Matrix Report
Osama bin Laden is not under our protection any more. This is what former Taliban foreign minister Mulla Abdul Wakeel Muttawakil told Milt Bearden, ex-CIA chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan via phone. US invasion of Afghanistan had other motives, Bearden told a recent Webinar audience for Centre for National Interest, Washington.
Bearden recently gave a riveting account on how Washington disregarded a Taliban offer to take out Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan shortly before the October 2001 invasion.
Below is the transcript of Bearden’s historical background, looking back to Afghanistan’s role in the attacks on 9/11 in 2001 and on the US history with the various players in Afghanistan.
Milton Bearden:
Yes, in the beginning, there was Osama bin. Everything begins in our Afghanistan adventure with bin Laden, but you have to understand that this goes back to the Gulf War when when the Saudis ejected Osama bin Laden and sent him off to Sudan and he spent the next four years there brooding and watching America operating in the Gulf until the Americans were looking at improving relations with the Sudanese who were desperate to get out from underneath so many of the sanctions we had imposed on them. So we went to the Sudanese and said. Look a good first step of getting out of the doghouse with America would be to get rid of bin Laden.
He was under the protection of the spiritual leader of Sudan at that time Hassan al-Turabi. But I in fact carried a message to Khartoum to both Omar Bashir who was president and to Hassan Torabi who died my phone for four years and said, it’s the bin Laden thing. I want to get him out of here.
They went to bin Laden and said, where would you like to go back to Saudi Arabia? No the Saudis said not on your life He’s not coming here.
The Sudanese came to us and said. We’ll give him to you and we said we don’t have anything to charge him with so we don’t want him either.
And he said well we’ll just keep him here under a tight leash And the American position was no we can’t do that.
You’ve got to get him out of there. So they came back and said he said he’d go to Somalia. That would be OK with you. Well no it wouldn’t be OK. And finally the Sudanese came to us and said, how about Afghanistan? The American position was that is so far away that it’s perfect Send bin Laden to Afghanistan.
So in nineteen ninety six out of Sudan and off to Afghanistan to. Jalalabad, which at that time had not yet fallen to the Taliban, he linked up I think with his old friend Abdul Russel’s, and later when the Taliban took over in that part of Afghanistan, they they more or less celebrated having bin Laden there. And the rest becomes history because he plodded along with some boys in Hamburg and New Jersey And the next thing we have is 9/11. But this was not something that was entirely accidental. We were involved in it all the way back to the time that the very. Early 90s when he was in Sudan and I think that’s an important part of the history that we should understand as we move forward here rather than always saying that Afghanistan provided a safe haven to terrorists because that’s part of the current discussion Now, will they again provide a safe haven to terrorists? Well they provided one at our assistance back in 1996. So I’d like to just lay that out there as a set of facts that we can bear in mind as we go forward and take a look at the future.
