Clinton, Bush, and Osama bin Laden: The WikiLeaks Cables

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American Thinker:

Whatever you think of WikiLeaks, the recently released tranche of diplomatic cables reveal naiveté and illusion in America's pre-9/11 attempts to deal with the Taliban.

In the months leading up to the September 11 terror attacks, the Bush administration had Osama bin Laden on its radar. He was not a household name in America yet, but top administration officials regarded him as a mortal enemy. Secretary of State Colin Powell was among those deeply concerned about bin Laden's ability to launch or provoke serious terror attacks -- and to influence large swaths of the Muslim world, where many admired him and were drawn to his hate-filled anti-Americanism.

Secret diplomatic cables just released by WikiLeaks show that ten years ago, just months before 9/11, top Bush officials were attempting to bring bin Laden to justice for outrages that included his role in the truck-bombing attacks of U.S. Embassies in the East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. However, Washington was getting nowhere with the Taliban.

The Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, was getting stalled, stonewalled, and lied to by the Taliban in response to repeated queries and demands about bin Laden's whereabouts and the Taliban's pledges to close terror-training camps, according to diplomatic cables classified as "secret."

The subject line of one secret cable: "Taliban claim Bin Laden out of their territory." Dated February 19, 1999, it was written by President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, based on information provided by a top Taliban figure, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, who was considered a "moderate" Taliban.

Sounding upbeat, Talbott wrote: "Mujahid has long indicated his own opposition to UBL and support for better relations between the U.S. and the Taliban. It was clearly gratifying for him to deliver the news that UBL had left tall ban territory. Mujahid was more emotional during this session than in any previous encounter."

The diplomatic back-and-forth between Washington and Taliban officials over bin Laden's whereabouts, up until the eve of 9/11, is eerily similar to Washington's negotiations over the years with North Korea and Iran about their nuclear weapons programs.

Read in the hindsight of 9/11, the cables provide a fascinating and sometimes comic and even depressing glimpse into the minds of officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations as they tried, during the late '90s and early 2001, to find common ground and shared interests with the Taliban -- with the aim of neutralizing bin Laden or bringing him to justice (though not necessarily kill him) and to shut down bin Laden's terror-training camps in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

During the Clinton years in particular, some diplomatic cables give the sense that State Department officials viewed Taliban leaders as people who would listen to reason -- or who could be shamed or pressured into doing the right thing in respect to their famous guest, Osama bin Laden, and his terror-training camps.