Another group Vendrell set up in December 2000 came to be known as the Geneva Initiative. It consisted of representatives from the United States, Iran, Germany, and Italy. Its purpose was to bring together the three non-fighting Afghan groups based in Europe. These consisted of the Rome group, comprising Zahir Shah’s supporters; a splinter of that movement, called the Bonn group; and the Cyprus group, made up of Pashtuns and Hazaras who detested the king and were backed by Iran. These meetings were the only venue where U.S. and Iranian officials met face-to-face, and they became even more important after 9/11. Iran sent some of its top diplomats to the venue. “There were essentially two sets of conversations going on between the Americans and the Iranians, one in public and the other in private, where they discussed how to undermine the Taliban,” said Vendrell.
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During the spring of 2001, Vendrell and his aides prepared a concept paper that aimed to achieve minimal agreement among those in the international community on what pressures it would be prepared to put on the Taliban. The paper called for the rearming of the Northern Alliance in order to deny the Taliban total victory.
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Along with Vendrell’s initiative, the experts group began to promote a new thesis. Led by Barnett Rubin, we wrote a joint paper that was circulated widely to international organizations and Western governments.
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We proposed using economic aid related to the reconstruction of Afghanistan as a tool to isolate the Taliban and create an alternative political infrastructure that could also become a lobby for peace inside the country. Similar thoughts were being advocated by other U.S. and European officials. In his last report to the UN Security Council before 9/11, Kofi Annan urged a new “comprehensive approach” to try to bring peace to Afghanistan, terming past attempts “fruitless endeavors.” He outlined the need for a plan to reconstruct the country.
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UN sanctions on the Taliban had failed, as they provided no incentives for ending the civil war, made no provisions for reconstruction, and demanded only that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. Most significantly, there was insufficient pressure from the Clinton administration to mobilize an international effort to end the conflict in Afghanistan.
When the Bush administration took office at the beginning of 2001, it was unclear what its policy would be—continuing to demand the extradition of bin Laden, or brokering an end to the Afghan civil war, or pressuring Musharraf to end support to the Taliban. In the nine months it was in power before 9/11, the administration took none of these issues seriously enough, although there was no shortage of warnings about the dangers of letting the problem fester. When Bush visited the White House on December 16, 2000, for the first time, Clinton had briefed him on “the biggest security problems” he would face. Of the six major threats Clinton listed, three involved al Qaeda and Pakistan. These were al Qaeda itself, nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan and nonproliferation, and “the ties of the Pakistanis to the Taliban and al Qaeda.”
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Clinton’s terrorism tsar, Richard Clarke, gave a thirteen-page document to incoming national security advisor Condoleezza Rice outlining the al Qaeda threat. Clarke recommended arming the Northern Alliance, developing Uzbekistan’s capacity to attack al Qaeda, destroying terrorist camps, and sending in U.S. Special Operations Forces (U.S. SOF) to collect intelligence on bin Laden.
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CIA director George Tenet later said that it was the CIA that prepared the first paper presented to the Bush team. However, the CIA station chief in Islamabad refused to endorse arming the Northern Alliance because it would have infuriated the ISI.
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The Bush administration arrived in office pledging to challenge Clinton’s foreign policy, including his steps against al Qaeda that had been so ineffective. Rice ordered a policy review of al Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Pakistan but set no timetable for its completion. The administration appeared to be least interested in Afghanistan. State Department officials told me that the new secretary of state, Colin Powell, was aloof from the entire policy review, showing little interest. Christina Rocca, the new assistant aecretary of state for South Asian Affairs, was far too timid and wary of the neoconservatives to offer her opinion. It had taken the administration four months to nominate her to the post, and she was confirmed only in June, five months after the administration took office. South Asia was clearly not a priority on Powell’s or Rice’s to-do list.
Rocca had spent fifteen years at the CIA (1982-1997) and then worked as foreign policy adviser to Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas.
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“She is a faithful implementer of what her bosses decide,” a senior U.S. diplomat told me at the time. The Pakistanis liked dealing with Rocca because they considered her so ineffective. “She had no ability to take decisions and she was not a risk-taker, so that suited us,” said a senior Pakistani diplomat. Early on she got rid of Alan Eastham, her deputy in the South Asia Department and the most knowledgeable person about the region.
Musharraf had written an effusive congratulatory letter to Bush upon his taking office, pointedly criticizing the Clinton administration and asking for a better relationship with him. In his reply in February 2001, Bush urged Musharraf to work with the United States to “address Afghanistan’s many problems—the most pressing of these is terrorism and it inhibits progress on all other issues.”
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The letter made little impact in Islamabad, and it was not until June that the Bush administration held its first substantive talks with Pakistan, when Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar visited Washington as well as London and Ottawa. In all three capitals, Sattar heard similar dire warnings that Pakistan’s failure to cease its support to the Taliban, and by extension to al Qaeda, would affect its relations with the West. However, nobody was threatening Islamabad with anything specific.
In Washington, on his own insistence, Sattar was accompanied by the ISI’s Maj.-Gen. Faiz Jilani, who explained Pakistan’s Afghan policy because U.S. officials knew that the Foreign Ministry had no say in Afghan policy. “Nobody from the Foreign Office ever went to Afghanistan. We were trying to influence the ISI, but we had no knowledge of what was going on or what Pakistan was giving to the Taliban,” Sattar told me.
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As Sattar arrived in Washington on June 1, twenty thousand Taliban troops, including thousands of Pakistani militants, launched another major offensive against the Northern Alliance. Condoleezza Rice gave Sattar an earful. “She told us that the Taliban were dead in the water and we should drop them. It was a very rough meeting,” said a Pakistani diplomat. Rice later admitted that “I delivered a very tough message, which was met with a rote, expressionless response.”
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However, there were still no specific threats or incentives for Pakistan to change policy. If the U.S. administration had decided to arm the Northern Alliance and informed Islamabad of that fact, it may well have made a difference in the military’s thinking, but so far there was no U.S. policy decision to speak off.
Instead, the Bush administration chose to improve relations with Islamabad. The new deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, encouraged the military regime. “I don’t want to see Pakistan only through the lens or the prism of Osama bin Laden,” he said. “We want to look at Pakistan and see what Pakistan thinks about Pakistan’s future.”
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Other U.S. officials echoed this sentiment. “It is in no one’s interest for declaring Pakistan as a failed state,” said Harry Thomas, the director for South Asia at the National Security Agency. “We don’t want Pakistan becoming another Afghanistan, ” he said just three weeks before September 11.
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Musharraf welcomed Washington’s conciliatory stance and hoped that unlike with Clinton, the Bush administration would put the issues of terrorism, nonproliferation, and restoration of democracy on the back burner. There was now even less incentive for Musharraf to change his policies toward the Taliban and there was no extraordinary U.S. pressure to go after al Qaeda. Dealing with Bush was going to be much easier than dealing with Clinton. Whereas Clinton resisted the wool being pulled over his eyes, the Bush administration simply closed their eyes themselves. Three years later Rice was to admit her failure:
America’s al Qaeda policy wasn’t working because our Afghanistan policy wasn’t working. And our Afghanistan policy wasn’t working because our Pakistan policy wasn’t working. We recognized that America’s counter-terrorism policy had to be connected to our regional strategies and to our overall foreign policy. . . . Al Qaeda was both a client of and a patron to the Taliban, which in turn was supported by Pakistan. Those relationships provided al Qaeda with a powerful umbrella of protection, and we had to sever that.
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In fact the Bush administration made no attempt to sever these relationships because the policy review kept getting delayed. Moreover, it seemed to lack all seriousness, according to U.S. diplomats at the Islamabad embassy, who were never consulted on it. In January, William Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, prepared two cables in order to brief the incoming Bush team about Pakistan and the threat from the Taliban and al Qaeda. His first cable reviewed current policy, while the second proposed options for a policy change. There was no response from Washington and no demand for further information—even though Milam was the U.S. point man for meetings with the Taliban leadership and had warned the Taliban that Washington would hold them responsible for any al Qaeda attack on a U.S. target. In May, Milam met with Armitage in Washington, but nobody asked Milam for his views or mentioned the policy review. The Islamabad embassy was not consulted once about the review—which indicates how low a priority it was for the State Department.
“Al Qaeda was not on the radar screen in Washington,” said a senior U.S. diplomat at the time. “Nobody thought there was any urgency to the policy review. Papers were circulated, dates were made to meet, and were broken—it was the usual bureaucratic approach.”
Through the summer there was still no sense of urgency about the policy review, even though there were more than enough warnings about an al Qaeda threat. The FBI issued 216 internal threat warnings about the possibility of an attack by al Qaeda between January and September 2001, while the National Security Agency reported 33 intercepts indicating possible al Qaeda attacks.
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U.S. forces in the Arabian Gulf were placed on the highest state of alert on June 22—Threat Condition Delta. Richard Clarke wrote to Rice on June 28 saying that warnings of an imminent attack “had reached a crescendo.”
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On July 10, the CIA prepared a briefing paper for Bush that was emphatic: “We believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks . . . attack preparations have been made . . . and will occur with little or no warning,” the paper said.
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The first formal meeting of deputy heads of departments in the U.S. government to consider the policy review had taken place only on April 30.
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The meeting bogged down over a technicality: whether the Pentagon or the CIA was to pay for and run the program for the covert Predator drone that would fly over Afghanistan. The $3 million Predator, which was being tested, was now more lethal, as it had been armed with a Hellfire missile.
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It would take another five months for the Principals Committee to meet.
On August 6, the CIA’s daily brief to the president was headlined, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research had tried to motivate Condi Rice and Colin Powell by sending them papers on the history of the fruitless attempts to persuade the Taliban and Pakistan to hand over bin Laden and, prophetically, a paper urging the overthrow of the Taliban regime—but there was silence from above. Other officials were angry and frustrated at Pakistan’s attitude. “The ISI is totally inflexible,” the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, then working at the National Security Council, told me when I visited Washington in the first week of July. “We wanted a joint project with them to change the Taliban leadership, but the ISI backed out. We don’t want to confront Pakistan, but we may have to.”
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At the UN, Russia and France presented intelligence dossiers to the UN Security Council showing that Pakistan continued to flout UN sanctions by providing fuel and other supplies to the Taliban. Up to thirty ISI trucks a day were still crossing into Afghanistan. Musharraf brazenly condemned UN sanctions, saying, “The Taliban are the dominant reality in Afghanistan. . . . The unilateral arms embargo on the Taliban government is unjustified, discriminatory and will further escalate the war.”
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U.S. officials continued to warn Pakistani diplomats of the possible consequences for both the Taliban and Pakistan of an al Qaeda attack anywhere.
I witnessed one such exchange at a conference organized by the British Foreign Office in July, at Weston Park, a mansion deep in the English countryside. A senior U.S. diplomat rounded on his Pakistani counterpart, telling him that “the Taliban and al Qaeda are one enterprise and we see Pakistan as backing that enterprise.” He went on: “Bush is very serious and could declare the Taliban a terrorist group in which case Pakistan would be directly held responsible for backing terrorism.” The American then counted off on his fingers the nine senior ISI officers directing military policy for the Taliban inside Afghanistan.
Finally, on September 4, nine months after Bush became president and a week before the 9 /11 attacks, the long-awaited interagency cabinet meeting of the principals took place in Washington. Those assembled agreed to provide the CIA with $125 million to arm Masud and the Northern Alliance. There was still disagreement over which agency would handle the Predator. The all-important issue of how to deal with Pakistan, especially once U.S. arms started to flow to Masud, was left unresolved. Powell argued for putting more pressure on Pakistan, but he outlined no strategy. The meeting ended with White House lawyers being tasked to finalize a “National Security Presidential Directive” that would call for the elimination of al Qaeda. Rice said any new strategy to topple the Taliban regime would take three years to work.
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A few days later, Mohammed Atta and his accomplices were saying their last prayers as they prepared to attack the American homeland.