Author: Mary Pat Flaherty, David
B. Ottaway and James V. Grimaldi
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: November 5, 2001; Page A01
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/specials/attacked/A39681-2001Nov4.html
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. Even as its cables and reports showed
growing anxiety, the department vacillated between engaging and isolating
the Taliban. 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.
U.S. diplomats held out hope that
the threat of adding Afghanistan to the terrorism list was "one card we
had to play" in pressing the Taliban to turn over bin Laden, according
to a former Clinton administration adviser. The lack of a coherent policy
toward Afghanistan was part of a broader miscalculation by the U.S. government,
experts now realize. By allowing terrorism fueled by anti-American rage
to take root in Afghanistan, officials underestimated the potential for
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 K. 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."
Taliban Not 'Objectionable'
The day after the Taliban seized
Kabul in September 1996, State Department spokesman Glyn Davies encountered
tough questions from U.S. reporters. Victorious in a brutal fight against
rival factions, the Taliban claimed power after castrating and killing
former president Najibullah and hanging the corpses of him and his brother
from a post at the entrance to the Presidential Palace.
Davies reported the events matter-of-factly
and told reporters the United States saw "nothing objectionable" about
the Taliban imposing its strict interpretation of Islamic law.
"So let me get this straight," a
reporter asked. "This group, this Islamic fundamentalist group that has
taken Afghanistan by force and summarily executed the former president,
the United States is holding out possibility of relations?"
"I'm not going to prejudge where
we're going to go with Afghanistan," Davies said.
For seven years, the State Department
had loosely monitored Afghanistan's civil warfare after defeated Soviet
troops pulled out of the country in 1989. Prolonged fighting had left Afghanistan
devastated, with tides of refugees, a largely illiterate population and
a ravaged agricultural economy based heavily on opium production.
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
mujaheddin 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.
In fact, when the Clinton administration
took over in 1993, Warren Christopher mentioned bringing peace to Afghanistan
in his confirmation hearings for secretary of state, then never made a
significant speech about the country again. Christopher declined requests
for an interview.
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. By disengaging, the United States
risked "throwing away the assets we have built up in Afghanistan over the
last 10 years, at great expense," he argued in a confidential 1993 memo
to top State Department officials.
"The U.S. mistake was to ignore
Afghanistan," Tomsen says today. "We walked away."
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. "It
was really a struggle to get attention and resources."
Yet to a large extent, the United
States deferred to Pakistan, its ally against the Soviet Union, as Afghanistan's
turbulence dragged on, according to other former officials.
"The U.S. had what I call a derivative
policy toward Afghanistan," said Elie D. Krakowski, a former special assistant
to the secretary of defense, who has written extensively on Afghanistan.
"That is, it had no policy on Afghanistan on its own, and whatever Pakistan
said, we bought." The United States was reluctant to criticize Pakistan
as it further aligned itself with the Taliban after Kabul's fall.
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 in as
a guest.
Activities at bin Laden's training
camps increased. A State Department report in August 1996 labeled him one
of the "most significant sponsors of terrorism today."
The Pipeline Connection
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. Raphel, who shuttled to Kandahar
to meet with Taliban leaders and met at other points with different groups,
said the agency also thought the project might help rally them around a
common goal. "We worked hard to make all the Afghan factions understand
the potential, because the Unocal pipeline offered development opportunities
that no aid program nor any Afghan government could," she 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. The deal promised to be a boon for the Taliban,
which could realize $100 million a year in transit fees.
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 A. Kissinger, former special
U.S. ambassador John J. 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.
Officially, Unocal refused to take
sides in the Afghan conflict. But its favors to the Taliban sent a clear
signal to rivals. Unocal gave the Taliban a fax machine to speed its communications
and funded a job training program affiliated with the University of Nebraska
that was set up in Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold in southeast Afghanistan.
Before Unocal, the Taliban "were
just a bunch of wild jihadists running around. They came out of nowhere,"
said Richard Dekmejian, a University of Southern California terrorism specialist,
using the Islamic term for holy warriors.
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 were barred from schools and jobs and required to wear
head-to-toe shrouds known as burqas. Secluded inside homes with darkened
windows, they could be seen in public only in the company of male relatives.
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 huddled in refugee camps.
Albright's trip was a sign that
the Taliban treatment of women, more than any other issue, "finally sparked
their interest on the seventh floor," the State Department's executive
suite, said Lee O. Coldren, who directed the little-noticed office on Afghanistan
from 1994 to 1997.
Crucial Albright Visit "Despicable."
Albright emerged from a mud-brick
camp in Nasir Bagh sheltering 80,000 Afghans, and with that single word,
she ratcheted up the U.S. rhetoric. 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.
The visit "was one of those watershed
events for me," Albright said recently.
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. And at the
United Nations, the two women who headed the food and children's care programs
linked their Afghanistan aid to improved treatment of women.
The issue of international terrorism
had no such constituency. A bin Laden fatwa 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.
That July, U.S. women's groups organized
protests of Unocal's plans to go ahead with its project despite what Smeal
called the Taliban's "horrific gender apartheid."
The pressure from women's groups
began to have an impact domestically. It became increasingly clear that
U.S. recognition of the Taliban -- the seal of approval needed so desperately
by Unocal -- would be politically implausible.
Why Not on List?
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 was 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."
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 Bill 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. News reports at the time speculated that Unocal feared
it could face sanctions for doing business with the Taliban.
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 funds and arms.
In that same year, the State Department
formally named bin Laden's al Qaeda 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.
Inderfurth and others believed that
step was unnecessary because Clinton's order and the United Nations sanctions
were the "functional equivalent" of declaring the Taliban as a state sponsor.
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 Middle East specialist Dekmejian.
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."
The State Department, she said,
"consumed all the intelligence. . . . Given the intelligence we had, we
followed through as best we could.
"So the question comes up of how
do you fight terrorism," Albright said. "The tragedy of this, and it's
horrible, is that it took this kind of event to generate the support we
need to do more."
Staff writers Joe Stephens and Gilbert
M. Gaul and researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
