LONDON – It’s ironic at best, dangerously absurd at the worst, that a year to the week after President George Bush made his initial decision to hunt down Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan all the debate now is focussed on Iraq and there is barely a word on the president’s pledge to “smoke out” bin Laden. Yet no one has produced hard evidence of complicity linking Iraq with Al Qaeda. Neither is Bush visibly pulling out the stops to hunt down bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan where he is said to be hiding out. One can only conclude that this Administration is not drawn to the boring business of stealthy slow police work. It seems to prefer what the Germans used to call a “frischer, fröhlicher Krieg” (a short jolly war). But the Bush administration is arguably not much worse than its predecessors
The fact is that bin Laden could have been caught and arraigned in an American courtroom long ago. Just as there is now ample evidence in retrospect that the U.S. missed a half dozen chances of forestalling September 11th if its intelligence, immigration and police systems had been more integrated and better run, there are plenty of reasons for thinking that the Clinton administration in particular is to blame for letting bin Laden slip through its fingers for lack of a coherent legal strategy.
Last October Samuel Berger, Clinton’s National Security Advisor, was quoted in the Washington Post about an earlier effort to run bin Laden down. In a remarkable confession he admitted that Sudan offered to turn him over to U.S. marshals but “we have this thing called the Constitution, so to bring him here into the justice system I don’t think was our first choice. Our first choice was to send him some place where justice is more streamlined”. Three colleagues of Mr Berger made it clear what Mr Berger meant: “they hoped that the Saudi monarch King Fahd would order Mr bin Laden’s swift beheading”.
The Sudan instead expelled bin Laden to Afghanistan and from there he planned the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the attack on the American destroyer in Yemen and finally the devastation in New York and Washington. This is one of the many unanswered questions that have never had a full airing.
Successive administrations, including this one, have also failed to explain why they have decided to work so closely with the forces that sponsored and financed the Islamic militants of Al Qaeda- the military infrastructure of Pakistan. The Musharraf dictatorship has pulled off the incredible feat of persuading Washington that its regime alone can prevent the “Talibinization” of a nuclear-armed Pakistan, although the fundamentalist groups, Jamiet Ulema e Islam and Jamiat Ulema e Islam, were not very long ago the military’s partners of choice that were used to create and sustain the Taliban.
This latter day mistake goes back to the 1980s when, beginning with the Carter Administration, the U.S., with appalling lack of foresight decided my enemy’s enemy is my friend. The U.S., falsely exaggerating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as the first step in a lunge through the impassable terrain of Afghanistan and Pakistan to a warm water port on the Arabian Ocean, worked with Saudi Arabia to funnel arms through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency to the fundamentalist militants of whom bin Laden was one. Moreover, large amounts of what became a multi-billion dollar program were siphoned off to ignite the now nuclear-dangerous insurrection against Indian rule in Kashmir and Pakistan even used Al Qaeda camps to train operatives who were to deployed in anti Indian terrorism. If nuclear war does erupt on the sub-continent historians will surely pinpoint this as one of the main provoking causes.
The effort, combined with lack of foresight, that went into building up the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan was exactly in the mould of what came to be the rest of the so-called “Reagan doctrine”- arming anti communist “freedom fighters” in countries as diverse as Nicaragua, Angola and Cambodia. Only in this case the legacy was not just a war-torn country but also an army of would-be jihad fighters. This is what has come back to haunt the West- and Saudi Arabia too. As for Pakistan it makes this politically fragmented country almost impossible to rule. Only a Herculean effort by General Pervez Musharraf, in return for major debt relief, economic and military aid, has temporarily saved the economy and kept a dubious electorate pointing in America’s direction. It is doubtful if it can last and the U.S. may well find that one spin off from its planned war with Iraq is that it might have to invade Pakistan to seal off its nuclear weapons.
September 11 teaches us all manner of lessons but two stand out. There is no substitute for long-term police work and it is still evident- just as it was in Vietnam, Central America and Angola – that it is the greatest mistake to believe the U.S. can solve all and ever problem by military might. So called “victories” have a horrible habit of turning at best into today’s disasters and at worst into tomorrow’s Frankensteins.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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