Foreign Policy In Focus

We're honored to have Michael Busch dissecting the latest WikiLeaks document dump for Focal Points. This is the thirty-fifth in the series.

Not to be outdone by the emergence of an actual social movement in the Arab world, Osama bin laden reemerged from media obscurity this past weekend, pathetically taking advantage of the spotlight shining on former French-controlled North Africa to issue threats against none other than Nikolas Sarkozy’s proud nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys. According to reports in the Tehran Times, bin Laden has promised to have French hostages captured last year in Niger killed if French forces are not removed from Afghanistan. 

In almost knee-jerk response, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published a string of Wikileaked embassy cables concerning bin Laden. Collectively, the series of cables offer a partial timeline of intelligence building by US diplomats on the Saudi terrorist in the years leading up to the attacks of September 11. 

Bin Laden first flits across the page in a cable from 1993 describing diplomatic discussions with a prominent Saudi banker who reveals to the Americans that his brother had been a Mujahid in Afghanistan during the resistance fight against Soviet occupation years earlier.  The cable reports that while the banker noted the rise of religious conservatism in Saudi Arabia, the country remained “stable” under the firm rule of the royal family. Nevertheless, the banker

did concede that some businessmen do stand out for their support of Islamic groups, citing the example of Usama bin Laden. Although most known for his funding of mujahideen groups in Afghanistan, bin Laden has given money to several Islamic causes throughout the world.

A year later, bin Laden surfaces again in another cable describing impotent Saudi efforts at providing internal security to its people. While the Saudis are portrayed as nothing less than incapable of controlling acts of political violence on their sovereign turf, American diplomats applauded the government’s decision to revoke [sics, as always, courtesy of the cables -- RW]

the citizenship of Osmama bin Laden, a Saudi known to support extremist groups and suspected of financing terrorism in Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon, and the occupied territories.

Unfortunately, the cable also notes “several reports that [the government] s or has been funding terrorist groups in Egypt, Algeria and Israel” as well as indirectly “financing extremist Muslim secessionist groups in the Southern Philippines.”

Around the same time, a cable from State Department headquarters in Washington, DC reported intelligence claims that bin Laden was in eastern Afghanistan, and sought permission from what was then the neutral Nangarhar Shura which controlled the area. The cable relates that when the Shura rejected bin Laden’s request—“Nangarhar officials will not allow ‘these people’ to live in the eastern provinces” because “Afghans were already living in an ‘emergency situation’ and did not need more problems”—bin Laden retreated to Kabul and the protection of the notorious warlord, and later al Qaeda collaborator, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. 

This intelligence was refined a few months later when, in September 1996, Taliban forces swept through Afghanistan’s Pashtun east on their way to capturing the state. Another cable emanating from Foggy Bottom notes that “recent Taliban advances in eastern Afghanistan may mean that several militant training camps belonging to Hekmatyar…have or will come under Taliban control. Also, there are recurrent reports that Osama bin Laden is still in the eastern provinces.” The headquarters dispatch requests that diplomats reach out to Taliban representatives and ask them “do you know where he is? We hope that you will expel him from territory under your control. The presence of Osama bin laden in Afghanistan is not a positive development for Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile, back in Saudi Arabia, a relative of bin Laden’s was telling American officials they had nothing to worry about. According to this unidentified source, bin Laden is a “simple person easily influenced by others,” and that he had been “brainwashed” by Egyptian radicals. Bin Laden’s turn to zealotry had not gone over well with the family, the source told American officials, and that they had all cut him off completely. The source weirdly speculates that bin Laden was receiving support from Iran, points out that any monies changing hands would likely be funneled “through middlemen, since Usama would not openly maintain ties with a Shia government.” Either way, “Usama is no longer protected by the Saudi government and can now be reached by his enemies,” the unnamed source confidently claimed. “He is finished.” 

Jump to nearly two years later, and it becomes evident that the source had basically no idea what he was talking about. In a secret cable from State headquarters, an urgent message from a counterterrorism chief was sent to embassies throughout the Middle East and Central Asia warning of possible imminent attacks against unidentified targets. The cable expresses concern over bin Laden’s call for jihad against US troops in Saudi Arabia and public threats “that an attack could take place in the next few weeks.” The State Department “takes these statements very seriously,” the cable reports, and requests that American embassies secure “diplomatic and military facilities. You may also wish to increase security at US businesses and other potential targets which might be associated with the US.” American diplomats were right to worry. Two months later, al Qaeda operatives carried out devastating bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi which left 200 dead and over 4,000 people injured. 

The final cable of the series—dating from spring 2001—provocatively, if briefly, discusses the possibility that the Taliban might be willing to extradite bin Laden to Qatar to face charges in the East African bombings. Describing a meeting between American and Qatari officials in Doha, the cable notes that foreign and prime minister Hamad bin Jasim tells the American ambassador point blank that Qatar has no interest in hosting any trial involving bin Laden unless the Taliban themselves were to approach him with the proposal. As it happened, a “Taliban delegation was arriving in Qatar” that same day, and the “ambassador reminded him that the US is the single largest contributor of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan.” 

So what happened? The dispatch ends with a classic cliffhanger: “We will get a read out on the Taliban’s visit when it is concluded.” While we’ll have to wait for the details to leak at some later date, we already know that the unfortunate end to this particular chapter unfolds at Pentagon headquarters, across an anonymous field in Pennsylvania, and on the southern tip of Manhattan Island.  

His brother said: "He's not crazy. He's not a psychopath. He's not a sociopath. He's a man on a mission." His sister described him as a "very patriotic," man who "had grown frustrated with the public debate over [our] two major wars [as] the main cause had been forgotten [which was that] a man ordered a hit on our country, so we went to war."

. . . reports the New York Times on Gary Brooks Farber:

An ailing, middle-age construction worker from Colorado [who] armed himself with a dagger, a pistol, a sword, Christian texts, hashish and night-vision goggles and headed to the lawless tribal areas near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan to personally hunt down Osama bin Laden.

First question for Focal Points readers: Is this vigilante, however much he may be tilting at the windmill of a possibly dead bin Laden, deserving of any admiration whatsoever? Flipping this around, personally I've long been somewhat embarrassed by how little interest most Americans have ever shown in tracking bin Laden & co. down. It's also rendered inexplicable by how we as a nation gorge ourselves on vengeance-based entertainment.

Updating what I wrote in Counterpunch in 2005 . . .

Let's examine the forces that are ostensibly strong enough to make us jettison the impulse to vengeance.

1. We're too busy. Living in the most overworked developed nation, we scarcely have the time, even if inclined, to chew over how we were wronged as others in the developed world might, or stew over it like the underemployed of developing nations.

2. Vengeance is so primitive. To many on the East Coast, anger and vengeance are akin to fire and brimstone, that is, the Red states. It's aggravated by therapy-nation's credo that anger is not about how we deal with what provoked us, but how we handle the feeling itself. While recent polls [at the time] show Americans favor restrictions of Muslims' civil liberties, in Manhattan no one turns a head at Arab music issuing from a Middle-Eastern, sidewalk-food-vendor's boombox. Unfortunately, this comes off less as a commendable reluctance to profile than, once again, an inability to feel and express anger.

3. We're not actually angry. Many Americans dwelling in points distant from the attacks felt unaffected by 9/11. Others, though it's seldom spoken of in polite company, we're secretly glad that New York and Washington were struck. Despite their disdain for the Islamic religion, they weren't above feeling grateful to its most extreme representatives for wreaking havoc on their biggest enemy: big government and liberals.

4. We ain't got no quarrel with them Arabs (no disrespect to Muhammad Ali intended). The conventional wisdom on why President Bush was reelected was summed up by Jeff Jacoby in a Boston Globe column: "Americans trust Bush's judgment on the overriding issue of our time: the West's life-and-death struggle against Islamist fanaticism. . . he got the core meaning of 9/11 right." If that's true, it's only because the administration sensed, perhaps because of their own pet Saudis, that Middle-Americans had no innate antipathy toward Middle-Easterners. Thus, the string of terror alerts that the administration issued during the election year [2004] may, in part, have been a means of jolting Middle America into upgrading Middle-Easterners to their "A" list of hatred along with gays, Mexicans, and the aforementioned liberals.

5. Bin Laden is not enough. Half of those polled by Zogby International in New York City on the eve of the [2004] Republican National Convention agreed that the administration had foreknowledge of the attacks. While that may be chalked up to fashionable urban cynicism, more and more Americans suspect the administration either commissioned or was complicit in 9/11.

Second question: Granted -- 9/11 was a form of blowback. Nor am I personally calling for revenge. My concern is what does our continued nonchalance about bringing back the head of bin Laden say about the mood of our country?

Someone recently posted a blurb to a security list I play on, quoting a noted Mid East analyst (whose work I admire, incidentally) as saying that the Democrats can't leave Afghanistan, because that would make them losers, and as a result, they would lose elections for decades to come.

I guess I was either under or over-caffeinated at the moment, because this is a polite version of what spewed out of my terminal . . .

Get over it, people! This is pure legacy thinking!

The Democrats are forever angsting over being accused of ‘losing China’ or being ‘soft on communism’. Time to get their meds titrated.

Between debt, disinterest and rising casualties, it will likely be far more dangerous politically for Obama NOT to bring the boys home quickly.

And here’s how he can do it.

1. Frame it as a bad war, started by the bozos across the aisle, which he tried to fix, but – so sorry – it was just too late after years of mismanagement under those duplicitous Republicans. And, really folks, we can’t justify more blood and treasure for people who look and talk funny, and don’t like us anyway. Also, dear voters, let’s talk about all that money we’ll save, and how, as your leader in a new term, I’ll use it to create jobs, rebuild your communities and bake a whole ton of apple pies using my dear, old Nona’s secret recipe
2. Throw (SecDef) Gates under the bus as an example of what happens when you try to be a nice guy and let those duplicitous Republicans help govern and they go and lose a war for you. Dump Hillary, too, for totally bricking it as SecState, being a general pain in the butt, and for a little righteous payback. I mean, it will be time for a cabinet shuffle prior to the election anyway. Also, with any luck, Petraeus will be collateral damage, just as people start to call for drafting him as the Great Republican Hope in 2012.
3. Blend this with a righteous maskirovka claiming ‘We got UBL!’ (like we ‘got’ all those other muj who later turn out to be inconveniently alive) and claim victory. By the time anyone burns through the jamming, it will be beyond the attention span of the Average American Voter. (Currently estimated at the length of one Idol episode, or until the beer runs out.) Great October Surprise payback, too. Plus, the thought of Osama jumping up and down in front of a video camera screaming, ‘I’m alive, you idiot infidels!’ is just too funny. Imagine it with a Bart Simpson voice-over. Could set the movement back 20 years and the BBBG (big, bad, bearded guy) might even be tempted to wave at a drone pilot just to be taken seriously. 
4. If it turns out the polls say POTUS needs some tough guy creds (if saying ‘kick some ass’ wasn’t tough enough, although it totally scared me) he can just send the Secret Squirrels over and blow the bejeebers out of Somalia, Yemen or some other third world backwater in the name of freedom, democracy and using up the ordnance so the contractors who own congress can replace it all with newer (and more expensive, if not better) models.
5. Start practicing the tango with Michelle because you’ll look soooo cool at the (second!) inaugural ball.

Oh, gotta run. The phone’s ringing, and I think it’s Rahm Emanuel offering me a consulting gig.

(Yeah, I know I’m being cynical, but am I being cynical enough? And I DO need the work.)