Early U.S. Threats Against Afganistan, bin Laden

Jonathan Steele, Ewen MacAskill, Richard Norton-Taylor and Ed Harriman
Saturday September 22, 2001
The Guardian

Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible American
military strikes against them two months before the terrorist assaults on
New York and Washington, which were allegedly masterminded by the
Saudi-born fundamentalist, a Guardian investigation has established.

The threats of war unless the Taliban surrendered Osama bin Laden
were passed to the regime in Afghanistan by the Pakistani government,
senior diplomatic sources revealed yesterday.

The Taliban refused to comply but the serious nature of what they were
told raises the possibility that Bin Laden, far from launching the attacks on
the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon out of the blue 10
days ago, was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw
as US threats.

The warning to the Taliban originated at a four-day meeting of senior
Americans, Russians, Iranians and Pakistanis at a hotel in Berlin in
mid-July. The conference, the third in a series dubbed \"brainstorming on
Afghanistan\", was part of a classic diplomatic device known as \"track two\".

It was designed to offer a free and open-ended forum for governments to
pass messages and sound out each other\'s thinking. Participants were
experts with long diplomatic experience of the region who were no longer
government officials but had close links with their governments.

\"The Americans indicated to us that in case the Taliban does not behave
and in case Pakistan also doesn\'t help us to influence the Taliban, then
the United States would be left with no option but to take an overt action
against Afghanistan,\" said Niaz Naik, a former foreign minister of
Pakistan, who was at the meeting.

\"I told the Pakistani government, who informed the Taliban via our foreign
office and the Taliban ambassador here.\"

The three Americans at the Berlin meeting were Tom Simons, a former
US ambassador to Pakistan, Karl \"Rick\" Inderfurth, a former assistant
secretary of state for south Asian affairs, and Lee Coldren, who headed
the office of Pakistan, Afghan and Bangladesh affairs in the state
department until 1997.

According to Mr Naik, the Americans raised the issue of an attack on
Afghanistan at one of the full sessions of the conference, convened by
Francesc Vendrell, a Spanish diplomat who serves as the UN secretary
general\'s special representative on Afghanistan. In the break afterwards,
Mr Naik told the Guardian yesterday, he asked Mr Simons why the attack
should be more successful than Bill Clinton\'s missile strikes on
Afghanistan in 1998, which caused 20 deaths but missed Bin Laden.

\"He said this time they were very sure. They had all the intelligence and
would not miss him this time. It would be aerial action, maybe helicopter
gunships, and not only overt, but from very close proximity to Afghanistan.
The Russians were listening to the conversation but not participating.\"

Asked whether he could be sure that the Americans were passing ideas
from the Bush administration rather than their own views, Mr Naik said
yesterday: \"What the Americans indicated to us was perhaps based on
official instructions. They were very senior people. Even in \'track two\'
people are very careful about what they say and don\'t say.\"

In the room at the time were not only the Americans, Russians and
Pakistanis but also a team from Iran headed by Saeed Rajai Khorassani,
a former Iranian envoy to the UN. Three Pakistani generals, one still on
active service, attended the conference. Giving further evidence of the fact
that the Berlin meeting was designed to influence governments, the UN
invited official representatives of both the Taliban government in Kabul
and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Dr Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern
Alliance\'s foreign minister, attended. The Taliban declined to send a
representative.

The Pakistani government took the US talk of possible strikes seriously
enough to pass it on to the Taliban. Pakistan is one of only three
governments to recognise the Taliban.

Mr Coldren confirmed the broad outline of the American position at the
Berlin meeting yesterday. \"I think there was some discussion of the fact
that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might
be considering some military action.\" The three former US diplomats
\"based our discussion on hearsay from US officials\", he said. It was not
an agenda item at the meeting \"but was mentioned just in passing\".

Nikolai Kozyrev, Moscow\'s former special envoy on Afghanistan and one
of the Russians in Berlin, would not confirm the contents of the US
conversations, but said: \"Maybe they had some discussions in the
corridor. I don\'t exclude such a possibility.\"

Mr Naik\'s recollection is that \"we had the impression Russians were
trying to tell the Americans that the threat of the use of force is sometimes
more effective than force itself\".

The Berlin conference was the third convened since November last year
by Mr Vendrell. As a UN meeting, its official agenda was confined to trying
to find a negotiated solution to the civil war in Afghanistan, ending
terrorism and heroin trafficking, and discussing humanitarian aid.

Mr Simons denied having said anything about detailed operations. \"I\'ve
known Niaz Naik and considered him a friend for years. He\'s an
honourable diplomat. I didn\'t say anything like that and didn\'t hear anyone
else say anything like that. We were clear that feeling in Washington was
strong, and that military action was one of the options down the road. But
details, I don\'t know where they came from.\"

The US was reassessing its Afghan policy under the new Bush
administration at the time of the July meeting, according to Mr Simons. \"It
was clear that the trend of US government policy was widening. People
should worry, Taliban, Bin Laden ought to worry - but the drift of US policy
was to get away from single issue, from concentrating on Bin Laden as
under Clinton, and get broader.\"

Mr Inderfurth said: \"There was no suggestion for military force to be used.
What we discussed was the need for a comprehensive political
settlement to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, that has been going
on for two decades, and has been doing so much damage.\"

The Foreign Office confirmed the significance of the Berlin discussions.
\"The meeting was a bringing together of Afghan factions and some
interested states and we received reports from several participants,
including the UN,\" it said.

Asked if he was surprised that the American participants were denying the
details they mentioned in Berlin, Mr Naik said last night: \"I\'m a little
surprised but maybe they feel they shouldn\'t have told us anything in
advance now we have had these tragic events\".

Russia\'s president Vladimir Putin said in an interview released yesterday
that he had warned the Clinton administration about the dangers posed
by Bin Laden. \"Washington\'s reaction at the time really amazed me. They
shrugged their shoulders and said matter-of-factly: \'We can\'t do anything
because the Taliban does not want to turn him over\'.\"