Taliban Met With U.S. Often

Taliban Met With U.S. Often

Talks centered on ways to hand over bin Laden

The Washington Post
October 29, 2001

WASHINGTON -- 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 regime, 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, the two tracks proved equally 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. 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 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 involved a 40-minute chat between a mid-level State Department bureaucrat and the Taliban's supreme leader, Mohammad Omar. There was a surprise Taliban visitor to Washington, bearing a gift carpet for President Bush.

The diplomatic effort to snare bin Laden began as early as 1996, when a plan was made 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 -- 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, which killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured 4,600.

The bombings were ''a seminal moment'' in Washington's view of the Taliban, an administration official said. The attacks convinced U.S. policy makers that Omar was no longer simply interested in conquering Afghanistan, but that his protection also allowed his longtime friend, bin Laden, to engage in terrorist ventures abroad.

A two-pronged policy was launched 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 officials 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 Taliban 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 following the U.S. warning, Taliban security forces took bin Laden from his Kandahar compound and spirited him away to a remote site, according to press reports at the time. They also seized his satellite communications and barred him from media contacts.

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 such cryptic statements should have been interpreted differently. Bearden, for example, believes the Taliban more than once set bin Laden up for capture by the United States and telegraphed their 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 mounted. In October 1999, a Security Council resolution demanded the Taliban turn bin Laden over to ''appropriate authorities'' but left open the possibility he could be tried somewhere besides a U.S. court.

The Taliban proposed bringing bin Laden to justice, either in Afghanistan or another Muslim country.

One Taliban proposal involved turning bin Laden over to a panel of three Islamic jurists, one each chosen by Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

When the United States rejected it, the Taliban countered that it would settle for only one Islamic jurist on such a panel, according to a source close to the Taliban leadership.

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,'' said Inderfurth.

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 say Hashimi simply wanted to know if 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, according to a source close to the Taliban.

Even after Sept. 11, the Taliban's mysterious maneuvering continued.

Bearden, the former CIA administrator, picked up his phone in Reston, Va., 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 President 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 U.S. 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 Ladin. ''It never clicked.''

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