Did the Bush transition drop the ball on a potential Taliban handover of Osama bin Laden before 9/11? It seems entirely possible ...
[Crossposted from
Reading A1]
Reuters today reports a secret meeting between U.S. and Taliban officials in Frankfurt, Germany, "almost a year before the Sept. 11 attacks," whose purpose was to "discuss terms for Afghanistan to hand over Osama bin Laden." A German television documentary broadcast last night quotes
Kabir Mohabbat, an Afghan-American businessman, as saying he tried to broker a deal between the Americans and the purist Islamic Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who were sheltering bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.
He quoted the Taliban foreign minister, Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, as saying: "You can have him whenever the Americans are ready. Name us a country and we will extradite him."
A German member of the European Parliament, Elmar Brok, confirmed to Reuters that he had helped Mohabbat in 1999 to establish initial contact with the Americans.
"I was told (by Mohabbat) that the Taliban had certain ideas about handing over bin Laden, not to the United States but to a third country or to the Court of Justice in The Hague," Brok said.
"The message was: 'There is willingness to talk about handing over bin Laden', and the aim of the Taliban was clearly to win the recognition of the American government and the lifting of the boycott," he said, referring to the international isolation of the Taliban.
Link via
Corrente, where several commenters looked at the "almost a year before the Sept. 11 attacks" and concluded the report was the product of another attempt to smear the Clinton administration for lack of diligence in the effort to take down Osama. Corrente's Lambert, who posted the item, was led to apologize for an "insufficient display of cynicism," but I think he was too hasty.
The ZDF documentary claims the Frankfurt meeting happened in November, 2000, and goes on to say that "there was talk of holding further negotiations at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan," but that no more talks took place. That leaves it entirely open whether or not this was a ball the Bush transition simply dropped. If so, it would be of a piece with the incoming Bush team ignoring warnings from the outgoing Clintonites about the seriousness of the bin Laden threat.
And a CBS News report of Sept. 25, 2001, would seem to substantiate that idea. (All hail Google!) It reports a covert meeting between a U.S. delegation and two Afghanis, one a Taliban military commander, at a hotel in Quetta, Pakistan just four days after 9/11. The other Afghani, possibly the broker of the meeting, may have been none other than that same Kabir Mohabbat, the Afghan businessman at the center of today's Reuters story.
Four days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, five Americans checked into a hotel in Quetta, one of the most potentially dangerous cities in Pakistan.
Hotel records show they were booked in as U.S. embassy employees. CBS is not making public the names of those embassy employees but at least one was a military officer.
The following day, two Afghanis checked in as Afghan embassy employees.
Taliban sources say one of them was a Taliban military commander. ...
CBS News has met with an Afghan-American businessman who
describes himself as a middleman and says he attended a meeting on September 16th between the U.S. and Taliban officials in the hotel in Quetta.
"I was very encouraged by the United States officials," recalls Kabir Mohabbat. "They used restraint and very friendly terms, and they spoke very friendly with each other."
Tough to imagine how such a meeting could have been arranged so quickly if there had been no prior contacts on the subject of a bin Laden handover. Was that American delegation trying to follow up an opportunity that the Bush transition had disastrously let slide?