One Man’s Story: Pursuing Osama bin Laden

I have already commented  on the article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in Counterpunch on the negotiations for the capture of Osama bin Laden between the U.S. government and the government of Afghanistan. The source for the story was Kabir Mohabbat, an Afghan American who acted as translator and go-between. Back in late 2006 one of Mr. Mohabbat’s coworkers found my article and sent it to him. As a result, he contacted me by email, saying, “I have not told my whole story.”  I was in Houston on other business in early 2007 so I visited him and interviewed him for this piece.

Various diplomats and former intelligence operatives have differed as to the seriousness of Taliban offers. Some thought that the Taliban were stalling. Others thought that the U.S. government was missing opportunities due to cultural ignorance; that is, the Taliban kept dropping broad hints that seemed obvious to them, but blew over our heads.

I briefly interviewed William Milam, who was our ambassador to Pakistan at the time of these events. He called Kabir Mohabbat “a charlatan” and said that the Taliban were never serious about handing over Osama bin Laden. Other U.S. government officials have had opinions somewhere in between Mohabbat and Milam. Herein lies the problem.

I can see how this would be a Rashomon kind of event, with different parties interpreting the same facts in markedly different ways and coming up with different narratives. The Afghan/American cultural divide is large. I can see U.S. government personnel (and specifically Bush administration officials) finding it in their interest to downplay the significance of these negotiations. I can also see Mr. Mohabbat being motivated to enlarge his own role and capabilities, as well as overestimating the possible success of these negotiations. That is why, in the end, I am labeling this “One Man’s Story.” I originally wrote it in the spring of 2007, abandoned it for a few years, and just rewrote it in light of bin Laden’s death.

Kabir Mohabbat

Kabir Mohabbat was an Afghan-born American citizen. At the time of his death he was living in southern Texas and working at Fort Polk, Louisiana, training soldiers who were about to be sent to Afghanistan. His family belongs to the Jaji clan, traditionally the kingmakers of Afghanistan, and the clan of the last king. The Mohabbat family is known as the “American Afghans,” having traveled back and forth between the two countries for fifty years.  Mr. Mohabbat studied political science in the U.S. and graduated from college the day that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Mr. Mohabbat returned to Afghanistan and became a member of the mujihadeen fighting the Soviets in the 1980’s. He returned to the U.S. in 1989 after the Soviets were driven out. Mr. Mohabbat retained his close ties to family, clan, and high-level political connections back in Afghanistan, as well as his contacts in the State Department and U.S. intelligence circles. With a foot in both worlds, he was a unique back-channel link between the U.S. and Afghanistan. When I interviewed him he was employed by the U.S. military as a consultant on Afghan language, culture, and politics. Kabir Mohabbat died in mid-July of 2007.

The First Offer

During the summer of 1998, Mohabbat was in Afghanistan at the request of Afghan Ambassador Faizi. The ambassador wanted Mohabbat’s help in restarting talks with Unocal, a U.S. oil company, on a contract to build an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. Faizi also wanted to improve relations with the United States, which were strained after the Taliban (a conservative Moslem religious faction) took over the government. On August 7^th, 1998, followers of Osama bin Laden bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  The attacks killed 257 people and wounded thousands. By August 20^th, President Clinton had fired dozens of cruise missiles into Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Mohabbat started to receive calls from tribal leaders and government officials in Afghanistan, all wondering why their old ally was attacking them. He explained to them that Osama bin Laden’s presence was the reason for the attacks.  Many of them offered to go after bin Laden themselves in order to appease their anti-Soviet ally. Mohabbat called Lee Coldren, then in charge of South Asian affairs at the State Department, and met with him and Roberta Chew, another State Department employee. They discussed the offer and said they would get back to him, but never did.

 The Second Offer

In the first half of 1999, Mohabbat was in Afghanistan, meeting with Afghan government officials and trying to set up the stalled pipeline deal with his own investors. In the second week of June he traveled to Islamabad, Pakistan, and met at the U.S. embassy with the Deputy Chief of Mission, John Schmidt. Schmidt relayed a message for the Taliban, “straight from the President’s mouth.” If anything happened to Americans or American interests, Mullah Omar (leader of the Taliban/Afghan government) would be held responsible and the U.S. would bomb Afghanistan.

In October 1999, Mohabbat was back in Afghanistan for more pipeline contract negotiations. While travelling to an oilfield, Mohabbat and the head of the Afghan Oil Ministry had their car stopped by a party of armed men. It took a call to the Ministry of Defense to get them released. They later found out that they had strayed near the camp of Osama bin Laden and that the gunmen were his followers. The mullahs apologized and quietly confessed that they had no use for bin Laden but that they didn’t know how to get rid of him.

In mid-October, 1999, Mohabbat talked to the mullahs about the U.S. threat of bombing and told them to take it seriously. The mullahs’ reply was that they were always thankful for U.S. support against the Soviets. They wanted to assure the U.S. that they would hold Osama responsible for any acts of terrorism and that they didn’t want him. He was already in the country when they took power and was imposed on them. They had offered to send him to Egypt, Jordan, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and the International Criminal Court in The Hague, but nobody wanted him. Every country was afraid of retaliation if it held him.

Mohabbat asked, “Can I have him?”

The reply was instant: “Dead or alive?”

Mohabbat immediately flew back to Washington D.C. and contacted an old acquaintance, Phyllis Oakley, then Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. He said, “I have Osama bin Laden on a silver platter. How would you like him, rare, medium, or well done?” Oakley was “amazed and delighted” and invited Mohabbat to her home to meet her husband, retired Ambassador Robert Oakley, and retell the story. She told him that she would send Michael Sheehan, the State Department Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, down to work out the details with him. After waiting a while, Mohabbat called her office and found that Oakley had abruptly retired three weeks after their meeting. Mohabbat called her at home. She was obviously angry about the situation and told him that she couldn’t help him anymore.  Michael Sheehan never appeared.

Note on Phyllis Oakley: Her resignation came not long after the U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, suspected of being a chemical weapons factory by the Clinton administration. Oakley wrote a report after the fact that disputed the accuracy of the intelligence that prompted the bombing. The report was suppressed and she resigned soon afterwards.

The Third Offer

Mohabbat returned to his pipeline negotiations with the Taliban. By May of 2000 he had finalized the contracts, but U.S. sanctions on Afghanistan came into effect, making it illegal for him to deal with the mullahs. On his return to the U.S., he was stopped and questioned at Newark International Airport. He explained to the officials about his connections to the Taliban and their willingness to hand over bin Laden. The officials sent him on his way and said that someone would contact him.

When he returned home he was contacted by an FBI agent (“Mario”) and a CIA operative (“Joe”). They worked together over the next few months to try to finalize a deal between the U.S. and the Taliban over the fate of bin Laden. This included a preliminary meeting in Frankfurt, Germany between Taliban representatives and officials of the European Union.

On October 12^th, 2000, bin Laden’s followers bombed the U.S.S. Cole in a harbor in Yemen. Mohabbat happened to be in D.C. and was summoned to the State Department. He met with Jeffrey Lunstead, the South Asia Bureau Coordinator for Afghanistan. Lunstead said, “Kabir, we are ready to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age unless the Taliban unconditionally hand Osama bin Laden over to us.” Mohabbat asked for 3-4 weeks, saying, “I am begging you and President Clinton to give me a chance.” Lunstead said that the president had only authorized him to give Mohabbat two weeks. Mohabbat flew immediately to Kandahar.

Mohabbat met with Taliban leaders and told them that the U.S. delegation would meet them in Frankfurt. He told them that unless they came to the negotiating table, the U.S. would bomb Afghanistan and that would be the end of them.

The key meeting in Frankfurt occurred on November 2^nd and 3^rd, 2000, in a Sheraton hotel suite. Present at this meeting were:

• Alan Eastham, State Dept. Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asian Affairs
• Jeffrey Lunstead, State Dept. South Asia Bureau Coordinator for Afghanistan
• Frank (Urbancic?), State Dept. Deputy Director of Counter-terrorism
• Gary Schroen, CIA Deputy Chief, Near East Division, Directorate of Operations
• A CIA operative who Mohabbat would not name due to ongoing covert status.
• Taliban representatives who Mohabbat would not name because of present risk of assassination.
• An Afghan national who Mohabbat would not name because of present risk of assassination.
• Kabir Mohabbat, acting as translator and mediator.

Here’s the relevant section of the transcript of my interview with Kabir Mohabbat:

“So, when we got to the meeting, the Taliban representatives asked Eastham ‘What is the evidence?” Frank, the Director of Counter-terrorism, pulled out a New York Times article, and he said ‘Look, this is what we’ve got on him.’ The mullahs laughed. They said, ‘We could fix newspapers for you like that. But we thought Mr. Mohabbat said that you have documents.’ So that day was the worst day ever of my negotiations, November 2^nd. And that meeting collapsed.

I knew that the American delegation was looking for bombing, so I spent almost the whole night with the Taliban. I convinced them that these people, whatever they’re doing, they want to bomb, but let’s do something that won’t give them an excuse. I finally convinced them, that, let’s try to give Osama. Do we need him? They said ‘no’, but [the Americans] said they had evidence. It was a newspaper article. It is immoral, it is unethical. There should be some kind of laws, or some kind of procedures. So, the Taliban [representative] at that point offered, that if [the Americans] could get some relatives of people that died in Kenya, in Nairobi, just a simple complaint with Taliban courts, he said within three days he will be hanging off a tree, if they could provide us three witnesses.

Just to get something legal, Islamic, because they were very good Muslims. Just give us three. And Alan Eastham said, ‘We don’t have three,’ and the Taliban said ‘You mean to tell me the most powerful nation on earth can’t provide me with three witnesses?’ They said ‘No. We want Osama now.’ And the Taliban looked at him and said ‘You want Osama?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ He said ‘When?’ That’s the 3^rd of November. ‘We have no use for him.’ And it was so amazing to me that I asked the American delegation, I said, ‘Excuse me I have to ask him again what he said before I translate.’ Of course, this room, which was a big suite, it was already [equipped with] cameras, it was audio, everything was there, They were audio and video taping this, and that’s what they told me, directly to the president of the United States, at this meeting. So, they were listening to it at Camp David.”

“And, when the Taliban said – Oh, Alan Eastham, the head of the delegation, said to the Taliban, ‘We thank you for bringing security to Afghanistan. Afghanistan, right now you have made it like a beautiful highway. One big piece of rock is lying in the middle of the highway. All we have to do is get rid of this piece of rock, and we will do whatever we can for you.’ And the Taliban said, ‘What if this piece of stone is too heavy for us? Would you help us lift it?’ ‘Yes.’ And that’s when we agreed that as soon as possible, hand him over. And that’s when they appointed Ambassador William Milam, Islamabad, and CIA station chief, (initials deleted), that they would work out the details in Islamabad, Pakistan, and the bombings stopped, completely. They said, “No, there will be no bombing.” So we all hugged each other, they all shook hands, and thanked each other, and had a nice lunch.”

“We went our ways and I took them to the American embassy in Islamabad, met with the ambassador and the station chief, and also at that meeting was present Paula Tate who was a counselor to the embassy, an advisor on Afghanistan affairs. She was present, and she couldn’t believe this either. The Taliban were saying ‘When will you do something about it?’”

The agreement reached on November 3^rd was that the Taliban would escort a group of U.S. commandos to within striking distance of bin Laden and then look the other way for an hour or so. The Taliban were enthusiastic about this approach because it relieved them of public responsibility for his death.

Eighteen days later, on November 21^st, 2000, President Clinton signed a presidential order appointing Kabir Mohabbat as his personal secret envoy to the Taliban for the express purpose of negotiating the extradition or killing of Osama bin Laden.

The Election, Delays, and a Warning

A few weeks after George Bush took office, he signed a presidential order that was essentially a duplicate of the one Clinton had signed, appointing Kabir Mohabbat as his presidential representative to the Taliban for negotiating the extradition or death of bin Laden.

The situation in early March of 2001 was that Osama bin Laden and 200 of his highest-level followers were confined in a compound in Darunta, about 120 kilometers from Kabul. The agreement that the Taliban reached with the U.S. was that the Taliban would give the U.S. the coordinates of the compound and the U.S. would fire a few cruise missiles, killing bin Laden and essentially decapitating the power structure of al Qaeda.

Another excerpt from the interview transcript, where KM explains how that had come about:

“So when the election was to President Bush’s advantage, of course I was very understanding that he wasn’t ready, so I brought the Taliban back to the US embassy in Islamabad. Then William Milam apologized, said that we have a new administration. We won’t be able to do anything. Let’s meet in March and we’ll be completely ready to send cruise (missiles). And the Taliban understood. And they came back in March of 2001. To my surprise I was told by the White House that we are ready to bomb. When I got to the American embassy in Islamabad ….

Heretic: Ready to bomb who?

Kabir Mohabbat: Osama…Osama.

H: Ready to drop the cruise missile.

KM: Right. When I got to the embassy, William Milam, American ambassador, when I brought the Taliban into the embassy, it is something, it is really worth mentioning, that the first meeting that was held with the ambassador, it was at his residence, and the ambassador said, “Let’s move the meeting to my office at the embassy, because last time the Pakistani intelligence overheard us.” So I almost blew up.  I said, “Don’t you think that Osama knows?” They said, “We hope not.” So we moved the meeting from his residence.

H: Because the ISI [Pakistani Intelligence] was all connected into…

KM: Right. They heard everything. And we moved to his office and when we got there, to our surprise, the Ambassador told me, and I quote, “I don’t know who the fuck elected this man as the president of the United States. But your Excellency, I am here to apologize to you, we are not ready. We need at least four more weeks.”

(Note: In a later conversation, Mohabbat emphasized that Milam was getting his orders directly from the White House.)

H: This was March…

KM: March 21^st. American embassy, Islamabad, Pakistan. Which is all….you know, every time you enter the American embassy, you register.

H: Right.

KM: So it’s all registered. So I’m saying, maybe a day back and forth, but it’s registered. The mullahs and me.

H: Yeah. These are the unnamed mullahs. We can’t name them.

KM: No we can’t.

H: Okay.

KM: Yes. But there are enough documents, the logbook is there.  So the mullahs were surprised, and said, because there was an international sanction on them travelling. He [the mullah leading the Taliban delegation] was on the top of the list. He said he was a very important person, as they knew. He sneaked into Pakistan as a thief in the night. How could you do something like this? Then why don't you come to Kandahar next time? You are my guest. I’m not going to sneak into Pakistan. What about if I get caught? Or there will be a big ugly death in my family. There will be nobody left of me. This is very dangerous. So the American Ambassador William Milam apologized with the CIA station chief participating, and said we need four more weeks. And I asked the Taliban to please agree. They need more time. And we were supposed to meet in April, towards the end of April. So when I came back to the U.S. the meeting was being delayed and delayed and delayed, and in May of 2001 the Taliban called me from Kandahar and said, I quote, ‘Mr. Mohabbat, something so big is gonna happen,’ middle of May, that I called my contact immediately in Houston….

H: Contact at the U.S…

KM:…Contact in Houston to meet with me immediately. And I told him the severity of the phone call I had. And I taped the conversation and I handed it over to my contact in Houston.  And [initials deleted]

H: Do you have a copy of that tape still?

KM: No, the FBI has it. The copy is with the FBI. I did not take any copies. But I have some tapes, yes.

H: So how specific was the guy from Kandahar on the phone with you?

KM: Just like that, “A big thing.” So he [Mohabbat’s FBI contact] said, “Let me call…” it was Sunday when this happened, he said, “I’ll get you an answer tomorrow.”

H: Now, again, the guy from Kandahar, did he specify that this was something that Osama was going to do?

KM: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Osama was gonna do it. It was so big.

H: Something really big.

KM: And he said, ‘We don’t know what’ …. So he [Mohabbat’s FBI contact] got in touch with the White House, and they were procrastinating again. So in the middle of June, it was so bad, that whenever I got a call from Kandahar, I said [to the FBI contact], ‘For God’s sake, do something.’ Then I told the administration and my contacts with national security, that I am personally going to go and take care of this business.  Something is going to happen.  In return, they told me, if I touch Osama, I’ll be prosecuted, because that will be against U.S. law. I am a federal employee and I cannot take things into my own hands. So then I said I am going to resign, and go, anyway.

So I think I scared enough people they told me to bring the Taliban back to meet with Ambassador Milam. We are ready to bomb [Osama]. So that’s in June of 2001 when Mr. Tenant claims to know. Those are my words and they have a tape of it. They have a tape of the Taliban saying that something so big is gonna happen.  That was where it came from. In June, 30^th of June, Taliban had met with the American ambassador again. William Milam was so angry with the Bush administration that he refused to sit in the meeting with Taliban, where he was pushed aside. So that’s when the CIA station chief took over. And at that meeting was another lady, counselor to the American embassy, Angie Bryan. So when US ambassador and CIA station chief said, “Your Excellency, we are really sorry, we need four more weeks.” And the Taliban, the second way he offered, he said, ‘Why don’t we do this, people blow up in bombs in Afghanistan all the time. What about if Osama blows up?’ And I asked the Taliban, ‘Please, repeat, your Excellency, what you said.’ I wanted to make sure, because every time we attended meetings, they were video and audio taped. So be very clear and I won’t mistranslate this. When I told this, to bomb, the ambassador, they were shocked. They said ‘Sir, give us four more weeks, and we’ll do it together.’ So there was a second way to get Osama.

Taliban said directly to the CIA chief, they said, ‘Something so big will happen that neither you nor I will be able to repair, and you will blame us for it.’ And CIA station chief replied, and I quote, ‘Your Excellency, as long as we have you, nothing will happen because you will prevent it’ He [The Taliban representative] said ‘I can’t. We don’t know what it is. But we are hearing them talking about something big. Even though they are under house arrest, there is some way they are communicating.’ And Ambassador William Milam walked out of that meeting being angry.”

September 11^th, and the Aftermath

On September 3^rd, 2001, Mohabbat returned to Afghanistan. On September 11^th he was in Kabul. He spent the night watching television and translating the reports for the mullahs of the Taliban. At this point they were frantic to get rid of bin Laden. Mohabbat arranged one more meeting between U.S. officials and Taliban representatives on September 16^th, 2001, in Cuetta, Pakistan. Mohabbat fed the story of this meeting to Allen Pizzey of CBS in an attempt to move the process forward and avoid a U.S. attack. CBS broadcast the story, but nothing came of it.

Mohabbat’s account of the meeting:

KM: His name was Akhtar Mohammed Usmani. He was the commander of Kandahar Corps and deputy of Mullah Omar. He told the CIA station chief, “We’ve been waiting for you for nine months. I’m asking you for three days. Let me go back to Kandahar to do something about Osama.” And the station chief told him, “I’m really sorry, your Excellency, I have my orders, I want him now, today.” And Usmani told him, “You never wanted Osama. You won’t even let me go to Kandahar. I’m asking you for three days. You had nine months to do something.”

H: Now what date is this meeting?

KM: This is September 16 of 2001. That’s reported. So, and, the CIA station chief told him, “I’m sorry sir.” And I jumped in the conversation and told CIA station chief, I said, “You used me in the middle, didn’t you. Now I’m going to be considered a non-desirable person in the U.S., dead by Osama, and god knows what the Taliban are going to think about me from now on. I said, “This is something very immoral. You shouldn’t have done this to me. I served you with honesty. I would spend my own money. I almost died, well, a few times. Going back and forth to Afghanistan is not easy.” And he told me, “I’m really sorry Kabir. You did a wonderful job. But there is a big light at the end of the tunnel for you.” Which I refused to take, or ever see that light.

H: So, you knew that he meant the presidency?

KM: Yes sir.

H: How did you know?

KM: Because he told me blunt…bluntly. He said, “Stay, you are in charge of one dollar to one billion dollar, that’s right here at the embassy. You can spend it any way you want. Get people behind you and rally them behind you. We need you.” I said, “Find yourself another sucker.” I’m not dumb. Look at Afghan history. You don’t bring an outsider as a puppet. People don’t accept. Don’t matter who….I offered, I offered, I’ll go on my own. Without U.S. military help. And they said no. I said, “Let me go on my own, then.”

 “So, damn it, you’re taking me back all the way you know. So that’s when they sent me again and swore to me that they were ready. It was November 3 of 2001 (Note: I think he meant an earlier date, perhaps October 3), after that, and they said we are ready to do it. When I got to the embassy, the CIA station chief, with a sad face, told me, “Kabir, I don’t know what’s going on. All we want you to do is go one more time and apologize.” And I said, “You bunch of idiots. Are you trying to have me killed, going back and forth to Afghanistan? And everybody knows in Afghanistan, in Kabul, in Kandahar, the man without a beard, with a tie, in a western suit, what the hell is he doing?” [Mohabbat looks and dresses like a conventional American businessman] I said, “I’m gonna get killed before we kill him.” He said “One more time.” And sure enough, I went and apologized, and the Taliban gave me the message again, and told the Americans, we did whatever we could, you are only procrastinating, and you don’t want this man, we don’t want to be blamed for it. And I brought this message back to the U.S. embassy and to people in Washington.”

In a later conversation, Mohabbat quoted Ambassador Milam as saying to the Taliban representative, “Your Excellency, everything you say is being heard in Camp David.” Apparently the videotaping had a direct real time link to the President.

I should note that Kabir Mohabbat survived two assassination attempts during his travels in Afghanistan. The first, in February of 2001, was a bomb detonated at his hotel in Kabul. It caused damage, but no injuries. The second, in June of 2001, was a grenade thrown into his hotel room. Thankfully, it failed to detonate.

After months of fruitless negotiations over bin Laden, the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. The Taliban kept Osama bin Laden and his followers in custody until November of 2001, when they were forced out of Afghanistan. Once we removed his jailers, bin Laden escaped into the mountains.

The Final Offer

In the year after September 11^th, Kabir Mohabbat suffered a heart attack. His finances were depleted from all the travelling, and for a while he drove a cab in Houston. Eventually, with the ongoing war in Afghanistan, his language skills and knowledge of Afghan culture became useful to the U.S. government. He obtained a job at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where soldiers are trained before being sent over to Afghanistan.

In August of 2006 he went on a one-year assignment to Afghanistan as a consultant to U.S. forces there. Nineteen days into his assignment he met with a group of high-ranking intelligence officers. They discussed the Taliban, and Mohabbat repeated the offer to kill Osama bin Laden. He still had connections with the Taliban, and it could be arranged. The officers were very excited about this prospect and said that they would put it into operation immediately. The next day Mohabbat was relaxing with his extended family and got a call from the U.S. embassy. He was to come there immediately. When he arrived, his supervisor was waiting for him with an embarrassed look on his face. “Kabir,” he said, “you are our best guy. We really need you…” Mohabbat cut him off. “I am supposed to return home, right?” Mohabbat was told to take a helicopter to Bagram Air Base and immediately get on a flight back to the States. Mohabbat refused the helicopter; “I was afraid they might push me out the door.” He had a family member drive him to Bagram, where two KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) security officers met him and escorted him to the plane. Twenty-four hours later he was back home. No explanation was ever given for his sudden recall to the U.S.

Even with this rejection, the story wasn’t over. From our interview:

KM: Exactly. So I refused, and I was punished, even up to now. But my offer is still open. And I hope there should be an investigation, Congressional investigation into this.

H: So, you’re saying to me, right here, right now…

KM: Right here, right now…

H: You could deliver…

KM:…Deliver Osama now.

H: Yeah?

KM: Yes.

H: Through mullah, um….

KM: Through mullah…Ok, when I mentioned mullah Usmani’s name, the sad thing is, he got killed about a month ago, by U.S. forces, with a cruise (missile). The same cruise he was asking me to hit Osama with. How come that cruise never hit Osama but it hit him? That is where my fear is. That Osama’s people have helped U.S. government to hit mullah Usmani, about five weeks ago. Because there is one member of Taliban which I always suspected him. He is running the show in Kandahar. His name is mullah Dadullah. He is the one very close to Osama. And he was a very, he was competing with mullah Usmani. Right now, according to my sources, the mullah Omar has condemned mullah Dadullah to death. Even though…

H: For killing Usmani?

KM: For killing Usmani.

H: Do you think that Dadullah gave the…

KM: U.S. forces. That’s a fact. That’s a fact. Dadullah betrayed Usmani. But that’s sad, to kill, one of my own. One of the American’s best allies, who would have loved to come back to the negotiation table. So…

H: So, they have the capability of delivering up Osama?

KM: Yes.

(Note: Dadullah was killed with a missile strike in May 2007)

In a conversation with Mohabbat, he mentioned that he was on the TSA watch list, which means that he was stopped at airports. He was returning from Dubai in early 2007 and, per usual, was stopped at immigration for questioning. He answered their questions and reiterated his offer to arrange the death of bin Laden. The officials hurriedly sent him on his way.  Mohabbat also noted that another pro-western member of the Taliban had recently been captured. He expressed his concern that mullah Dadullah and other pro-Osama types were still betraying and eliminating their rivals, thus isolating the Taliban leader, mullah Omar. The Taliban ability to make good on the offer was slipping away.

I should note that I was ready to publish this piece in the May of 2007, but Mr. Mohabbat asked me to delay it because he still had some negotiations going on. There was a period of silence and then he contacted me to tell me he had been in the hospital for emergency surgery on a blood clot. Then more silence, and in a web search I found an online memorial to him by one of his family members.

Conclusion

This story gives an interesting perspective internal Taliban politics. It’s not completely surprising to find that they are not monolithic, but then that is never true for any political or religious movement. There were purists and there were pragmatists – an old story. Remember that the Talibs were part of a fighting force that received our support during their war against the Soviets during the eighties. A number of the former anti-Soviet mujihadeen, Kabir Mohabbat included, were dedicated Reaganites.

Although they allowed bin Laden to stay in Afghanistan, one faction of the Taliban, represented by Mullah Usmani (and perhaps Mullah Omar) would have been pleased to be rid of him. Their public posture was at odds with their private wishes. Osama bin Laden’s presence was an obstacle to diplomatic and trade relations, but he had street cred, and they couldn’t be seen capitulating to the West.

An article in the Sentinel (The publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point) analyzes the writings of an Egyptian-born jihadi named Abu’l-Walid al-Masri. Masri was heavily involved in al Qaeda throughout the 90s and then realigned himself with the Afghan Taliban. He writes of the ongoing conflicts between the Taliban and al Qaeda and his relatively unsuccessful attempts to resolve them. He states that in the late 90s the Taliban hosted bin Laden and his organization on the condition that bin Laden did not antagonize the U.S. Masri describes a rocky relationship between the two groups, with al Zawahiri of al Qaeda describing the Taliban’s nationalism as “Satanic,” and the Taliban isolating bin Laden and restricting his movement. The main event in the Sentinel article is the attempt by Masri to have bin Laden pledge his allegiance to Mullah Omar, and the eventual failure of this effort. Bin Laden had Masri, then not even an official member of al Qaeda, go to Omar and pledge for him, allowing bin Laden plausible deniability in either direction.

Another faction of the Taliban, represented by Mullah Dadullah, was hard line for bin Laden. They had no intention of compromising with the west, even given the political and economic costs.

I have written previously about the death of Mullah Dadullah and the possibility that Mullah Omar used the U.S. military as his unwitting assassins.

Why didn’t the Bush administration pull the trigger? Was Osama bin Laden more valuable to them alive than dead? Without him, there would have been no credible excuse to invade Afghanistan, the non-Russian route out for Central Asian oil and natural gas and the strategic base between Iran and China. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Stephen Cambone, Zalmay Khalilzad, and a number of other Bush administration insiders were all members of the Project for the New American Century, a think tank which had advocated such an invasion as far back as 1998.

Or was it Taliban intransigence? It appears that the power struggles within the Taliban, their extremely legalistic religiosity, and their need for the appearance of anti-western solidarity combined to make the pathway to bin Laden’s capture or death an extremely narrow and crooked one. Was it too narrow and too crooked for U.S. diplomats to navigate?

Wherever the blame lies, what I see is an opportunity lost. If I had been a member of our national security team back in the years around 2000, I would have looked at this channel to capturing Osama bin Laden as a first priority. The Taliban, however medieval in their social and political outlook, had a cadre of pragmatists. I believe that enough carrot combined with enough stick could have extracted bin Laden from their custody before 9/11, and if not before that, then before our invasion. Either way, thousands of lives and billions of dollars would have been saved.

There is another loose end, a very loose end, and this intrigues me. The compound in Darunta where bin Laden was confined in 2001 was built by the CIA in the 1980’s during the anti-Soviet war. Why did the U.S. government need Taliban cooperation at all once that location was identified?  The U.S. had detailed coordinates and satellite imagery for the site. If the Bush administration was intent on killing bin Laden, how difficult would it have been for the U.S. military to destroy that site, and Osama bin Laden, in the spring of 2001?

Here’s a repetition of my prior caveat: This is mostly one man’s story, and a disputed story. Participants disagree with each other on what was said and done, and what was meant by what was said. It would make me happy if someone with more time and resources than your Minor Heretic pursued the myriad leads of this story and made better sense of it. 

Another Death

I was listening to the clock radio alarm yesterday morning, half asleep, when I heard the news. Osama bin Laden was killed by a small team of U.S. commandos in his walled compound, 30 miles from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Please forgive me, but I did not have the urge to jump out of bed and dance around the room. Yes, he deserved it, but his death is ten years late and our response to his crimes has been self-destructive. Thinking pragmatically, there’s no real win here.

We had the chance to kill him back in the winter of 2000-2001. On November 2, 2000 in a hotel room in Germany, representatives of the Taliban government of Afghanistan met with representatives of the Clinton administration and agreed to help us kill Osama bin Laden. The method of choice was to isolate bin Laden and his followers under house arrest in a compound in a village called Daronta and have the Taliban give us coordinates for a cruise missile strike.

(I picked up this story from Counterpunch in 2006 and interviewed the source in 2007.)

Admittedly, there has been considerable debate as to the intentions of the Taliban in these negotiations. Various diplomats and former intelligence operatives have differed as to the seriousness of Taliban offers. Some thought that the Taliban were stalling. Others thought that the U.S. government was missing opportunities due to cultural ignorance; The Taliban kept dropping broad hints that seemed obvious to them, but blew over our heads. Whatever the truth there, it seems to me that with more determination and imagination we could have decapitated al Qaeda before 9-11 at minimal cost.

 Consider the changes the United States has gone through since bin Laden’s biggest plot came to fruition on September 11^th, 2001.

The U.S. government, with our complicity, has discarded major portions of our constitution. The Orwellian USA-PATRIOT Act, passed in a panic-stricken rush, set the stage for our march towards a police state. We have sunk to third-world dictatorship moral status with our government’s embrace of torture, indefinite detention, rendition, military tribunals, and secret prisons. We are subject to warrantless wiretapping and other arbitrary invasions of privacy. Habeas corpus, a settled point of law for four centuries, has become a quaint anachronism. We have, in general, discarded the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, and 8^th Amendments in the Bill of Rights (covering unwarranted search and seizure, due process, self incrimination, a speedy and public trial, rules of evidence, and cruel and unusual punishment), and key parts of Article 1, Sections 8 and 9 (war powers and habeas corpus). The executive branch has accumulated dangerous and unconstitutional powers.

We invaded Afghanistan when there was still a chance of surgically killing the object of our pursuit, and we remain there a decade later. We committed the ultimate war crime – invading another country without provocation – and Iraq has suffered beyond even its previous sufferings. The blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives is on our hands. We have sunk ourselves in debt by pouring trillions of dollars down the bottomless maw of the military industrial complex. This pipeline of cash has snaked back on itself and further corrupted our electoral system.

The truly perverse part of it all is that bin Laden and his followers just blew up a couple of big buildings. He killed fewer people than die in a month on our highways. They were killed in an especially cruel, horrifying, and dramatic way, and I am not trying to minimize their suffering or the suffering of the victim’s families and friends. But stand back a bit and look at all the painful ways that hundreds of thousands of people die in this country every year.

My point is, bin Laden didn’t depopulate us, he didn’t invade us, he didn’t take over our territory, and he didn’t execute a coup and take the reins of our government. As with the usual automotive carnage, we did the work ourselves. Osama bin Laden didn’t stand at the podium in the House or the Senate, arguing for yet another attack on our fundamental rights. Nor did he vote for the idiots who did. That was the work of U.S. citizens, scared into docility and jingoism, eating up the propaganda and lopping off the best parts of themselves to feed the sharks. The sharks being the opportunist politicians and the corporate sociopaths they serve.

At 54 years old, bin Laden beat the average life expectancy of Afghans by about a decade and came close to that of your average Pakistani. He committed an act of mass murder calculated for its emotional impact and then sat back and watched us as we wrecked the foundations of our own society. We are reduced as a nation, morally, politically, socially, and economically. He probably didn’t have much time to reflect in his last few minutes of life, but if he did, I imagine he died with a certain sense of satisfaction.

Yes, I’m glad he’s dead. No, this doesn’t feel like a victory.

Prompt Criticality

(With a hat tip to Green Mountain Daily)

Arnie Gunderson of Fairewinds Associates, Vermont’s own nuclear watchdog, has been making a series of video commentaries about events in Fukushima. One of his latest covers the explosion at reactor #3. It addresses the question of when an explosion is not an explosion and when it is more than your usual explosion.

Gundersen Postulates Unit 3 Explosion May Have Been Prompt Criticality in Fuel Pool from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Long story short, the spent fuel pool at reactor #3 actually detonated. Hydrogen was the initial culprit, but Gunderson presents evidence that the initial hydrogen explosion compressed the spent fuel rods of mixed uranium and plutonium enough that they achieved critical mass. That is, enough neutrons shot around in a tight enough space to create an uncontrolled and fast chain reaction. Gunderson called it a “prompt criticality.” The fuel pool walls and open top acted like the barrel of an upturned cannon and shot pieces of fuel rods as much as two miles away.

“Prompt criticality.” Hmmm.

As I recall from studying physics and technological history, compressing uranium and plutonium in order to create a critical mass that detonates is the job description of an atomic bomb. That flash and column of smoke we saw on the news at reactor #3 was probably a small, but quite real nuclear blast.

This is a new idea for me, and probably for a lot of people. There are spent fuel pools all over the world, including one in the southeast corner of Vermont. The concept of one boiling off and spraying radiation is bad enough, but “micro-nuke” is a new level of risk. They are not just water filled boxes of radioactive materials. They are all potential atomic bombs. It’s not that we should anticipate Hiroshima-like devastation. The engineering that goes into an efficient nuclear weapon is not trivial, and compressed spent fuel rods are not going to get anywhere near that.

The risks of a prompt criticality are catastrophic loss of containment and a wide and high spread of heavier radioactive materials. I doubt that the spent fuel pool at Fukushima #3 has any real structural integrity left, and getting near enough to it to either remove the materials or repair the containment is problematic (understatement alert). The fact that solid bits of the spent rods traveled two miles is an indication of how far dust and volatile gases must have traveled. We’ll have to wait and see how much of the nuclear material is still left in the pool, but a significant amount of uranium and plutonium must have shot up into the air. The next question is, having shot into the air, where did it, or will it, all come down?

The question after that is, how much more of this stuff do we want to make and have sitting around?

How they can do it

If you are watching national politics at all, you must have said to yourself at some point, “How can they do that? How in hell can they say those things and do those things and vote for that ridiculous legislation?” (Whatever that ridiculous legislation happens to be.) I’d like to take a moment to put it in perspective.

The primary thing to understand is that these people in Washington are not causes; they are symptoms. We humans like to think in terms of personalities and stories, with clear cut heroes and villains making decisions and duking it out. I think of politicians more like those Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, following their simple programs. These politicians of ours don’t show up in D.C. as blank slates, of course. They grew up in some particular place, learned about life in some particular way, and for some reason got interested in being in politics. They showed up with established worldviews. And they were chosen.

I’m not saying chosen in some metaphysical way. I mean that they passed through a series of tests. They had to be socially adept enough in some way to get people to believe in them, and they had to be extroverted enough (or motivated enough to fake extroversion) to deal with campaigning. They had to have a set of beliefs conventional enough to fit easily into one of the two party hierarchies. The real test, however, the test-du-la-test, is their money appeal. Let me restate the two most important facts about American politics:

1)      Whoever spends the most money in a congressional primary wins, 9 times out of 10.

2)      80% of that money comes in big chunks from millionaires and billionaires.

Ergo, those politicians who have worldviews and policy ideas that annoy the wealthy have a small chance of even competing in a primary election. Considering that the #2 and #3 spenders probably need those $1,000 checks to compete, I’d put the chances of your average millionaire-offending candidate at about 1%. There you have Senator Bernie Sanders.

Really, the whole congressional process is as predictable as bad TV drama. For any policy area, figure out what would either throw money at the symbiotic corporate/millionaire organisms or allow them to retain more of what they already have.

Taxes? Reduce income tax rates on the top 1%, lower capital gains taxes, lower inheritance taxes, don’t pursue millionaire and corporate tax cheats when they offshore their income, and shunt the burden on to regressive local property and sales taxes.

Foreign policy? Court oil despots, then loan money to them so they can buy weapons systems from our military suppliers. If one of them starts to get independent ideas, expend a few hundred billion whacking him. Nothing says “I care” like a million dollar cruise missile. Sell weapons to anybody whose financial interests match our own at the moment. Respond to international crises in the most expensive way possible.

You can fill in the blanks on labor, the environment, banking, or what have you.

The beauty part is that bribery is unnecessary. Ok, so some senators and reps get junkets, maybe discounted rent or house renovations. But that guy with the cash in his freezer, that surprised me. Why risk prosecution for bribery when 99% of the members showed up agreeing with you anyway? Why give directly when you can launder it nicely through the party of your choice? And why take money when you have a nice six-figure consulting job waiting for you when you retire? A tidy little band of millionaires picked these people for their moola-friendly attitudes. It’s like running a casino. Sure, some lucky stiff will walk off with a few thousand here and there, but that just encourages the other rubes to keep coming back. They’re the house, for chrissakes; the odds are always on their side.

Despite the cynicism and political calculation in Washington, never forget that most of these stooges actually think that supply side economics works. They think that bankers know how to run a prosperous economy and that markets can actually be unregulated. They think that expanding the Gross Domestic Product is more important than choosing how it is spent. They believe a whole bag of pixie dust that just happens to benefit the 1% of Americans who own 40% of the country. That’s why the 1% filled out those $1,000 ballots and handed them to these guys instead of reality-based candidates.

Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent piece in Salon on why Obama’s apparent ineptitude in negotiating with the GOP is actually political shrewdness. It’s just shrewdness for a political purpose, not a social one. He’s cruising down the groove that will get him reelected – give up enough to diffuse right wing opposition, placate the clueless center with homilies about the middle class, and stay just close enough to the right-shifted center so that the left doesn’t primary him. For those of you who are disappointed by this, remember that during his presidential campaign Obama was hailed as an amazing fundraiser. An amazing fundraiser from whom? Review the two most important facts, above.

As long as those two facts hold true, bank CEOs will commit securities fraud with impunity, oil companies will cheat the government on their royalty payments, and drug companies will double their prices on us. Our pseudo-elected pseudo-representatives will allow it because of a mixture of true belief and realpolitik. If any of them waver from the path they will find themselves underfunded and facing a primary challenge. Someone with a firmer adherence to the necessary beliefs will replace them. That’s how they can do it.

Work Life Without Rights

In light of the recent end run by Wisconsin Senate Republicans (stripping public workers of their collective bargaining rights) I’d like to relate a couple of stories.

There was a friend of my father’s who, despite his quite English-sounding last name, was of Polish ancestry. The old family name was (approximately) Vitczyorick. This man’s grandfather was new to America and working in a factory when he was called up front by his foreman. The foreman told Mr. Vitczyorick, “I can’t spell your name and I can’t pronounce your name. Change it or you’re fired.” Vitczyorick had a family to support, and times were hard, so he picked the name of a close friend and changed to that.

Think about this for a moment. Put yourself in his place – giving up your family name on the whim of a manager. This was how life went in the days before unions.

There is a plastics plant near where I grew up. A couple of friends of mine have worked there. It is hot, smelly, grueling work. Back in the day, before the place unionized, the management did have a pension plan for line workers, and not such a bad one. The only problem was that when an older worker got within a few years of retirement he would suddenly, mysteriously get shunted to the graveyard shift, 11 PM to 7 AM. There would be nothing these near-retirees could do about it. Some would grind through their last few years, but quite a number would give up in exhaustion before they qualified for their pensions.

I just read a piece about this on my favorite guilty pleasure blog, The Rude Pundit. He relates a story about friends of his who work for state governments in so-called right-to-work states. They have no union protection and fear for their jobs at every election. In practice, the next political appointee can pink-slip any of them on a whim and hire a relative or a crony. Experience, performance, and education count for nothing. You might just say “Tough luck for them,” but it also means that administrative decisions, legal decisions, environmental rulings, and other functions of government are even more politicized than elsewhere.

There are millions of stories like this out there. They range from negligent homicide all the way down to those little quarter-teaspoonfuls of shit that ordinary workers have to eat every day to keep their jobs. Whether or not you are a union member you are standing on a platform of assumptions about worker rights that didn’t exist a hundred or so years ago. For example:

• The weekend
• The minimum wage
• The 8-hour day and overtime
• Workman’s comp
• Unemployment insurance
• Workplace safety requirements
• Termination for cause

These things didn’t come to us because of the magnanimity of employers. Union members fought, and in some cases, died for them.

Think about the last one. Today, if an employer said to you, “You’re a Catholic (or insert other religion, ethnicity, or political affiliation) so you’re fired,” you could sue them and win. So they don’t do that. This wasn’t always the case, and it isn’t guaranteed to last if the corporate conservatives have their way.

Polls on the subject have found that roughly 2/3 of American workers would like to be unionized, but are afraid of losing their jobs if they organize. This is because the existing labor laws favor businesses, especially businesses with big budgets directed specifically at squelching unions.

Public employee unions are the remainders of a half-beaten union movement, and in Wisconsin they are now legally crippled. They also suffer from being scorned by the very class of people they would help. Unions are starting to realize that they have to fight the broad battle of public perception as well as their narrow battles over wages and conditions. Large corporations have been mostly responsible for shrinking state revenues, through the banking collapse, tax evasion, and corruption-based lobbying, but they have pinned the blame on unions .They have redefined  earning a fair income as earning too much.

I am reminded of an old Russian fable. A farmer does the discover-and-uncork-the-old-bottle bit and releases a genie. The genie grants the farmer a wish, but with one condition: whatever he gets, his neighbor will get double. The farmer considers a bag of gold, but realizes that his neighbor will get two. A house? A good team of horses? More land? Whatever he wishes, his neighbor will one-up him. Finally he has an inspiration, and smiles broadly. “Blind me in one eye!” he says triumphantly.

And so it goes in America. Some people can’t seem to stand the thought of others getting a fair deal. They have been propagandized into thinking that their own cheated status is the proper baseline for a working life. Thus we hear the canard about union members being privileged, when they are only getting their due. According to those who own businesses, working oneself to death while being underpaid and abused is some form of virtue. It is a myth that business interests and their captive politicians are happy to promote.

As an example, have you ever noticed that in news accounts unions always make “demands,” while management always makes “offers”? Oh, those unreasonable, demanding unions. Oh, those generous managers. We never hear that management is making a demand that people work for less money or with poorer conditions.

If you want an idea of what widespread unionism can offer, look into working conditions in Germany. They have a workforce that is over 50% unionized, with more than 60% working under collective bargaining agreements. They have mandatory worker positions on all corporate boards and regional wage agreements for many trades and professions. They have high pay, good working conditions, and a mandatory minimum of 24 days annual paid vacation. All this, and their economy is the strongest in Europe, with a thriving manufacturing sector, a trade surplus, and money in the bank.

Consider the German example, or the northern European example in general, when someone starts blaming unions for our economic ills. Remember that the basic rights you assume as an employee didn’t pop magically into existence. And remember that those rights won’t necessarily stick around if you don’t keep fighting for them.