LONDON — On Sept. 17, 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 videotape 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 hey did in the destruction of the World Trade Center.
For sure, an odious regime was pushed aside and one that harbored 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 US 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 Defense 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 Taleban’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 US has funneled 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 US 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 US 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 (US diplomats in 1979) and that is what has precipitated some terrorist attacks.”
The US 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 in numerous cases, including Adolph Eichmann, it worked. Of course, the US will argue that for five years before the World Trade Center 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-Taleban 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 Gen. Pervez Musharraf staged his coup, he forbade 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 US believing it couldn’t get a conviction in a US court and instead tried to persuade other countries to take him in and try him. Samuel Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, revealingly told the Washington Post last October, “In the US, 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.”
This is how it came to be that Sudan expelled Bin Laden to Afghanistan, where he planned the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the near destruction of the American destroyer in Yemen and finally the devastation in New York and Washington. Berger’s account still rings with contradictions.
If he was convinced at the time that Bin Laden was such a danger to the US 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 Berger apparently wanted, but it could perhaps have landed him in jail for a very long time. We deserve to know more.
