Clinton's War on Terror

The Covert Hunt for bin Laden

'Arsonist in Your Basement'

The Clinton administration had defined its enemy as narrowly as its military instruments. Bin Laden and his aides were targets, but not the Talbian regime that gave them sanctuary. For a time in Clinton's final year in office, it appeared that might change.

American policy toward the Taliban had been ambivalent at first when the fundamentalist militia led by Mohammad Omar conquered the eastern city of Jalalabad and Kabul, the Afghan capital, in September 1996. It shifted to hostility the next year over the regime's treatment of women. After the 1998 embassy bombings, bin Laden became the primary issue for Washington.

For the next two years, Clinton pursued a policy of economic sanctions against the Taliban and sent numerous messages to the de facto government of Afghanistan requesting bin Laden's delivery for trial.

Frustrated by the Taliban's lack of cooperation, Clinton's emissaries took on a more menacing tone in the spring of 2000. But though the administration deliberately raised the specter of military confrontation, it chose in the end to step back.

The new approach began on April 4, 2000. Pakistan's intelligence chief and leading Taliban supporter, Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed, had come to Washington. Pickering, the State Department's third-ranking official, summoned him unexpectedly for a blistering message intended equally for the Taliban leadership.

Ahmed spoke of bin Laden with what Pickering later called "the hospitality gambit." Bin Laden was the Taliban's guest, honored in the tradition of Afghanistan's Pashtun community. But the general offered to find a solution that both parties could accept.

Pickering told him the Taliban's guest had killed Americans and intended to do so again. "People who do that are our enemies," he said, "and people who support those people will also be treated as our enemies."

He urged Pakistan "not to put itself in that position." An American in the room said Malia Lodhi, Pakistan's U.S. ambassador, appeared to be shaken by the implicit threat. Zamir Akram, Pakistan's deputy chief of mission, said his delegation emphasized that "Pakistan was in no way supporting or condoning the activities of al Qaeda" and reminded Pickering of their joint work against suspects in the 1998 embassy bombings.

About the same time, Assistant Secretary of State Michael A. Sheehan, the department's counterterrorism coordinator, delivered the new message directly to the Taliban. He telephoned Foreign Minister Ahmed Waqil and read him a formal declaration known as a demarche.

"If bin Laden or any of the organizations affiliated with him attacks the United States or United States interests," he told Waqil, "we will hold you, the leadership of the Taliban, personally accountable. Do you understand what I am saying? This is from the highest level of my government."

When Waqil demurred, Sheehan added: "If you have an arsonist in your basement, and he leaves your basement every night and burns your neighbors, and you're protecting him, you become responsible for his crimes."

The next month, Pickering arrived in Islamabad. On the evening of May 26, he met with Mullah Ahmed Jalil, Taliban deputy foreign minister, at the Pakistani Interior Ministry in Islamabad. Pickering formally presented him with bin Laden's indictment in the Southern District of New York for the embassy bombings. "We don't think your evidence is persuasive," Jalil replied. Even if there were proof, he said, bin Laden should be subject to judgment under sharia, or Islamic law. Pickering told him, as Sheehan had told his boss, that "people who are helping other people kill Americans are our enemies and should consider themselves as such."

In Washington, however, Clinton's national security cabinet stopped short.

"There were verbal scoldings, but that was about it," Shelton said. "There never was any consideration of going after the Taliban. When discussions came up of what are we going to do, the military focus stayed on Osama bin Laden himself and his outfit."

No threat or inducement short of all-out war, Clinton's advisers concluded, would move Omar, the supreme Taliban leader. A limited bombardment would destroy the hard-won consensus behind U.N. sanctions against Afghanistan. And the first casualty would be the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which consumed Clinton's final months in office.

"The hard part for everybody now is to keep yourself in 1998, 1999 and 2000, and not 2001," Albright said. "For what we knew, and what we had to operate with, I think we did the right thing."

Researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.