How the Taliban Escaped State Department's Terrorism Blacklist
Mary Pat Flaherty, David B. Ottaway and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Service via The International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, November 6, 2001
 
WASHINGTON Each year, the State Department formally rebukes and imposes penalties on governments that protect and promote terrorists. But since 1996, when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, the nation harboring Osama bin Laden has never made the department's list of terrorist-sponsoring countries.

The omission reflects more than a decade of vexing relations between the United States and Afghanistan, a period that found the State Department more focused on U.S. oil interests and women's rights than on the growing terrorist threat, according to experts and current and former officials.

Even as its cables and reports showed growing anxiety, the department vacillated between engaging and isolating the Taliban. It was not until 1998, when two U.S. embassy bombings were linked to Mr. bin Laden, that officials knew they must directly address Afghanistan's protection of the terrorist's organization.

U.S. diplomats held out hope that the threat of adding Afghanistan to the terrorism list was "one card we had to play" in pressing the Taliban to turn over Mr. bin Laden, according to a former Clinton administration adviser.

The lack of a coherent policy toward Afghanistan was part of a broader miscalculation by the U.S. government, experts now realize. By allowing terrorism fueled by anti-American rage to take root in Afghanistan, officials underestimated the potential for danger.

"This is hard to say and I haven't found a way to say it that doesn't sound crass," said former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. "But it is the truth that those attacks before Sept. 11 were happening overseas and while there were Americans who died, there were not thousands and it did not happen on U.S. soil."

The day after the Taliban seized Kabul in September 1996, the State Department spokesman, Glyn Davies, encountered tough questions from American reporters.

Victorious in a brutal fight against rival factions, the Taliban claimed power after castrating and killing former President Najibullah and hanging the corpses of him and his brother from a post at the entrance to the presidential palace.

Mr. Davies reported the events matter-of-factly and told reporters the United States saw "nothing objectionable" about the Taliban imposing its strict interpretation of Islamic law.

"So let me get this straight," a reporter asked. "This group, this Islamic fundamentalist group that has taken Afghanistan by force and summarily executed the former president, the United States is holding out possibility of relations?"

"I'm not going to prejudge where we're going to go with Afghanistan," Mr. Davies said.

The United States hoped the regime would restore stability. Mr. Davies's comments reflected years of U.S. support for Afghan rebels during the war with the Soviets. The U.S. government had covertly supplied aid to religious fighters known as mujahidin who wanted to restore an Islamic state.

In those ranks was Mr. bin Laden, a scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family. Mr. bin Laden had arrived in Afghanistan in 1982 to fight the Soviets, and stayed through 1990, forming alliances with fundamentalist leaders, including Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban supreme commander.

None of this seemed particularly threatening to most of the diplomatic corps at the State Department, which was consumed with events in Iran and Iraq and the brewing nuclear arms race between Pakistan and India.

In fact, when the Clinton administration took over in 1993, Warren Christopher mentioned bringing peace to Afghanistan in his confirmation hearings for secretary of state, then never made a significant speech about the country again. Mr. Christopher declined requests for an interview.

But there were warnings. Peter Tomsen, a longtime State Department official who was a special envoy to Afghanistan, and a few others insisted that the United States should help rebuild the country to protect it from extremists. By disengaging, the United States risked "throwing away the assets we have built up in Afghanistan over the last 10 years, at great expense," he argued in a confidential 1993 memo to top State Department officials.

"The U.S. mistake was to ignore Afghanistan," Mr. Tomsen says today. "We walked away." After the Cold War, the United States was "weary of Afghanistan," said Robin Raphel, the assistant secretary for South Asian affairs at the State Department from 1993 to 1997. "It was really a struggle to get attention and resources."

Yet to a large extent, the United States deferred to Pakistan, its ally against the Soviet Union, as Afghanistan's turbulence dragged on, according to other former officials.

"The U.S. had what I call a derivative policy toward Afghanistan," said Elie Krakowski, a former special assistant to the secretary of defense, who has written extensively on Afghanistan. "That is, it had no policy on Afghanistan on its own, and whatever Pakistan said, we bought." The United States was reluctant to criticize Pakistan as it further aligned itself with the Taliban after Kabul's fall.

With U.S. officials paying more attention to Afghanistan's neighbors, Mr. bin Laden returned to the country. The United States had pressed Sudan to evict him for suspected terrorist activities but did not sustain the pressure when Mullah Omar welcomed him in as a guest.Activities at Mr. bin Laden's training camps increased. A State Department report in August 1996 labeled him one of the "most significant sponsors of terrorism today."

Throughout the mid-1990s, a U.S. oil company was tracking the outcome of the Afghan conflict. Unocal, a California-based energy giant, was seeking rights to build a pipeline system across Afghanistan, connecting the vast oil and natural gas reserves of Turkmenistan to a plant and ports in Pakistan.

State Department officials promoted Unocal's pipeline project in their role of helping U.S. companies find investments in the region, Ms. Raphel said.

Before Unocal, the Taliban "were just a bunch of wild jihadists running around. They came out of nowhere," said Richard Dekmejian, a University of Southern California terrorism specialist, using the Islamic term for holy warriors.

In a late 1997 public relations move, Unocal flew Taliban officials to tour the company's U.S. offices. They took a side trip to the beach, then flew to Washington for meetings in the Capitol and at the State Department to press their case for U.S. recognition.

But the visit only fueled the outrage of women's rights groups who were incensed by Unocal's coziness with the regime. However, among the State Department's old hands, "there was a lot of putting down, like these women didn't know what they were talking about," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation.