salam
Zaeef there in early August, and U.S. embassy officials held secret talks
with Taliban security chief Hameed Rasoli. The Taliban invited a U.S.
delegation to Kandahar, but the United States refused unless a solution
for handing over bin Laden was first reached, a source close to the
Taliban said. Even after Sept. 11, as U.S. aircraft carriers and warplanes rushed
toward Afghanistan, the Taliban's mysterious maneuvering continued. Bearden, the former CIA administrator, picked up his phone in Reston in
early October and dialed a satellite number in Kandahar. Hashimi answered,
still full of optimism that Saudi clerics and an upcoming conference of
Islamic nations would give their blessing to Bush's demand that they
"cough him up." "There was a 50-50 chance something could happen," Hashimi told
Bearden, "if the Saudis stepped in." Five days later, bin Laden remained at large and the United States
began pummeling Kandahar and other Taliban strongholds. "I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the
neck," Bearden said of bin Laden. "It never clicked." Staff writers Gilbert M. Gaul, Mary Pat Flaherty and James V.
Grimaldi and researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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