Will Bush produce bin Laden? Today he put the same task force that got Saddam on it.
Furthermore the Asia Times reported:
The increase in troop presence serves to prevent a civil war and to fight the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, where they remain a strong presence. Furthermore, the International Security Assistance Force under NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) command, has Kabul under control but is incapable of ensuring law and order in the rest of the country, where warlords prevail.
Why have the US media returned to Afghanistan? 'I don't know why, but they think Osama bin Laden is about to be captured,' says UN spokesman Manoel de Almeyda, a Brazilian national.
That is another thing keeping Bush awake at night: he wants bin Laden captured before the November elections in the US.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FF16Ag02.htmlNo doubt Bush will hold Afghanistan up as an example of his military success or wants to, but, as I've been reporting it doesn't seem as though the US has wanted to capture OBL. So far they have let him escape from Sudan to Afghanistan, visited him in a hospital in Dubai, and, let him escape from Tora Bora into Iran or Pakistan.
Will the capture of OBl make a more stable region, hell no! Either way smoking Bin Laden out of Pakistan or Iran means special forces in, an escalation of the war. Plus bin Laden is still a hero in in parts of Pakistan where the jihadi movement is strong. Only the Lord knows how a US incursion into Iran would play out:
And it appears that he chose Iran, rather than Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or China. A leading source says that shortly before the collapse of Kandahar, Mullah Omar called a meeting in the town at which the governor and important commanders were present. Mullah Omar briefly mentioned the war situation, explaining the reasons for the sudden retreat from Kabul. He stressed that given the heavy US carpet bombing, there would be no way to defend Kandahar, and so he had arranged for the safety of senior "guest" fighters and would announce the surrender of Kandahar shortly.
The sources say that after this meeting bin Laden went to see Mullah Omar, along with a small group of Afghans and Arabs. Bin Laden's next destination was discussed, and it was not Chaman in Pakistan, as some reports have said, as it was infested with anti-Taliban militia.
The sources point out that that Iranian border areas are a nest of the Mujahideen-i-Khalq, who are fighting a war against the government in Tehran. They are minority Sunnis, and they have good relations with some of the Afghan and Pakistani tribes. When the Iranian government has taken its regular crackdowns on the group, members have taken refuge in Pakistani or Afghani tribal areas.
http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/CL19Ag01.htmlIf I'm reading this on the Internet let's hope someone in the military planning department knows this as well:
According to the soldier who believes bin Laden could have been captured, teams from the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, Ky. -- working alongside members of the Central Intelligence Agency -- believe they had the location of the terrorist leader on Nov. 28.
Intelligence reports placed bin Laden in an elaborate cave complex in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
The soldier said bin Laden's captured cook had told American military officials bin Laden's exact location.
But a Special Forces team captain on the ground would not give approval to go after bin Laden because there was no specific mission order to do so, the soldier said.
While the Army was deciding what to do, Special Forces soldiers saw two Russian-made helicopters fly into the area where bin Laden was believed to be, load up passengers and fly toward Pakistan.
"I said, `There he goes,'" the soldier said.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/linkscopy/OdbLeNc.htmlIt seems this isn't the first time the evil one has slipped through the hands of the forces of truth and justice. There was Khartoum Sudan in 1996:
Plan to Arrest Bin Laden in 1996 Fell Apart
WASHINGTON, Oct 3 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A plan for Sudan to arrest Osama bin Laden in 1996 fell through when the United States found it unable to put him on trial and failed to convince Saudi Arabia to take him, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The newspaper also said Washington, three years later, trained 60 Pakistani intelligence agents to go into Afghanistan to capture or kill bin Laden, but that a coup in Islamabad put an end to that operation.
The U.S. administration of then-president Bill Clinton had secretly spoken with the Sudanese government in 1996 on a plan to seize the Saudi dissident - who is now Washington's prime suspect in the devastating September 11th attacks on New York and the Pentagon - but let the idea go after evaluating the situation, according to U.S. officials quoted by the newspaper.
Bin Laden had been living in Sudan at the time, after being expelled from Saudi Arabia.
"Had we been able to roll up bin Laden then ... we probably never would have seen a September 11th," the newspaper quoted an unnamed U.S. government anti-terrorism official as saying.
Despite bin Laden being seen by intelligence officers as a rising threat, "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time, and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States," Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, who was deputy national security adviser then, said to the Post.
Berger told the newspaper that the U.S. Constitution would have made it difficult to win a conviction. "Our first choice was to send him some place where justice is more 'streamlined'," he said.
http://www.islamonline.net/english/news/2001-10/04/article1.shtmlInteresting, so we could have caught him, but, lacking any evidence we didnt want him to stand trial in the US. Riyahd wouldn't do the dirty work, so back he goes to Afghanistan.
The war on terror started well before Bush:
When bin Laden was fingered as the likely mastermind of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 that killed more than 200 people, Clinton switched tactics, and in August of that year, targeted bin Laden by ordering cruise missiles fired into his camps in Afghanistan. Bin Laden managed to escape that attempt, but Clinton reportedly did not give up.
In a separate report, the Washington Post said the CIA in 1999 had secretly trained and equipped around 60 agents from Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency to go into Afghanistan to assassinate bin Laden.
In return, Clinton was to lift sanctions and provide economic aid to Pakistan.
The operation was begun less than a year after the U.S. strikes on training camps in Afghanistan, along side additional covert action approved that year by Clinton for the CIA to work with Afghani and other foreign intelligence services to move against bin Laden, the Post said.
Defense officials, quoted in the article, expressed regret that the strikes had been so few and limited, saying that a serious campaign to eliminate bin Laden and al-Qaeda should have been initiated at that time, but that it was held back by many of the same concerns that are restraining President George W. Bush, such as the threat of killing innocent civilians and an inability to pinpoint bin Laden's exact location.
Between the 1998 strikes and the late 1999 commando plan, the paper quoted officials as saying that a number of opportunities had arisen to go after bin Laden, but that intelligence had never been solid enough.
The CIA's plan was aborted in October 1999, the paper quoted unnamed sources as saying, when the Pakistani government headed by prime minister Nawaz Sharif was ousted in a military coup by the current president, General Pervez Musharraf.
http://www.islamonline.net/english/news/2001-10/04/article1.shtmlI believe the roots of course go back to 1979, but, I would wager a guess that after the vietnam war the CIA just rolled up tents and moved towards the Mid East in its quest to fight communism. It is well known that bin Laden has CIA roots. That is when his grand plan for world domination, global jihad and the network to fund it was set up, to fight the Soviets and the Ba'ath. The Afghani Soviet war lasted ten years ending in 89. We are talking a huge covert operation lasting ten years. Bin Laden's family built the bases in the caves. State of the art to withstand Soviet nukes. Clinton bombed them. Bin Laden understood global finance. The money washed in ... we are seeing the same players from Iran Contra ... the drug dealing is hard to overlook and certainly sensational, but, 60 billion in arms sales to Iran ... they don't just sell them hardware, they train them, sometimes in the US. Its a huge huge operation, like Vietnam became, until we have so many assets on the ground, and, the devil is thoroughly created in the press and the natives are getting pissed off enough to send some of us home in body bags, the overt case for war is made. Pearl Harbor, cut Japan off from oil forcing them to take on our fleet, know its coming and minimize the damage, but, still ...The Bay of Pigs, Kennedy didn't bite when the CIA force of ex patriots is slaughtered on the beach ... The Gulf of Tonkin, nothing to see there ... and now 9-11.
Will the US and NATO hot on the heels of Osama follow the route invented for him and the Mujahideen by the CIA in 1979?
To understand bin Laden's long-term view, it's essential to consider his Four Pillars of jihad: 1) The Arab peninsula, with all its oil wealth, and most of all, Islam's two most sacred sites - Mecca and Medina. 2) The Indus Valley, which means basically Pakistan - a technology-savvy nuclear state with an Islamic army permeated by fervent Islamists. 3) Egypt, the heart of the Muslim world, where he can draw support from Gamaa Islamiya, the organization founded by al-Qaeda's brain, Ayman al-Zawahiri, alias "The Surgeon". 4) This is the trickiest pillar: we could call it the Iranian Islamic counter-revolution, which bin Laden thinks will develop when his own Sunni Islamic revolution will be a superpower and Iranian Shi'ites will be forced to adhere to it.
In bin Laden's not-exactly-worldwide strategy (he is only interested in selected areas of the Muslim world), he concentrates his attacks on what he qualifies as rotten regimes. His mapping is extremely coherent. His intuition has shown him that all traditional Muslim monarchies - from Jordan and Morocco to Saudi Arabia - are in deep trouble. The periphery - from Pakistan to the Central Asian republics - is bordering chaos. In Iran, a counter-revolution by secular and democratic forces is taking shape around President Khatami. And Indonesia and Malaysia - the Meccas of Muslim capitalism - were battered by the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis (most Arabs still firmly believe the crisis was detonated by Jewish speculators to get rid of Suharto).
For bin Laden, Hosni Mubarak's Egypt has to implode - because Mubarak, a thug, is also a beggar: in exchange of the annual American US$2 billion pocket money, he has to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel - an arrangement that enrages the Egyptian street. Bin Laden despises the Algerian regime - whose generals are dying to get a French passport. He despises both Baath Party regimes in Iraq and Syria - because they are despised by the majority of the respective populations, Shi'ite in Iraq and Sunni in Syria. But his strategy for Iraq and Syria is completely different from Egypt's. bin Laden wants to recycle both Iraq and Syria - because for him the main enemy is Saudi Arabia. This goes some way to explain why al-Qaeda maintains a shady but arguably solid connection with the Lebanese Hezbollah - which is allied to Syria - and also a connection with a significant sector of Iraqi intelligence.
Of course, bin Laden's noire is the Saudi Arabian regime, which was born from a Bedouin revolt and was supposed to reestablish the "purity of Islam" through the ultra-conservative Wahhabi faith. But for bin Laden, the Saudi royal family boils down to a bunch of cowards and traitors. It's important to remember there is no hereditary monarchy in Islam. The only family widely respected is the Hashemite family - who are the legitimate descendants of Prophet Mohammed.
Bin Laden's resentment against the House of Saud is widely shared by the majority of the Arab population (which, by the way, is not Wahhabi). And this includes the Yemenite minority. Rounding up his strategy, bin Laden was also the first to notice how Pakistan was in danger of being absorbed - economically and socially - by regional superpower India. He understood that after the end of the Cold War, Pakistan was literally left in the cold by both its crucial allies, China and the US.
The only missing link would be to seduce the Iran of the mullahs. And that's exactly what bin Laden did. He recognized the merits of the Shi'ite Islamic revolution of 1979. But he promised much more to the mullahs: the keys to his all-embracing super-Sunni Islamic revolution, the only means to end the Iranian regime's political isolation. Bin Laden may have started his career in the anti-Soviet jihad in 1982 as an American agent - but in the 1990s he did everything in his power to convince hardline Iranian mullahs that he was not an American ally anymore. Israeli commentators and a few CIA analysts swear that he got extremely valuable help from Iraqi intelligence - but there's absolutely no evidence. At the time bin Laden was based in Khartoum, Sudan, working on subversive plots for Egypt. Sudan was pro-Iraq - and Iraq had a very imposing embassy in Khartoum. But this proves nothing.
Saddam Hussein's main strategy to rally worldwide Muslim public opinion is to emphasize his commitment to the Palestinian cause. In this context, bin Laden could not be further from Saddam. He never demonstrated any interest in Palestine. Sources in Peshawar remember how disgusted he was when in the peace negotiations in Madrid in 1992 the Palestinian spokesperson was an unveiled Christian woman, Hinane Ashraoui (nowadays she is assistant secretary to the Arab League). The Palestinians are way too "modern" for bin Laden. He firmly believes that they cannot extract anything out of the Jews because they are led by a cocktail of women, Christians, homosexuals and Marxists. In this case, bin Laden is nothing more than reproducing the ideas of his mentor, Abdullah Azzam, a Jordanian Palestinian academic killed by a massive explosion in Peshawar in 1989. Azzam was the brains behind the new ultra-hardcore wahhabis of Saudi Arabia.
Pakistan is vital to bin Laden's design. It's nobody's secret in Pakistan that President General Pervez Musharraf has virtually no clue of what his Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is up to. It's an extraordinary "revenge of history": the Pakistani army, which according to much evidence never respected civilian political power, now is constantly upstaged by an intelligence agency. But the ISI is not just an agency: it is a state within a state. Bin Laden immensely profited from the fact that in the 1980s he had two key Pashtun allies. General Hamid Gul was the architect of the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad - alongside the "moneyman", Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia. General Nasirullah Babar - today living a cozy life in Peshawar - was no one else than the man who invented the Taliban. These two generals were the real masters of Afghanistan. They were Afghans, anyway, because they belonged to prominent Pashtun families.
As the evidence collected by Western intelligence shows that al-Qaeda is directed by a sort of central committee, it's important to point out that this committee also includes high-ranking Pakistani generals, some from the ISI, and some of them Pashtun.
American pundits seem to be startled that terrorism central has moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Time to wake up: this is exactly what bin Laden wanted. He always knew that post-September 11 the conditions were ripe for Pakistan to explode or implode at any moment. This fits his plans for more power for the Islamist contingent (according to official Pakistani figures, around 15 million people), but most of all for the crucial ISI Islamist sectors with access to the Pakistani nuclear bomb.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/DG11Ag01.html