More ominous, perhaps, was the demonstration of an operational capability to coordinate two nearly simultaneous attacks on U. Despite the availability of information that al Qaeda was a global network, in policymakers knew little about the organization. The reams of new information that the CIA's Bin Ladin unit had been developing since had not been pulled together and synthesized for the rest of the government.
Indeed, analysts in the unit felt that they were viewed as alarmists even within the CIA. Policymakers knew there was a dangerous individual, Usama Bin Ladin, whom they had been trying to capture and bring to trial. Documents at the time referred to Bin Ladin "and his associates" or Bin Ladin and his "network. Was this just a new and especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat America had lived with for decades, or was it radically new, posing a danger beyond any yet experienced?
Even after the embassy attacks, Bin Ladin had been responsible for the deaths of fewer than 50 Americans, most of them overseas.
An NSC staffer working for Richard Clarke told us the threat was seen as one that could cause hundreds of casualties, not thousands. Therefore, the government experts who believed that Bin Ladin and his network posed such a novel danger needed a way to win broad support for their views, or at least spotlight the areas of dispute. The Presidential Daily Brief and the similar, more widely circulated daily reports for high officials-consisting mainly of brief reports of intelligence "news" without much analysis or con-text-did not provide such a vehicle.
The national intelligence estimate has often played this role, and is sometimes controversial for this very reason. It played no role in judging the threat posed by al Qaeda, either in or later. In the late summer and fall of , the U. After years of war in the Balkans, the United States had finally committed itself to significant military intervention in Since , the UN inspections regime had been increasingly obstructed by Saddam Hussein.
The United States was threatening to attack unless unfettered inspections could resume. The Clinton administration eventually launched a large-scale set of air strikes against Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, in December These military commitments became the context in which the Clinton administration had to consider opening another front of military engagement against a new terrorist threat based in Afghanistan.
A Follow-On Campaign? Clarke hoped the August missile strikes would mark the beginning of a sustained campaign against Bin Ladin. Clarke was, as he later admitted, "obsessed" with Bin Ladin, and the embassy bombings gave him new scope for pursuing his obsession. Terrorism had moved high up among the President's concerns, and Clarke's position had elevated accordingly. The CSG, unlike most standing interagency committees, did not have to report through the Deputies Committee.
Although such a reporting relationship had been prescribed in the May presidential directive after expressions of concern by Attorney General Reno, among others , that directive contained an exception that permitted the CSG to report directly to the principals if Berger so elected. In practice, the CSG often reported not even to the full Principals Committee but instead to the so-called Small Group formed by Berger, consisting only of those principals cleared to know about the most sensitive issues connected with counterterrorism activities concerning Bin Ladin or the Khobar Towers investigation.
The overall goal of Clarke's paper was to "immediately eliminate any significant threat to Americans" from the "Bin Ladin network. The status of the document was and remained uncertain. It was never formally adopted by the principals, and participants in the Small Group now have little or no recollection of it. It did, however, guide Clarke's efforts. The military component of Clarke's plan was its most fully articulated element. He envisioned an ongoing campaign of strikes against Bin Ladin's bases in Afghanistan or elsewhere, whenever target information was ripe.
Acknowledging that individual targets might not have much value, he cautioned Berger not to expect ever again to have an assembly of terrorist leaders in his sights.
But he argued that rolling attacks might persuade the Taliban to hand over Bin Ladin and, in any case, would show that the action in August was not a "one-off" event. It would show that the United States was committed to a relentless effort to take down Bin Ladin's network.
Defense Secretary William Cohen told us Bin Ladin's training camps were primitive, built with "rope ladders"; General Shelton called them "jungle gym" camps.
Neither thought them worthwhile targets for very expensive missiles. President Clinton and Berger also worried about the Economist' s point-that attacks that missed Bin Ladin could enhance his stature and win him new recruits. After the United States launched air attacks against Iraq at the end of and against Serbia in , in each case provoking worldwide criticism, Deputy National Security Advisor James Steinberg added the argument that attacks in Afghanistan offered "little benefit, lots of blowback against [a] bomb-happy U.
According to Clarke, President Clinton was inclined to launch further strikes sooner rather than later. The experience of the previous week, he wrote, "has only confirmed the importance of defining a clearly articulated rationale for military action" that was effective as well as justified. But Slocombe worried that simply striking some of these available targets did not add up to an effective strategy.
They developed a plan that, unlike Clarke's, called not for particular strikes but instead for a broad change in national strategy and in the institutional approach of the Department of Defense, implying a possible need for large-scale operations across the whole spectrum of U.
It urged the department to become a lead agency in driving a national counterterrorism strategy forward, to "champion a national effort to take up the gauntlet that international terrorists have thrown at our feet. They outlined an eight-part strategy "to be more proactive and aggressive.
Its lead author recalls being told by Holmes that Lodal thought it was too aggressive. Holmes cannot recall what was said, and Lodal cannot remember the episode or the paper at all. The United States had issued a formal warning to the Taliban, and also to Sudan, that they would be held directly responsible for any attacks on Americans, wherever they occurred, carried out by the Bin Ladin network as long as they continued to provide sanctuary to it.
On August 22, the reclusive Mullah Omar told a working-level State Department official that the strikes were counterproductive but added that he would be open to a dialogue with the United States on Bin Ladin's presence in Afghanistan. Both sides shouted at each other, with Mullah Omar denouncing the Saudi government.
Riyadh then suspended its diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates were the only countries that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
His account confirmed reports that the U. The history of such cooperation in and had been strained. In his September meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah, Vice President Gore, while thanking the Saudi government for their responsiveness, renewed the request for direct U. An NSC staff-led working group on terrorist finances asked the CIA in November to push again for access to Tayyib and to see "if it is possible to elaborate further on the ties between Usama bin Ladin and prominent individuals in Saudi Arabia, including especially the Bin Ladin family.
During these trips the NSC, Treasury, and intelligence representatives spoke with Saudi officials, and later interviewed members of the Bin Ladin family, about Usama's inheritance. The Saudis and the Bin Ladin family eventually helped in this particular effort and U.
In the summer before the embassy bombings, the State Department had been heavily focused on rising tensions between India and Pakistan and did not aggressively challenge Pakistan on Afghanistan and Bin Ladin. But State Department counterterrorism officials wanted a stronger position; the department's acting counterterrorism coordinator advised Secretary Albright to designate Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism, noting that despite high-level Pakistani assurances, the country's military intelligence service continued "activities in support of international terrorism" by supporting attacks on civilian targets in Kashmir.
This recommendation was opposed by the State Department's South Asia bureau, which was concerned that it would damage already sensitive relations with Pakistan in the wake of the May nuclear tests by both Pakistan and India. Secretary Albright rejected the recommendation on August 5, , just two days before the embassy bombings. According to Ambassador Milam, the bombings were a "wake-up call," and he soon found himself spending 45 to 50 percent of his time working the Taliban-Bin Ladin portfolio.
Additional pressure on the Pakistanis-beyond demands to press the Taliban on Bin Ladin-seemed unattractive to most officials of the State Department. Congressional sanctions punishing Pakistan for possessing nuclear arms prevented the administration from offering incentives to Islamabad. A senior State Department official concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah put "a tremendous amount of heat" on the Pakistani prime minister during the prince's October visit to Pakistan.
Accepting this advice, President Clinton invited Sharif to Washington, where they talked mostly about India but also discussed Bin Ladin. After Sharif went home, the President called him and raised the Bin Ladin subject again. This effort elicited from Sharif a promise to talk with the Taliban. One intelligence report passed to Berger by the NSC staff quoted Bin Ladin as saying that Mullah Omar had given him a completely free hand to act in any country, though asking that he not claim responsibility for attacks in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
Bin Ladin was described as grabbing his beard and saying emotionally, "By Allah, by God, the Americans will still be amazed. The so-called United States will suffer the same fate as the Russians.
Their state will collapse, too. A onetime special forces officer, he had worked with Albright when she was ambassador to the United Nations and had served on the NSC staff with Clarke. He shared Clarke's obsession with terrorism, and had little hesitation about locking horns with the regional bureaus. Through every available channel, he repeated the earlier warning to the Taliban of the possible dire consequences-including military strikes-if Bin Ladin remained their guest and conducted additional attacks.
Within the department, he argued for designating the Taliban regime a state sponsor of terrorism. This was technically difficult to do, for calling it a state would be tantamount to diplomatic recognition, which the United States had thus far withheld.
But Sheehan urged the use of any available weapon against the Taliban. He told us that he thought he was regarded in the department as "a one-note Johnny nutcase. It specified both carrots and hard-hitting sticks- among them, certifying Pakistan as uncooperative on terrorism. Albright said the original carrots and sticks listed in a decision paper for principals may not have been used as "described on paper" but added that they were used in other ways or in varying degrees.
But the paper's author, Ambassador Sheehan, was frustrated and complained to us that the original plan "had been watered down to the point that nothing was then done with it. A limited war began between India and Pakistan, euphemistically called the "Kargil crisis," as India tried to drive the Pakistani forces out. The first, championed by Riedel and Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth, was to undertake a major diplomatic effort to end the Afghan civil war and install a national unity government.
The second, favored by Sheehan, Clarke, and the CIA, called for labeling the Taliban a terrorist group and ultimately funneling secret aid to its chief foe, the Northern Alliance. This dispute would go back and forth throughout and ultimately become entangled with debate about enlisting the Northern Alliance as an ally for covert action. In late , Washington provided some support for talks among the leaders of exile Afghan groups, including the ousted Rome-based King Zahir Shah and Hamid Karzai, about bolstering anti-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan and linking the Northern Alliance with Pashtun groups.
One U. Clarke opposed having the United States facilitate a "huge grant to a regime as heinous as the Taliban" and suggested that the idea might not seem attractive to either Secretary Albright or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton-both critics of the Taliban's record on women's rights. Within the State Department, some officials delayed Sheehan and Clarke's push either to designate Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as a state sponsor of terrorism or to designate the regime as a foreign terrorist organization thereby avoiding the issue of whether to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's government.
Sheehan and Clarke prevailed in July , when President Clinton issued an executive order effectively declaring the Taliban regime a state sponsor of terrorism. Clarke's staff thought his most likely destination would be Somalia; Chechnya seemed less appealing with Russia on the offensive.
Clarke commented that Iraq and Libya had previously discussed hosting Bin Ladin, though he and his staff had their doubts that Bin Ladin would trust secular Arab dictators such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qadhafi.
Clarke also raised the "remote possibility" of Yemen, which offered vast uncontrolled spaces. In November, the CSG discussed whether the sanctions had rattled the Taliban, who seemed "to be looking for a face-saving way out of the Bin Ladin issue. Omar had virtually no diplomatic contact with the West, since he refused to meet with non-Muslims.
The United States learned that at the end of , the Taliban Council of Ministers unanimously reaffirmed that their regime would stick by Bin Ladin. Relations between Bin Ladin and the Taliban leadership were sometimes tense, but the foundation was deep and personal. Working with Russia a country involved in an ongoing campaign against Chechen separatists, some of whom received support from Bin Ladin , the United States persuaded the United Nations to adopt Security Council Resolution , which included an embargo on arms shipments to the Taliban, in December President Clinton contacted Sharif again in June , partly to discuss the crisis with India but also to urge Sharif, "in the strongest way I can," to persuade the Taliban to expel Bin Ladin.
Sharif suggested instead that Pakistani forces might try to capture Bin Ladin themselves. Though no one in Washington thought this was likely to happen, President Clinton gave the idea his blessing. Though the meeting's main purpose was to seal the Pakistani prime minister's decision to withdraw from the Kargil confrontation in Kashmir, President Clinton complained about Pakistan's failure to take effective action with respect to the Taliban and Bin Ladin.
Sharif came back to his earlier proposal and won approval for U. A career military officer, Musharraf was thought to have the political strength to confront and influence the Pakistani military intelligence service, which supported the Taliban.
Berger speculated that the new government might use Bin Ladin to buy concessions from Washington, but neither side ever developed such an initiative. CIA officers told the tribals that the plan to capture Bin Ladin, which had been "turned off" three months earlier, was back on. Also, an executive order froze financial holdings that could be linked to Bin Ladin. In preparation for briefing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on September 2,Tenet was told that the intelligence community knew more about Bin Ladin's network "than about any other top tier terrorist organization.
Working with Albanian authorities, CIA operatives had raided an al Qaeda forgery operation and another terrorist cell in Tirana. These operations may have disrupted a planned attack on the U. After the embassy bombings, there were arrests in Azerbaijan, Italy, and Britain.
Several terrorists were sent to an Arab country. On September 16, Abu Hajer, one of Bin Ladin's deputies in Sudan and the head of his computer operations and weapons procurement, was arrested in Germany. He was the most important Bin Ladin lieutenant captured thus far. During September and October, the tribals claimed to have tried at least four times to ambush Bin Ladin.
Senior CIA officials doubted whether any of these ambush attempts had actually occurred. But the tribals did seem to have success in reporting where Bin Ladin was.
Worst of all, al Qaeda's senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication almost immediately after a leak to the Washington Times. But since the tribals seemed to know where Bin Ladin was or would be, an alternative to capturing Bin Ladin would be to mark his location and call in another round of missile strikes. On November 3, the Small Group met to discuss these problems, among other topics.
Preparing Director Tenet for a Small Group meeting in mid-November, the Counterterrorist Center stressed, "At this point we cannot predict when or if a capture operation will be executed by our assets.
Several intelligence reports, some of dubious sourcing, mentioned Washington as a possible target. On October 26, Clarke's CSG took the unusual step of holding a meeting dedicated to trying "to evaluate the threat of a terrorist attack in the United States by the Usama bin Ladin network.
Participants noted that while the FBI had been given additional resources for such efforts, both it and the CIA were having problems exploiting leads by tracing U. The Justice Department reported that the current guidelines from the Attorney General gave sufficient legal authority for domestic investigation and surveillance. On November 4, , the U. The indictment also charged that al Qaeda had allied itself with Sudan, Iran, and Hezbollah.
The original sealed indictment had added that al Qaeda had "reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq. This article was declassified at our request. The same day, Clarke convened a meeting of his CSG to discuss both the. Clinton on December 4, Redacted material is indicated in brackets.
One source quoted a senior member of the Gama'at al-Islamiyya IG saying that, as of late October, the IG had completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of Bin Ladin, but that the operation was on hold. A senior Bin Ladin operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options-perhaps including an aircraft hijacking. IG leader Islambuli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner during the "next couple of weeks" to free 'Abd al-Rahman and the other prisoners, according to what may be a different source.
The same source late last month said that Bin Ladin might implement plans to hijack US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport. Some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training, according to various sources, but no group directly tied to Bin Ladin's al-Qa'ida organization has ever carried out an aircraft hijacking.
Bin Ladin could be weighing other types of operations against US aircraft. Accord-ing to [-] the IG in October obtained SA-7 missiles and intended to move them from Yemen into Saudi Arabia to shoot down an Egyptian plane or, if unsuccessful, a US military or civilian aircraft. A [-] in October told us that unspecified "extremist elements" in Yemen had acquired SA-7s.
A Bin Ladin associate in Sudan late last month told a colleague in Kandahar that he had shipped a group of containers to Afghanistan. Bin Ladin associates also talked about the movement of containers to Afghanistan before the East Africa bombings.
In other [-] Bin Ladin associates last month discussed picking up a package in Malaysia. One told his colleague in Malaysia that "they" were in the "ninth month [of pregnancy]. To address the hijacking warning, the group agreed that New York airports should go to maximum security starting that weekend. They agreed to boost security at other East coast airports. The FAA issued a security directive on December 8, with specific requirements for more intensive air carrier screening of passengers and more oversight of the screening process, at all three New York City area airports.
Later in December and again in early January , more information arrived from the same source, reporting that the planned hijacking had been stalled because two of the operatives, who were sketchily described, had been arrested near Washington, D. After investigation, the FBI could find no information to support the hijack threat; nor could it verify any arrests like those described in the report.
The next day, Director Tenet sent a memo to the President, the cabinet, and senior officials throughout the government describing reports that Bin Ladin planned to attack U. Tenet said he was "greatly concerned. Generals Shelton and Zinni came up with military options. Special Operations Forces were later told that they might be ordered to attempt very high-risk in-and-out raids either in Khartoum, to capture a senior Bin Ladin operative known as Abu Hafs the Mauritanian-who appeared to be engineering some of the plots-or in Kandahar, to capture Bin Ladin himself.
Shelton told us that such operations are not risk free, invoking the memory of the "Black Hawk down" fiasco in Mogadishu. Vessels with Tomahawk cruise missiles were on station in the Arabian Sea, and could fire within a few hours of receiving target data.
One issue they discussed was the potential collateral damage-the number of innocent bystanders who would be killed or wounded. General Zinni predicted a number well over and was concerned about damage to a nearby mosque. The senior intelligence officer on the Joint Staff apparently made a different calculation, estimating half as much collateral damage and not predicting damage to the mosque.
But the officials believe that a Taliban government in Afghanistan would not stop Al Qaeda from rebuilding and that it will eventually work toward attacks on foreign soil again. The terrorist group has been severely hobbled by two decades of airstrikes and counterterrorism pressure. Al Qaeda's senior leaders and operational planners and many fighters have been killed or have fled the country. Al Qaeda's current leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, is believed to be alive but unwell, according to a U.
Security Council report released late last month. The report went on to say that Al Qaeda is believed to be in at least 15 Afghan provinces, primarily in the east and the south. McKenzie said last month that he does not believe the Taliban will stop Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan to strengthen and rebuild.
I'd like to believe that they will, but I've always wanted the Taliban not to be governed by what they say but rather what they do, and they have not done that to date.
IE 11 is not supported. The most likely scenario now may be that the Taliban will make promises about counterterrorism to the United States they will not honor, and al Qaeda will grow in Afghanistan as an international security threat. It is unlikely that they will change this calculation anytime soon.
Barbara Elias is an associate professor of government and legal studies at Bowdoin College. Commenting on this and other recent articles is just one benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription. Already a subscriber? Log In. Subscribe Subscribe. View Comments. Join the conversation on this and other recent Foreign Policy articles when you subscribe now. Not your account? Log out. Comments are closed automatically seven days after articles are published.
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Taliban fighters pose in front of a bakery at a market area in Khenj district, Panjshir province, Afghanistan, on Sept. September 21, , PM.
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