By Khan Zia
It is generally believed for various reasons that the U.S only attacked Afghanistan after Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden to them. This is incorrect. The events that led up to the decision tell a different story. What actually transpired has been recorded by a number of different writers and historians. To refresh our memories, a relevant extract from my book ‘Muslims and the West: A Muslim Perspective’ that sheds light on the issue is reproduced below:
How the decision to strike Afghanistan was made has been described in ‘Bush at War,’ by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, New York, pp. 82Â 84, 99): ‘Afghanistan’s history nagged at the president’s advisors. Its geography was forbidding and its record of rebuffing outside forces was real. Despite the options that had been presented earlier that morning, several advisors seemed worried. Bush asked them: What are the worst cases out there? What are the real downside risks?
‘One was triggering chaos in Afghanistan that could spill over into Pakistan. Rice and Cheney in particular viewed this as a great danger. ———- President Musharraf is taking a tremendous risk, the president said. Let us make it worth his while. We should help him with a number of things, including nuclear security. ——— Another risk they faced was getting bogged down in Afghanistan. ———- Should they think about launching military action elsewhere as an insurance policy in case things in Afghanistan went bad? They would need successes early in any war to maintain domestic and international support.
‘——- Rice asked whether they would envision a successful military campaign beyond Afghanistan, which put Iraq back on the table. ———— Wolfowitz seized the opportunity. Attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain. He worried about 100,000 American troops bogged down in mountain fighting in Afghanistan six months from then. In contrast, Iraq was a brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable. ———
‘When the group reconvened, Rumsfeld asked, ‘Is this the time to attack Iraq?’ He noted that there would be a big build-up of forces in the region and he was still deeply worried about the availability of good targets in Afghanistan. ‘Powell objected. You are going to hear from your coalition partners, he told the president. They are all with you, everyone, but they will go away if you hit Iraq. If you get something pinning September 11 on Iraq, great —– let’s put it out and kick them at the right time. But let’s get Afghanistan ———– ‘As for Saddam Hussein, the president ended the debate. “I believe Iraq was involved, but I am not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point ——–‘.
This discussion that took place at Camp David on 15th September 2001 seems almost surreal. There was no talk about proof of involvement or guilt but only about which victim would be ‘doable’, acceptable to coalition partners and provided suitable targets. Why were they even considering attacking Iraq when, as they claimed, it was al-Quaida that was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Centre? How does one assign guilt without having any evidence?
After this, what should one think about the leaders of the so-called civilized world who decide to rain death and destruction upon innocent people, mostly women and children, simply because it is ‘doable’? It wasn’t only Afghanistan and Iraq that had been targeted. The Pentagon had reportedly planned a military campaign lasting five years against a number of other countries in the region. US General Wesley Clark, NATO commander and Democratic hopeful for presidential nomination, recalls in his book, Winning Modern Wars (p. 130).
‘As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. —————-
‘And what about the real sources of terrorists —- U.S. allies in the region like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia? Wasn’t it the repressive policies of the first, and the corruption and poverty of the second, that were generating many of the angry young men who became terrorists? And what of the radical ideology and direct funding spewing from Saudi Arabia? Wasn’t that what was holding the radical Islamic movement together?’
Another comment in the book by Clark is even more interesting ‘——– It seemed that we were being taken into a strategy more likely to make us the enemy —– encouraging what could look like a ‘clash of civilizations’ —– not a good strategy for Winning the war on terror.’ ‘Encouraging a clash of civilisations’ is a thought that crops up repeatedly as one ponders over the events of the past five years and the actions of many of the western leaders and media.
Seeing the writing on the wall and in an effort to save her people from the terrible fate that awaited them, Afghanistan offered to hand over Osama bin Laden. Writing under the heading ‘War on Terror False Victory’, in the ‘Mirror’, John Pilger reports, ‘The guilty secret is that the attack on Afghanistan was unnecessary. The “smoking gun” of this entire episode is evidence of the British Government’s lies about the basis for the war.
According to Tony Blair, it was impossible to secure Osama bin Laden’s extradition from Afghanistan by means other than bombing. Yet in late September and early October, leaders of Pakistan’s two Islamic parties negotiated bin Laden’s extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the September 11 attacks. The deal was that he would be held under house arrest in Peshawar. According to reports in Pakistan (and the ‘Daily Telegraph’), this had both bin Laden’s approval and that of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.
‘The offer was that he would face an international tribunal, which would decide whether to try him or hand him over to America. Either way, he would have been out of Afghanistan, and a tentative justice would be seen to be in progress. It was vetoed by Pakistan’s president Musharraf who said he “could not guarantee bin Laden’s safety”. But who really killed the deal?
The US Ambassador to Pakistan was notified in advance of the proposal and the mission to put it to the Taliban. Later, a US official said that “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort if by some luck chance Mr. Bin Laden was captured”. And yet the US and British governments insisted there was no alternative to bombing Afghanistan because the Taliban had “refused” to hand over Osama bin Laden.
‘What the Afghani people got instead was “American justice” —– imposed by a president who, as well as denouncing international agreements on nuclear weapons, biological weapons, torture, and global warming, has refused to sign up for an international court to try war criminals: the one place where bin Laden might be put on trial.
‘The “war on terrorism” gave Bush the pretext to pressure Congress into pushing through laws that erode much of the basis of American justice and democracy. Blair has followed behind with anti-terrorism laws of the very kind that failed to catch a single terrorist during the Irish war. In this atmosphere of draconian controls and fear, in the US and Britain, mere explanation of the root causes of the attacks on America invites ludicrous accusations of “treachery.”
Above all, what this false victory has demonstrated is that, to those in power in Washington and London and those who speak for them, certain human lives have greater worth than others and that the killing of only one set of civilians is a crime. If we accept that, we beckon the repetition of atrocities on all sides, again and again.’ President Bush and his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disdainfully declared that there were to be no negotiations.
The need of the hour was not to put bin Laden on trial but to put together an ‘international effort’ for attacking Afghanistan (Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror, by Jeffrey St. Clair, Common Courage Press, 2005).
