U.S. pre-9/11 memos: Pakistan backs Taliban

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'An intrinsic enemy'
Bin Laden moved to Afghanistan — from Sudan where diplomatic pressure had forced him out — in the chaotic years before the Taliban came to power, and began setting up terrorist training camps. The warlords who let bin Laden in later combined into the Northern Alliance, which with U.S. military support ousted the Taliban in late 2001.

Among the Taliban’s early backers was Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun leader asked by the Taliban to become their U.N. representative before he became disillusioned with their extremism. Washington later supported Karzai as Afghanistan’s post-Taliban president, a post he still holds.

In March 1999, Karl F. Inderfurth, Washington’s senior diplomat for South Asia, wrote to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in pessimistic terms about the prospects of peace in Afghanistan. Washington, he wrote, “may have to consider the Taliban to be an intrinsic enemy of the United States and (Afghanistan to be) a new international pariah state.”

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Concerns about the Taliban included its links to opium crops, rights abuses and protection of bin Laden, who at the time was wanted in the United States in connection with the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that killed more than 200 people.

“Pakistan has not been responsive to our requests that it use its full influence on the Taliban surrender of bin Laden,” Inderfurth wrote. “We should demand that Pakistan help us meet our core goals in Afghanistan and foster a political settlement compatible with Pakistan’s own long-term interests.”

If not, the United States should consider taking Pakistan before the U.N. Security Council, where military action could be among the options, Inderfurth wrote.

“If we see continued Pakistani resistance and/or duplicity, we should begin to seriously consider seeking Security Council backing ... to ensure that Pakistan and the outside players abide with pledges to cease outside support,” he said.

Cooperation increased after 9/11
Aslam said the idea that Pakistan did not respond to U.S. requests on bin Laden was a “baseless allegation.”

“We tried out best,” she said. “I think the U.S. intelligence agencies have exaggerated Pakistan’s influence, in their own interests.”

Washington had stepped up efforts to get bin Laden after the African embassy bombings, posting a $5 million reward for the terrorist leader. In 1999, President Clinton met Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who soon afterward began talking of withdrawing Pakistan’s support for the Taliban unless bin Laden was handed over or expelled from Afghanistan, according to reports at the time.

Cooperation between Islamabad and Washington on bin Laden lapsed after Musharraf ousted Sharif in a coup in October 1999.

Musharraf made an abrupt shift in policy after the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S., withdrawing support for the Taliban and becoming a key U.S. ally in the Afghan war by providing logistical support and launching military action in the lawless border region to root out militants.

Bin Laden and top Taliban leaders escaped the U.S.-led war, and U.S. intelligence officials warned last month that al-Qaida might be regrouping in tribal zone on the border. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have stepped up attacks in the past two years trying to destabilize Karzai’s government and reassert themselves as a force in the country.

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