Episode 3: The CIA, Afghanistan, and the Road to 9/11

How a covert action program facilitated the Taliban’s rise to power.

This is the story of how a CIA covert action program inadvertently created the conditions for the Taliban to seize control and provide safe haven for Osama bin Laden. Following a Cold War proxy battle between the Soviet Union and the United States, al Qaeda gained strength throughout the 1990s, leading to the deadliest attack on American soil on September 11, 2001.
In this episode of None Of The Above’s ‘90s Rewind miniseries, the Institute for Global Affairs’ Mark Hannah explores America’s misplaced trust in partnerships with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the lack of coherent US policy toward the Taliban and al Qaeda during the 1990s. He is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll. NPR’s Deborah Amos and retired ambassador Thomas Pickering return to provide insights and commentary

Steve Coll is an editor at The Economist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars. Previously, he served as a professor and dean in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Between 1985 and 2005, he was a reporter, foreign correspondent, and senior editor at the Washington Post. There he served as the South Asia correspondent in New Delhi and was the paper’s first international investigative correspondent, based in London.

Deborah Amos is a Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton University. Over the course of her award-winning career, she served as an international correspondent for NPR, ABC, and PBS. Her reporting has largely focused on the Middle East and refugees. She was awarded the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.

Thomas Pickering is a retired diplomat who served as US ambassador to the United Nations, India, and Russia throughout the 1990s. He also served as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under President Clinton from 1997 to 2000. He achieved the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in American diplomacy.

Transcript:

STEVE COLL: They had internalized a lesson of the Vietnam defeat, which was, we are not really built for picking winners and losers in the emerging world. Picking which of more than a dozen Afghan political military factions ought to get which guns, that's a recipe for failure on our part.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome back to None Of The Above. I'm Mark Hannah. This season, we're bringing you a limited series all about the foreign policy decisions taken in Washington throughout the 1990s and how they continue to shape the world today.

Previously on '90s Rewind, we discussed the end of the Cold War, which led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the United States being left as the world's only superpower, as well as Russia's brief flirtation with democracy. Now we get into today's episode.

Archival: Another UN delegation arriving in Kabul to broker peace, but this time it had come to talk to a new military force in Afghanistan.

Six months ago, no one had heard of the alliance of Quranic students called Taliban. But a string of military victories has given it control of a third of Afghanistan.

In northern Afghanistan, the fight continues against the forces of the Taliban, with considerable recent success.

Morning at a frontline Taliban militiaman's camp, and faint hopes for a new dawn in the grinding civil war.

HANNAH: In the 1980s, the rugged terrain of Afghanistan became the site of a decades-long battle between the Soviet-allied communist government and various factions of anti-communist fighters. Some of which, of course, were backed by the United States. The conflict bled into the early '90s as the country erupted into civil war.

This episode, we'll be exploring how covert CIA operations ended up facilitating the Taliban's rise to power in the 1990s and how Osama bin Laden used Afghanistan as a training ground for what would become the deadliest attacks on American soil.

COLL: By 1996, when bin Laden came back, the Taliban were on the verge of taking full control of the country.

HANNAH: That's journalist Steve Coll. He wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars about the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden.

COLL: The Clinton administration really didn't have a policy toward the Taliban. There are lots of kind of declassified memos from diplomats in the region basically saying, we don't have a policy. Can you send us one? And, you know, there weren't a lot of great choices, and there were some diplomats who eventually said we should engage with the Taliban, maybe because we need them to try to limit bin Laden's activities. I mean, essentially people thought he wasn't a serious threat.

HANNAH: But first, a bit of historical context. Our story begins a decade earlier, when Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan on Christmas Day in 1979.

COLL: Prior to that, it had been contested ground in the Cold War with both the United States and the Soviet Union seeking influence among Afghan elites and trying to provide aid as a lever for access to the country. But it was a pretty minor theater in the larger Cold War proxy contests until the Soviets invaded. But the consequence was that they set off an enormous rebellion that spread organically across Afghanistan and among exiles who then went across the border into Pakistan.

The Pakistanis started to support them to try to create a little bit of a buffer between the Soviets and themselves, fearful that the Soviets might even seek to come across into Pakistan for some reason or another. And as the Pakistanis began to support the mujahideen rebels as they came to be known, the US joined them and embarked on what was then the largest covert action program in the CIA's worldwide portfolio.

HANNAH: Seeing an opportunity to weaken the Soviet Union, the CIA began arming anti-communist fighters known as the mujahideen. The operation captured the imaginations of officials like Representative Charlie Wilson and CIA Director William Casey.

COLL: I think there was an emotional element of it that was mostly, at least as I remember, operations officers talking about it, about payback for Vietnam. You know, they punished us in Vietnam, and there were prisoners of war who encountered Russian interrogators. We also remember, you know, Korea. We had some rough interventions ourselves, and here they went and did something as foolish as what we had done in Vietnam, and we were going to make sure they felt it. That was kind of the more visceral side, so less hubristic strategy and more just, here's an opportunity to exploit a mistake.

They don't make mistakes like this at this scale that often, so let's go all in. And then strategically, you know, you could certainly find people who talked about the dangers of the Soviet sort of thrust towards warm water ports and the way this might become a platform to threaten US allies in the Gulf and so forth.

But I think most sensible people didn't really believe that that was a threat, or even the Soviet intention. We now know it was really not the Soviet intention. And in any event, they got bogged down in the Afghan counterinsurgency campaign that they had invited on themselves. And very quickly, they really couldn't extend themselves, even if they had the intention to do so.

HANNAH: There was also a sense in the Reagan administration that America needed to fight Soviet ideology across what was then called the third world.

Ronald Reagan: We must stand by all our democratic allies. And we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, to defy Soviet supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.

COLL: If you, like, think of someone like William Casey, who was Reagan's CIA director during the '80s, and who was really the architect of the covert action program in Afghanistan, but also significantly in Nicaragua and in Angola. I mean, to him, and to many people around him, he was very aggressive in his approach, but there was a consensus that we were in an era of nuclear and strategic stability that was accompanied by an ideological proxy contest in the emerging world, and that the Reagan Doctrine was to take our part in both of those seriously, and that meant supporting and supporting anti-Soviet movements wherever we could find them.

But indirectly, and there was a kind of rules of the road with the Soviet Union about how far you could go in supporting proxies. You know, you were not going to invite another Cuba missile crisis, but you were going to support your allies in contests in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. So that was the strategy where Afghanistan fit.

HANNAH: Rather than support the mujahideen directly, the CIA provided money, weapons, and supplies through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. The Americans had very little contact with Afghan rebels and entrusted the more granular details of the operation to Pakistan.

Saudi Arabia also got involved. Motivated in part by anti-communist sentiment and flush with oil money, the Gulf country collaborated with the CIA and Pakistan to support the mujahideen. Soon the Soviets were losing to the well-armed and well-funded rebels.

COLL: The CIA's worldwide portfolio by the mid-1980s helped the rebels essentially persuade the Soviets to leave, which they did. Last troops came across the border and back into the Soviet Union in February 1989, just a couple of months before I arrived. The Soviets left behind an allied government in Kabul.

So, the war wasn't really over. Neither was the CIA's covert action program when I arrived. It was still the goal of the then George H. W. Bush administration to support the rebels as they sought to take power in Kabul, to throw out the kind of Soviet-allied strongman, a guy named Dr. Najibullah, who had been a secret police chief in the Soviet era, but who is now seeking kind of political reconciliation.

HANNAH: Soviet troops finished their withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, and Najibullah's government was clinging to the last vestiges of its power.

So, what reason did the CIA have to continue covert operations? The Soviet-backed government was the common enemy of the various warring factions.

But they were also fighting each other. Pakistan hoped to leverage the CIA's support to install an Islamic government in Kabul. Our recurring guest, Thomas Pickering, was the US ambassador to India from 1992 to 1993.

THOMAS PICKERING: I also believe that during my time in India, our ambassador in Pakistan did the unusual thing and invited me to come to Pakistan and meet with his colleagues in Pakistan, many of whom I had worked with in various other assignments, including the UN and in the Middle East, and to get an impression of how and in what way they were viewing the problem.

My stay in India was cut short at 10 months because of a decision to ask me to go to Moscow, which, when the president asks you to go to a place like Moscow, you don't tell him no, I can't go, I have to stay in India, much as the assignment in India was extremely enjoyable, very challenging, and very open to change, and I was succeeded by a superb officer, Frank Wisner, who stayed for a long time and did a fantastic job in India, but the Afghan peace hung in the crawl and was not easy.

We achieved some military superiority in Afghanistan through our work with the mujahideen and the value we put on our assistance, overt and covert, in that particular issue through those kinds of channels.

HANNAH: Pakistan's ISI chose to funnel most of CIA funding to a rebel faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. But why did the CIA entrust these crucial decisions to an ally who proved less than reliable?

COLL: At the time that I wrote this book, Ghost Wars, which was, you know, published 20 years ago, I interviewed a fair number of CIA officers who were involved in collaborating with ISI and asked them that question.

And one theme that came through was that this generation of operations officers charged with carrying out covert actions, recruiting spies, that part of the CIA, they were post-Vietnam, and they had internalized a lesson of the Vietnam defeat which was, we are not really built for picking winners and losers in the emerging world, you know. We should work through allies. We should concentrate on what we do well, which is to challenge the Soviet Union to maybe recruit Russian spies, but picking which of more than a dozen, initially, Afghan political military factions ought to get which guns, that's a recipe for failure on our part, and so why not let ISI do it?

They advertise themselves as the local experts. They managed the frontier. They had started to shape some of these groups and leaders before the Americans really got seriously interested in supporting the Afghan rebellion.

And once that momentum was going, then the Americans sort of consoled themselves with the idea that ISI was doing what it should do, managing the Afghan factional politics, the US was doing what it should do, providing the very best and most deniable weaponry to aid the Afghans and helping ISI train them on it.

And the Saudis, which were the third big member of the coalition, were doing what they do best, which was writing very large checks. And that was working very well through the 1980s.

And as the rebellion gained momentum and the Soviets started to really suffer, the CIA had no reason to change course.

HANNAH: After the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, the country fell off the list of foreign policy priorities, and the Americans were increasingly at odds with their tentative ally Pakistan.

COLL: It was certainly still a relatively uncontroversial covert action program, but US interests were shifting very rapidly. The Soviets had in fact left. They had left behind a no longer communist but sort of Moscow-aligned, nationalist, ex-communist government. The Cold War had ended. The Berlin Wall was about to fall. Tiananmen had just happened. Germany was reuniting. I mean, Afghanistan was declining in importance. And the principal feature of US policy in the covert action program was to support the government of Pakistan, which had itself now embarked on a nuclear weapons program and was messing around in Kashmir.

And so there were people in Congress who wanted to signal to the Pakistanis that the open checkbook and unquestioning alliance of the Soviet war days in the 1980s was coming to an end and that Pakistan needed to adjust its behavior, that it needed to cease its nuclear weapons program, or cap it, and that it needed to stop supporting cross-border jihadists elsewhere. And that ultimately led to sanctions debates and all kinds of things. So that was the kind of mess that was developing in US engagement in the region.

HANNAH: The Soviet invasion and decade of fighting which followed had deeply destabilized Afghanistan.

COLL: Well, the consequences for Afghanistan were that the fragile but stable order that had existed politically and socially in the country during much of the 20th century, a period of peace, you wouldn't say prosperity, but certainly stability inside Afghanistan, the royal period, that started to unravel in the 1970s before the Soviet invasion, but then was utterly smashed and decimated by the war that was caused by the Soviet invasion and the US covert action in the 1980s.

And that war left the traditional local and regional order, political order, social order, tribal order in shambles, and it empowered rebel groups that had benefited from ISI and US support, and it also left Kabul in the hands of a secular Soviet-mentored elite who had roots in Afghanistan just like the rebels did, but who were espousing ideologies that were quite unfamiliar for the most part in Afghanistan during the 20th century, how these left secularized-

you had 20,000, 40,000, 50,000 women at work in Kabul ministries going to work on buses by themselves in skirts and heels and bringing home salaries to support their families. Now, you know, society hadn't changed utterly, there were still lots of arranged marriages and lots of, you know, patriarchy, as we would say today, but the social transformation in the cities caused by the Soviet intervention was significant. And on the rebel side, you had an equal and opposite reaction as transnational Islamist groups espoused a vision of a post-Soviet Afghanistan that would be even more religiously political than Afghanistan had been during the 20th century.

HANNAH: The withdrawal of Soviet troops did not bring an end to the war in Afghanistan. A bloody civil war broke out between the warring factions, and they were all vying for control of the country.

COLL: Probably the biggest cause of the violence was the insistence by the Pakistanis after the US stopped paying attention, or certainly without US objection. The insistence by the Pakistanis, that they wanted to promote an Islamist faction of the rebellion that had been the one of the leading recipients of their aid, led by a guy named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is remarkably still alive and still in the mix in Afghanistan, but he was the sort of Baghdadi of his day, like the most scary Islamist faction leader in the global jihadist landscape, and he was indirectly backed by the CIA through ISI.

And once the Soviets left, the ISI said, he's got to win the war. And so they backed him to try to take Kabul, which he failed to do. And one of the reasons he failed was that he had very few allies among the other rebel groups. And he was terrible at sharing power with the other rebel groups, so he invited fratricidal conflict.

As the front of rebels started to approach the takeover of Kabul, they had no unified vision of what the post-war politics would be. In fact, I was in Kabul in April 1992, when the city fell to the mujahideen, about three years after the CIA predicted it would fall. The CIA was quite optimistic that Gulbuddin and the ISI would achieve their goals within weeks and after the Soviets left and they really started pressing, that turned out to be overly optimistic.

And in fact, the attempt to dislodge the Soviet-backed government went on for three years of civil conflict. Finally, in April, because the Soviet Union itself had collapsed and Najibullah, their ally in Kabul, no longer had a supply line, then you saw a lightning collapse of the Soviet government, and the rebels came into Kabul and took it over.

You know, the first thing that happened was that the two best armed and most militarily successful factions drove into the capital and seized buildings associated with different parts of the government and immediately went to war with one another. Gulbuddin got the interior ministry, Ahmad Shah Massoud, this legendary guerrilla commander from the north, got the presidential palace complex.

And the first night, there was a heady celebration of final victory, and a lot of tracer bullets were being shot straight up into the air like fireworks. And then the next night, all those tracer bullets were back down pointing horizontally at one another.

And the battle inside Kabul for control of the city immediately after the victory was quite vicious, involved tanks, and a lot of crossfire. A couple of journalists were killed. It was probably the most intense combat that personally I've ever been in. And it was pretty quickly over. Gulbuddin lost.

Another case where ISI had made the wrong bet and the CIA was attached to this bad ISI bet. Gulbuddin was expelled from the capital. He went south about 30, 50 clicks and started lobbing in mortars. And that began years of just decimating civil war.

HANNAH: The communist government fell in 1992, but the fighting continued. In the southern city of Kandahar, a new militia was gaining influence. They adhered to a strict interpretation of Islam and called themselves the Taliban, meaning "students" in Pashto. By 1996, they had seized the capital city of Kabul. Amid the chaos, a wealthy Saudi businessman was quietly building a following, Osama bin Laden.

Here's the National Public Radio journalist Deborah Amos, who reported on the ground during the Gulf War.

DEBORAH AMOS: I didn't really understand Osama bin Laden and what he was doing until the first Gulf War, where I'm standing in Kuwait, and it's three o'clock in the afternoon, and it's pitch black, because Saddam has blown up the oil wells. And what I'm looking at is oil fires and they're covering the sun.

And next to me is Robert Fisk, a British reporter who tells me that he has to get out of there because he's going to Sudan because he wants to go and report on Osama bin Laden, which he does. This is before he goes to Afghanistan.

HANNAH: The presence of American troops in the holy land of Saudi Arabia during and after the Gulf War would ignite bin Laden's hatred of the United States and set him off on a lifelong crusade against the West.

COLL: Briefly, he had been a volunteer during the 1980s, a wealthy young Saudi who kind of went to Afghanistan initially as if it were a sort of summer camp expedition. Got more and more involved, stayed longer and longer, and began funding a couple of the factions of the rebels. He participated in the effort to overthrow the government after the Soviet troops left, but became frustrated by the civil war.

And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia in August of 1990, he decided to go home. So he went home and got involved in Saudi politics, became a rebel within Saudi Arabia, trying to essentially emulate the role that he had imagined himself playing in Afghanistan, was eventually thrown out of the kingdom, and moved to Sudan. And as we know, he was a member of a very wealthy construction family in Saudi Arabia, so he had resources, he'd also learned to fundraise for Islamist causes.

In Khartoum, he operated and gave birth to what we now understand to be Al-Qaeda, though it didn't always call itself that in those days.

HANNAH: Bin Laden took refuge in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in 1992. From there, he operated Al-Qaeda, an organization which attracted many ex-mujahideen fighters.

AMOS: What the Sudanese wanted is, they would trade everything they knew, because he'd been there for a while, Osama.

Everything they knew about him, if the Americans, if the Clinton administration would lift sanctions, and they wouldn't agree. And it was important information, and I've always wondered if the Clinton administration understood what kind of threat Osama bin Laden was, the fact that they wouldn't make that deal.

HANNAH: On a winter day in 1993, a truck bomb exploded underneath the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six people and injuring hundreds more. Al-Qaeda did not officially claim responsibility for the attack, but its mastermind, Ramzi Youssef, had allegedly stayed at a bin Laden guest house in Pakistan.

His uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would be a central figure in planning the 9/11 attacks. Terrorism was not yet the national security priority, but it was a growing concern for the Clinton administration.

COLL: Eventually in 1996, the US put enough pressure on the Khartoum government that they told him he had to leave, and there was really no place for him to go. The Saudis had stripped him of his passport, and Afghanistan was, at that point, deep in the throes of the civil war we talked about earlier, the one that began, more or less, after the Soviet troops left, was still raging.

And the country was, you know, divided into pockets with different kind of warlord control. And in Jalalabad, in the east of the country, there was a faction in power that he had worked with earlier in the 80s. And so, with their invitation, he got on a private jet with his family and some allies, and he flew into Jalalabad, no doubt carrying a fair amount of cash to ease his welcome, and he essentially, at that point, went up a mountainside there in eastern Afghanistan and wrote out what became later a notorious declaration of war against the United States.

And that started his kind of US-directed terrorism campaign that lasted through the late '90s and led ultimately to 9/11.

HANNAH: Driven out of Sudan and unwelcome in his home country of Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden retreated to the mountains of Afghanistan in 1996, where he began plotting his revenge in earnest. Upon his arrival, bin Laden struck up a practical relationship with the Taliban. His wealth and devoted fighters supported the Taliban regime, and in exchange, the Taliban allowed Al-Qaeda to conduct recruiting and training operations there.

COLL: So, when he arrived in flight from Khartoum, he did not have a relationship with the Taliban.

But soon, the Taliban took power in Kabul, and he brokered an introduction to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the emir of the Taliban, who was living in Kandahar, and he went down to Kandahar, and Omar invited him to set up shop in Kandahar, and that was when Al-Qaeda set up its training base on the outskirts of the Kandahar Airport and bin Laden started to pour money into Kandahar construction projects.

He would essentially drive around Kandahar with Mullah Muhammad Omar pointing things out. Let's build a marketplace here. He built a beautiful Eid mosque for Mullah Omar. He built a house for Mullah Omar, a compound that the US Delta Force eventually occupied after 9/11. But they had a relationship, a collaboration.

And the benefit of it to the Taliban was that Al-Qaeda's volunteers, who came into Afghanistan from Arab countries to join the global fight that bin Laden had announced, became shock troops against the Taliban's remaining internal enemies in Afghanistan, primarily those in the northeast under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the anti-Soviet guerrilla fighter who remained in the country, never compromised with the Taliban, and fought against them from his stronghold in the Panjshir Valley.

And Al-Qaeda volunteers in that war just proved to be fanatical and martyrdom-seeking types who were fiercer fighters than the Taliban themselves could sometimes conscript. And bin Laden readily provided that kind of battalion size support to the Taliban's war effort. So, between his funding of reconstruction projects and just general kind of spreading of cash in Kandahar and his willingness to support the fight that the Taliban were in, he bought himself a lot of space.

HANNAH: The relationship between bin Laden and the Taliban was primarily transactional, and it had quite a bit of tension.

COLL: But then he would annoy the Taliban by attacking outside the country's borders, which would bring the world's heat down on Mullah Muhammad Omar and, you know, the Taliban were kind of indifferent to what the world thought of them.

There were only three governments that recognized them at the time, Pakistan, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. And they were heavily sanctioned, but they really thought they were on a different path that God had called them to, and they didn't much care about their status in the world. And yet, it seemed annoying that their guest, in the tradition of hospitality, that their guest would behave in such a way as to bring the entire world down on their heads, often just by speaking, you know, impoliticly, having journalists come in using technology that was generally banned by the Taliban, cameras and that sort of thing, and giving all of these fancy global satellite interviews announcing what jihad meant.

And the Taliban were like, wait a second, you know, you're our guest. What's the rule about three days, you know, you really are over interpreting our hospitality. So, there were tensions between them.

I think, you know, partly as a result, and they asked bin Laden to stop giving media interviews. He partially complied. There are funny anecdotes about him having family weddings, bin Laden having family weddings. And he was a Saudi kind of tech gadget guy. He went to business school. He wasn't really interested in living in the seventh century, as pious as he was.

And so, he had a lot of cameras and whatever the version of 1990s cell phones were for taking wedding photos. They wanted a lot of videos and stuff. And everybody had to hide them because the Talibans would disapprove of them, and they'd have to go pretend they were going to some place and then take their wedding photos inside four walls, and avoid being detected. So, there were definitely differences.

You know the big question that you refer to that's been so chewed over is whether the Taliban knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks. And you'll have people saying yes, no, yes, they must have. I don't think it matters that much because in the end, when it mattered, after the 9/11 attacks, Mullah Omar had a clear decision, which was he going to risk his status as an Islamic leader, his military forces, to try to arrest bin Laden at the behest of the United States and other world governments, including Pakistan, that was urging him to do something, or not.

And he decided, no, I'd rather go down with him. And so, you know, that kind of tells you where he was.

HANNAH: Bin Laden was not shy about broadcasting his anti-American message. In 1996, he published a declaration of jihad in a London based newspaper. He wrote, "There is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the Holy Land."

He was eager to connect directly with Western audiences. In 1997, CNN aired a striking interview between Peter Arnett and Bin Laden from a cave in Afghanistan.

Peter Arnett: Amidst these remote mountains of Afghanistan are the various hiding places of one of the world's most wanted men, Osama Bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden: We declared a jihad, a holy war against the United States government because it is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical.

HANNAH: In 1998, Bin Laden also gave an interview to ABC News' John Miller.

AMOS: But let us remember that when Osama bin Laden went to Afghanistan, he entertained Western reporters. It's not that he was hiding what he was doing. He wasn't.

And he made it clear every time that, you know, he was anti-American, and he was anti-American. I mean, he tried to make a deal with the Saudi leadership in the '90s saying, do not bring American troops here, my guys will do this.

HANNAH: Over in Washington, there was a debate about how seriously to take these threats.

The Clinton administration did not have a clear position on the Taliban and overly relied on two unreliable allies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Divisions also emerged between the CIA, the FBI, and the State Department on how best to handle the threat of terrorism.

COLL: Foreign policy was not Bill Clinton's priority during his first term and certainly not an obscure country that had been wrecked by two successive Republican-led administrations' covert action policies.

But to your original question of, how has bin Laden himself and his declaration of war in the spring of 1996 assessed in Washington? I mean, essentially, people thought he wasn't a serious threat. He seemed like a blowhard. Anyway, he was stuck in Afghanistan. He didn't have an air force. He couldn't get out of there.

And maybe he found it emotionally satisfying to declare war on the United States. What would that really mean? I mean, if you were paying attention, you would have thought that he did have the potential to carry out cross-border terrorist attacks against US targets and US allies and interests. He had done so prior to declaring war.

But these attacks had been relatively fleeting and ineffective.

HANNAH: Things shifted dramatically on an August morning in 1998. Two truck bombs exploded outside the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than 200 people were killed and 4,000 injured. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks.

COLL: So, where he really breaks out and announces himself, after the declaration of war, is when he carries out simultaneous bombings of the two US embassies in Africa, in Tanzania and Kenya. And hundreds of Africans die, and somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen Americans are also killed, and it was a dramatic demonstration that Al-Qaeda, despite the obscurity of its leader and his self-isolation in Afghanistan, had developed satellite and other kind, satellite phone and other kinds of communication links to cells elsewhere in the world who were prepared to attack US targets with his support. And so in response to the two embassy bombings, Bill Clinton sent some cruise missiles into Afghanistan, but that was it.

But that was when, you know, the sort of final phase of US policy in Afghanistan began, which was the CIA and Clinton and others started to ask, well, is there anything we can do about this guy?

And the CIA said, yeah, you know, we know people in Afghanistan from the '80s. And many of them are enemies of Bin Laden in one way or another. Some of them are in the country. Some of them are just across the border in Pakistan. We can get back in contact with them and see if we can, you know, get eyes on him, and maybe we can think about then what to do.

And so, Clinton did authorize a covert action program. And the CIA station in Pakistan more or less ran it. And some people from the CIA's counterterrorist center in Langley got involved as well. And they redeveloped contacts with allies from the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s and met with them and said, can you help us with bin Laden?

HANNAH: By the late '90s, Pakistan's continued support for the Taliban and by extension, Al-Qaeda, became a major point of contention. American officials like Thomas Pickering, who was Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs at that point, were having tough and at times hostile conversations with their Pakistani counterparts.

PICKERING: I went in with the objective of trying to do my best to open up a channel that would get to the top of the Pakistani decision-making chain in which we could adopt a more common view that the encouragement of Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan tended to defeat the capacity that we both wanted to achieve. A real danger to Pakistan.

And that while there were millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, that was not a very wise idea, but there were also Taliban sympathizers deeply among them whose views about how and in what way to run the country did not, in my humble view, accord with the way in which Pakistan, under its constitution and its varying political leaders, had an intention to go, or hope to achieve, if I could phrase it that way.

And as a result, while I was not empowered by any Pakistani to speak on their behalf, I did find the opportunity to try to point out what damage they were doing to their own interests by pursuing the approaches that they had fastened on.

They themselves, I think, saw the problem, as often they do, in light of their domestic political success, as parties who can continue to achieve the kind of popular support necessary to lead Pakistan.

And so, we had one of those very difficult problems that doesn't get solved very easily if, in fact, the inclination is that one side feels strongly and the other side equally strongly in the opposite direction.

HANNAH: Several opportunities emerged to target bin Laden at his compound in Kandahar. But the administration ultimately concluded that the risk of civilian casualties or the failure to kill bin Laden would result in greater blowback for the United States.

COLL: The campaign turned out to be, you know, it's part of the 9/11 report, it's a big part of my book Ghost Wars, but it, in the end, was hamstrung by a lack of conviction about bin Laden's importance. And there was an unwillingness by president Clinton personally, but by the entire US system, to take bin Laden seriously, even after the embassy bombings demonstrated that he had transnational reach, and then the USS Cole attack in the autumn of 2000, which claimed the lives of a number of US sailors and almost sunk a US frigate in port in Yemen. And there were other thwarted plots, you know, between those two successful attacks of real ambition and scale, nothing on quite the scale of 9/11, but you could see that his ambition to create mass casualty spectacular attacks against US targets was in full flower and that he had developed a network of allies who he had been able to meet with, fund, and train inside Afghanistan and then dispatch out into the world, so that pattern was well established.

But when the CIA got eyes on bin Laden and recommended cruise strikes against him, or recommended taking a risk and arming Afghan rebels that were fighting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and getting them into a position to carry out their own robust attacks against bin Laden or Al-Qaeda on the ground, there was always hesitation in Washington.

People didn't want collateral damage. They didn't want bombing strikes that went bad and left their children on global television screens. They weren't convinced that these allies that the CIA was working with could do the job or were reliable. And there were lots of, you know, legitimate questions to ask, but when you go through the details of it, the basic reality is that people didn't think bin Laden was enough of a threat to justify the kinds of risks that stepped-up CIA covert action would pose.

HANNAH: Afghan rebel Ahmad Shah Massoud was still leading a resistance to the Taliban in the north of the country. The CIA began focusing its efforts on supporting Massoud's Northern Alliance as the danger from Al-Qaeda grew, but it was too little too late.

PICKERING: I was asked by President Clinton to become the opposite Russian intelligence arm on a small committee to find ways that we could cooperate with Russia in supporting the Northern Alliance. And the view there was that pressure by the Northern Alliance could be helpful in working out a diplomatic solution to the problem in Afghanistan rather than necessarily imposing, by use of force, a military solution.

That turned out to be, put it this way, a flirtation, neither an engagement nor a marriage, in terms of the fact that I think both sides had reluctance and trusting too much to that kind of a process. But it was interesting that we started off in that direction.

HANNAH: On September 11, 2001, members of Al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger planes within the United States.

Two of these planes collided with the World Trade Center towers in New York City, one crashed into the Pentagon, and one ran aground in an empty Pennsylvania field after passengers courageously stormed the cockpit.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in American history and launched the US invasion of Afghanistan a month later.

George W. Bush: The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

HANNAH: The United States had intelligence indicating Al-Qaeda was planning a major attack. Richard Clarke, the chief counterterrorism advisor at the time, later said "all systems were blinking red" prior to 9/11. So what explained the lack of action against Bin Laden and his network of terrorism?

COLL: If anyone had been able to imagine 9/11, obviously, you know, Bill Clinton would have pulled out the stops and been very aggressive.

It's not that he was innately pacifist about someone like bin Laden, it was just trying to put things into context. What are the chances of failure? What are the costs of collateral damage? And what is the real threat here? And so, that was part of it. I think, on the other side of the argument, you would say, wasn't the attack on two US embassies in Africa enough of a demonstration project. Like, wasn't that unacceptable? You wouldn't want him to hit another set of embassies. That would be bad enough. Shouldn't that have justified more risk-taking? And anyway, counterfactuals in hindsight only take you so far. But that is, I think, the answer to the question that it was a lack of political will.

Now there were, you know, debates. Richard Clark, who was the counter-terrorism advisor in the White House and who's no great fan of the CIA and who himself was implicated by the failure to prevent 9/11, very impressive public servant but a pretty good infighter. And so he throws a lot of shade on the CIA, and he's worth listening to.

I mean, I think his take is, they really never delivered a good opportunity to get bin Laden. You know, they talked a big game, but in the end, the opportunities they offered were, you know, half-baked, uncertain, potentially risky, not adequately vetted, didn't meet standards. And you know, it's hard to judge unless you go back and look at all the cables and exactly the satellite photographs that were being circulated and so forth and make an independent call about whether this was something a reasonable president should have said yes to instead of no, but the CIA's position is that he should have said yes to it.

And when you look at the 9/11 report, which is probably the most impartial kind of official record of it, I think they lay out what the CIA had, by way of opportunities, and described that the president just felt that the collateral damage was too risky.

And you know, whether those shots, if they'd been taken, would have killed bin Laden is a whole other question.

HANNAH: And as Deb Amos puts it, the United States might have a tendency to underestimate adversaries it considers less sophisticated.

AMOS: I see it in many occasions. How were they so clever to do that? What? This failure of imagination happened before 9/11. I'm sure it happened with bin Laden.

HANNAH: Soon after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush declared a global war on terror with far reaching consequences.

George W. Bush: Our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.

HANNAH: Congress established the Department of Homeland Security and passed the Patriot Act, expanding state surveillance of US citizens. And the defense budget more than doubled over the next 10 years to nearly $700 billion. Congress also passed a resolution called the Authorization for Use of Military Force. This allowed the president to use military force indefinitely against an opponent in the War on Terror without a formal declaration of war.

This was a stark departure from the previous conflicts. Terrorism emerged as a preeminent threat of the 21st century, but it was not the only danger to international security that grew out of the 1990s. Nuclear proliferation was picking up steam with countries like Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, and Libya, racing to develop weapons programs just as disarmament talks were stalling between the United States and Russia.

We will discuss that next time on None Of The Above. Thank you to Steve Coll, Deb Amos, and Thomas Pickering for joining this episode. Our producer is Eloise Cassier and our associate producer is Sarah Leeson. Special thanks to the None Of The Above team: Jonathan Guyer, Lucas Robinson, and Ransom Miller. Our intern, Julianna Lozada, also helped with this episode.

If you enjoyed what you've heard, please consider sharing this episode with a friend or family member. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you find podcasts. You can also find us on X @podcastNOTA, that's podcast N-O-T-A, and you can rate and review us, especially if you're generous and want to give us five stars.

Please send me your comments at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. I am all ears. I'm Mark Hannah. Thanks for tuning in.

More Episodes