Have
we forgotten that the aim
was to arrest bin Laden?
By
Jonathan
Power
April 18, 2002
LONDON - On September 17th President George Bush declared
that the capture or death of Osama bin Laden was his
prime objective. "I want justice", he said, "There's an
old poster out West I recall that said, 'Wanted Dead or
Alive.'" He also said that the purpose of going to war in
Afghanistan was to "smoke him out".
Almost to the day, seven months later, a new video
tape of bin Laden surfaces on the screens of al-Jazeera
tv station seemingly suggesting he is still alive.
Washington appears almost insouciant. Meanwhile,
Afghanistan has been intensively bombed. But no one
bothers much to cast aspersions on the reports that more
innocent civilians, including many more children, died
than they did in the destruction of the World Trade
Centre.
For sure an odious regime was pushed aside and one
that harboured bin Laden, but bin Laden had never been
short of hiding places and chose Afghanistan more for all
times sake than any other reason. There are odious
regimes all over the world, hiding all sorts of crooks,
drug mafias and psychopathic killers and often enough the
U.S. gives them a pass. (Alas, when it has intervened or
sent arms it has tended to support the bad guys more than
the good -as it once supported Saddam Hussein in his war
against Iran).
Afghanistan is now in a mess. The Project on Defence
Alternatives, a US establishment body, recently issued a
report on the Afghanistan operation. "Warlords, banditry
and (revived) opium production" have now reasserted
themselves. "In some areas virtual anarchy
prevails…the new Afghanistan is more chaotic and
less stable than the old". Some women's groups have
hailed the softening of the Taliban's draconian laws on
women's dress as justifying the war. Set against the
minuses- thousands more orphans and dead, crippled and
near lifeless children- this is a pathetically small
plus.
Meanwhile, Washington still prevaricates about "nation
building" and the Europeans struggle to build an aid
relationship with the inept institutions of the new
government. Compared with East Timor or Bosnia and
Kosovo, the combined western effort pales into third
place. Worst of all, the power of the warlords,
Afghanistan's perennial problem, has been enhanced by the
money that the U.S. has funnelled to regional leaders
.
The Bush Administration believes it can defeat the
demons by shooting up whole countries. It ignores the
lessons of history. Jimmy Carter, the most underrated of
recent U.S. presidents, wrote in the New York Times in
March, 1989, "We have only to go to Lebanon, to Syria, to
witness first hand the intense hatred among many people
for the U.S. because we bombed and shelled and
unmercifully killed totally innocent women and children,
farmers and housewives in those villages around
Beirut…. as a result we have become a kind of Satan
in the minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is
what precipitated the taking of hostages [U.S.
diplomats in 1979] and that is what has precipitated
some terrorist attacks."
The U.S. should have chosen to run bin Laden to earth
as Western countries and Israel once chose to hunt the
big ex Nazis. It was hard dogged police work stretching
over decades, but it numerous cases, including Adolph
Eichmann, it worked. Of course the U.S. will argue that
for five years before the World Trade Centre bombing it
had been trying to hunt down bin Laden and even for three
years before the bombing had sent operatives to
Afghanistan in an attempt to encourage the leader of the
anti-Taliban opposition to capture him. Later in 1999 the
CIA trained 60 commandos from Pakistani intelligence to
enter Afghanistan and capture or kill him. But when
General Pervez Musharraf staged his coup he forbad the
continuance of the operation.
Of course, police work of this kind is hard and
frustrating. Yet there were also opportunities missed. In
the early spring of 1996 the government of Sudan, where
bin Laden was then living, made an offer to the CIA to
arrest bin Laden. Yet the Clinton Administration
faltered. It passed up the possibility of bringing him to
the U.S. believing it couldn't get a conviction in a U.S.
court and instead tried to persuade Saudi Arabia to take
him in and try him. Samuel Berger, Clinton's National
Security Advisor, revealingly told the Washington Post
last October, "In the U.S. we have this thing called the
Constitution, so to bring him into justice I don't think
was our first choice. Our first choice was to send him
some place where the justice system was more
streamlined." Three colleagues of Mr Berger made it clear
what Berger meant: "They hoped that the Saudi monarch
King Fahd would order bin Laden's swift beheading."
This is how it came to be that Sudan expelled bin
Laden to Afghanistan, where he planned the bombings of
the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the near
destruction of the American destroyer in Yemen and
finally the devastation in New York and Washington.
Mr Berger's account still rings with contradictions.
If he was convinced at the time that bin Laden was such a
danger to the U.S. that he should be beheaded then it
seems clear that the White House possessed rather
incriminating material. And if that were so the courts
would surely have been responsive. It may not have been
possible to secure a conviction that would lead to his
execution, as Mr Berger apparently wanted, but it could
perhaps have landed him in jail for a very long time. We
deserve to know more.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
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"Like
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