WASHINGTON, March 23 (UPI) -- The Taliban regime in Afghanistan considered expelling Osama bin Laden from his sanctuary there in 1998, after diplomatic and military pressure from the United States and Saudi Arabia, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks said Tuesday.
In the fall of 1998, following cruise missile strikes against terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, the United States "received substantial intelligence of internal arguments (among Taliban leaders) over whether bin Laden could stay" in the country, commission investigator Michael Hurley told a public hearing on Capitol Hill. Hurley characterized the period as "the high-water mark" of a 5-year-long U.S. diplomatic campaign to get the terrorist leader expelled from his Afghan sanctuary.
A staff statement prepared by Hurley and other commission investigators laid out for the first time details of this campaign, painting a picture of U.S. officials struggling to find leverage against an Afghan leadership which seemed to care nothing for international opinion and trying to engage the assistance of putative allies that it could neither trust nor rely on.
In May of 1998, Hurley said, Saudi authorities had uncovered a bin Laden plot to attack U.S. forces in the kingdom using "a variety of man-portable missiles. Scores of individuals were arrested." Seizing the opportunity, President Clinton sent Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet -- whom he made his emissary on terrorism to the Saudi royal family -- to the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Tenet obtained the agreement of Saudi ruler Crown Prince Abdullah to secretly pressure Mullah Omar, the reclusive, fundamentalist leader of the Taliban, to hand bin Laden over.
Although the al-Qaida leader was fiercely critical of the desert kingdom's ruling family and continued to support exiled dissidents in Europe and elsewhere, the Saudi royal family had been content to leave him be in Afghanistan until it became clear he was inciting terror acts on Saudi soil. Even then, they apparently acted only at U.S. urging.
The subsequent visit by Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal to Afghanistan has been previously reported, but Tuesday's hearing was told that he reached a deal with Omar to expel bin Laden. After the al-Qaida bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998 -- and the U.S. retaliation with cruise missile strikes -- Turki returned to the Taliban capital, Kandahar, but found that Omar had reneged on the deal.
"He (Turki) came back and told us the Taliban were idiots and liars," Madeleine K. Albright, the Clinton administration's secretary of state, told the hearing. But she added that even then she regarded the Taliban as "persuadable" and continued to try to pressure them to turn bin Laden over until July the following year, when the Clinton administration -- followed by the United Nations -- imposed sanctions.
The Clinton administration also tried to exert pressure through one of the Taliban's few other allies, Pakistan, the hearing was told, but to little effect.
In 1999, U.S. officials agreed to fund and train a special Pakistani commando force to go into Afghanistan and seize bin Laden, despite grave doubts about the trustworthiness of the Pakistani intelligence services. Indeed, the staff statement confirms for the first time that the U.S. government had intelligence suggesting that a former Pakistani intelligence chief, Hamid Gul, had warned the Taliban about the cruise missile strike in August 1998. Commission officials say it is not clear whether the warning contributed to the strike's failure to kill bin Laden.
The commando training had to be aborted when the Pakistani government was overthrown in a military coup in October 1999.
"The bottom line is that we did not have a strong hand to play with the Pakistanis," who regarded the Taliban as allies and an important counterweight to their regional rival India, said Albright. She said that legislatively mandated sanctions effectively closed off most of the incentives the United States might have used -- "we had few carrots to offer," she said -- and meant that the sharpest sticks were already being employed.
Moreover, the Taliban's terrorist sanctuary was only one on a long list of issues in U.S.-Pakistan relations, and not necessarily the most important one. Questions of weapons proliferation and Pakistan's nuclear arms race with India predominated, at least until the embassy bombings, the staff statement said. Even after those attacks, the statement quotes one U.S. diplomat as saying that the administration's policy had "too many moving parts."
