Al-Qaida roads not taken
History never moves as neatly as first reports suggest. After 9/11, conventional wisdom coalesced around the notion that the Clinton administration had botched its response to Osama bin Laden's terror threat in its 1998 missile attack on bin Laden's Khost training camp, a response to U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. If only Clinton had done a better job of retaliating then, the thinking was, maybe we wouldn't have faced the disaster of the al-Qaida attacks.
But a fascinating in-depth report in Time suggests that responsibility for the failure to act against al-Qaida ought to be at least equally shared with -- if not mostly borne by -- the Bush administration. It seems that the Clinton national security team handed its Bush-named successors detailed plans to dismember al-Qaida in Jan. 2001. But the proposals "became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials." Read and weep. (Joe Conason offers more detailed comment here.)
Meanwhile, Friday's Wall Street Journal offered a piece about the state of al-Qaida's relationship with the Taliban through the late '90s that challenges our view of events from a different direction. The Journal, which last year lucked upon a laptop computer filled with al-Qaida files that it has been mining for stories ever since, reports that, from the time of bin-Laden's arrival in Afghanistan through 1998, the al-Qaida Arabs and the Taliban Afghans disliked and distrusted each other: bin Laden's people looked down their noses at the Taliban hicks, and Mullah Omar's people thought bin Laden was a publicity-hungry grandstander abusing their hospitality. On the eve of the Khost attack, in fact, the Taliban seem to have been preparing to evict bin Laden's gang. Once the U.S. missiles landed, however, bin Laden became a folk hero -- the Islamic leader who'd stood up to the Americans -- and the Afghan-Arab alliance was fortified.
Does this mean Clinton goofed by not hitting al-Qaida harder? On one level, sure, that's obvious. But "hitting harder" without actually killing bin Laden would probably not have made a difference in the long run to 9/11. Unless one of those cruise missiles lobbed at Afghanistan had actually taken bin Laden out -- or unless the U.S. had geared up for a much more extensive assault on bin Laden's entire organization, which in those Monica-mad times would have been viewed as a gigantic "Wag the Dog" exercise -- it's hard to see how anything would have changed.
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