OBL's location?

The hunt

Armies have been mobilised, phones tapped, huge rewards offered - yet Osama bin Laden is still at liberty. Does anyone even have the faintest idea where he is? Declan Walsh investigates

Guardian September 11, 2006

To find Osama bin Laden, try Peshawar's smugglers' bazaar on the road to the Khyber Pass. Walk past the small mountains of almonds and lemongrass and green tea. Turn at the stacks of duty-free TVs and cheap cosmetics. Stop at the stalls with the topless women. Down a cramped alley, bearded shopkeepers squeezed behind tiny counters offer a fine selection of fanciful sex products. "Delay sprays" carry the promise of lingering pleasure. For the discerning lover there is Lovely Curves, a product that claims to be a "bust-developing cream". If all else fails, there is plenty of knock-off Viagra at knock-down prices. Worry not about the quality: "Made is Germany" (sic) reads the label.
The merchandise hidden under the glass counters, however, caters to a different kind of thrill. For a discreet inquiry and 75p, the smiling traders offer a wide selection of jihadi DVDs. Slickly edited footage shows beheadings of alleged collaborators, bombs that flip American Humvees into the air, and the last words of suicide bombers. And then there are the images of the lanky Saudi tycoon's son with a bad back, a scraggly beard and a placid, dead-fish glare. "I've sold about 100 since Friday," says Abdul at one of the stalls, sifting through a stack of discs. "Some ask for [Afghan militant] Gulbuddin. Some ask for Taliban. Some ask for Osama."
The sheikh, the director, the emir, even "the Samaritan" - Bin Laden violently changed the course of our world in 2001, and then began his own audacious flight from justice. Six days after the twin towers folded into Manhattan, while dazed Americans fumbled for meaning, President George Bush promised to lasso in the al-Qaida leader, Texan style. "There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: dead or alive'," he told a press conference at the Pentagon. The order went down the line. Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterrorism chief, later told a subordinate, "I want Bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice." Yet five years on, a pokey video stand on the Pakistani frontier is about as close as anyone has got.
Rarely has so much brought so little. The US has spent billions on the search. It has mobilised armies, bribed informers, bullied allies, emptied bank accounts, tapped phones, abducted suspects and assassinated his henchmen. It has, without a doubt, seriously damaged al-Qaida's ability to carry out terrorist attacks. Yet still the scarlet pimpernel of jihad roams free.
The foolhardy words of the American general who promised a scalp by the end of 2004 have been quietly forgotten. Embarrassment has crumbled into recrimination. The Americans blame the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis blame the Afghans. The Afghans shrug their shoulders. President Bush wanted to invade their country and catch Bin Laden, they say. So why hasn't he?
Guessing the location of Bin Laden's lair is the favoured parlour game of south Asia, played out along the 1,500-mile Pakistan-Afghanistan border where the participants - spies, soldiers and journalists - believe he is hiding. It is a massive and daunting arena. Scraps of intelligence and educated guesswork slim the odds, but not much. Theories shift with the seasons. Three years ago, some put Bin Laden in Pakistan's Waziristan, nested behind serried ranks of flinty pro-Taliban fighters. Last year it was Bajaur, a tribal agency further north, where a group of harried Arabs were spotted lugging supplies up a mountainside. This year's hot bet is closer to the Chinese border, in Chitral.
Peaceful, mountainous and sprawled across the lower Himalayas, until recently Chitral's main attractions were hiking, rare falcons and a rather rough version of horse polo. Then, one day last winter, three Americans arrived, and all that changed. The strangers checked into the Hindu Kush Heights, a luxury hotel with sweeping views over Chitral's main valley. The owner, Siraj ul Mulk, a genial former air force officer and a prince of the local royalty, offered his help. "They said they wanted to develop the area," he recalls. "They said American development money was coming." Ul Mulk whipped out his maps, which the Americans eyeballed enthusiastically. But when the conversation turned to talk of tourism, their faces glazed over. "You could tell it was going in one ear and out the other," he says.
As it turned out, the Americans were only interested in one tourist. By last May, word spread that the CIA or the FBI - nobody was ever sure which - had come to Chitral on the trail of Bin Laden. Locals grew angry. A cleric organised protests and a politician kicked up a fuss in parliament. Reporters snooped around a house that the now-absent Americans had rented, noting a fitness machine and a satellite dish on the porch. The Americans never came back, leaving locals scratching their heads and wondering if the bizarre episode was a blessing or a curse. "I'm thinking of spreading new Osama rumours," says Ul Mulk sardonically. "It seems a good way to bring in visitors."
For America, it was another dead end in a long manhunt. The "development experts" had come from the US consulate in Peshawar, a colonial-style house ringed with enough razor wire to protect a small prison. It is the sort of place where visa inquiries are politely referred elsewhere. Behind its fortified walls is a major nerve centre in the Bin Laden hunt - some of the world's most sophisticated decryption and eavesdropping equipment. And yet western intelligence has not had a bead on Bin Laden in years, says Michael Scheuer, the CIA analyst who set up the Osama bin Laden cell in 1996 and resigned two years ago. "As far as I know there's been no serious credible information about his location since Tora Bora," he says.
That high-octane cave chase in December 2001 was probably Bin Laden's luckiest break. After Kabul fell, he fled south to the saw-toothed White mountains, on the border with Pakistan, and burrowed into Tora Bora, an underground warren that the CIA once helped fortify. Surrounded by an estimated 1,000 al-Qaida diehards and pounded by a blitz of American bombs, it was a harrowing time. According to one account, American officers listening on a captured radio set heard Bin Laden apologise to his fighters for leading them there. But then, many believe, the American generals made a mistake. Instead of sending in the elite rangers to finish the job, they turned to unreliable Afghan militias. As daisy-cutter and bunker-buster bombs exploded around him, Bin Laden slipped through the dragnet and into North Waziristan, a remote Pakistani tribal agency of fortress-like compounds and stern tribesmen. An American general, Tommy Franks, disputes this account, saying it was never clear if Bin Laden was in Tora Bora. Nevertheless, in 2004, under intense American pressure, Pakistan dispatched tens of thousands of soldiers to Waziristan, by then a major haven for al-Qaida fugitives. But it was too late. The sheikh had fled.
Since then, the trail is mostly conjecture. In interviews with Pakistani army officers, western officials and local reporters, a common theory emerges. Bin Laden is surrounded by two or three concentric circles of security with a small corps of battle-hardened men at its centre. He has not used his satphone - the old number was 00873 682505331 - in years and communicates only through handwritten notes carried by trusted couriers. He travels only at night, possibly in disguise. At an early stage, Pakistani police were instructed to check all burkas in case he was hiding underneath, John Simpson-style. "He's morphing all the time," says one western official.
The armour has two possible chinks. Since 2001, al-Qaida has released at least 37 video or audio recordings. The latest, produced last week, shows Bin Laden meeting with the 9/11 bombers. Earlier this year, he released five audio tapes. Could the tape trail unravel his cover? The early cassettes were delivered to the office of al-Jazeera in an Islamabad suburb. America was watching, but to no avail. "They did it at night using cut-offs," says one official, using the term for someone who does not know his employer. "It's one of the most reliable measures in spycraft." Now Bin Laden's messages are distributed via an even more elusive channel - the internet.
His other weakness is his health. Rumours of sickness have swirled around Bin Laden for years. The French newspaper Le Figaro reported in 2001 that he had visited Dubai for kidney treatment. Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Peshawar journalist who interviewed Bin Laden in 1998, noticed his copious consumption of water and green tea, which may indicate kidney disease. At the time, Bin Laden walked with a cane, he says, and complained of back problems. "He said he used to love playing soccer and horse riding, but had to stop," says Yusufzai. But when he photographed a stooped Bin Laden shuffling into a tent, his followers erased the digital images. "They said they didn't want him to look weak or disabled," he says.
Even if Bin Laden is ailing, he enjoys an ideal sanctuary. The Pashtun tribal belt is a broad swathe of high-walled villages, sprawling orchards and fiercely conservative tribesmen that straddles the Pakistani-Afghan border. Pashtunwali, the strict Pashtun code of honour, dictates that all guests must be treated to warm hospitality, no matter who they are. But the tribal belt can also be a tough place to keep a secret, which leads many to believe that Bin Laden has a powerful protector. "It seems that someone very important has given him refuge," said Yusufzai. "Someone we don't suspect and someone the Americans don't suspect. Someone with so much commitment that he would risk losing everything."
That may help explain why America's $25m bounty - advertised on Pakistani television and hawked on cheap State Department matchboxes bearing his picture - remains untouched. Assumptions that a sweaty-palmed Pashtun tribesman would trade his loyalty against a fistful of dollars have proved fantastically misplaced. "Everyone thought they were feckless, that they would sell him for the money. It hasn't happened," laments a US official in Pakistan. "These people are direct and forthright. They can't be bought."
And they call Bin Laden their Robin Hood. According to a poll released last year, 51 per cent of Pakistanis, 60 per cent of Jordanians and 35 per cent of Indonesians support Bin Laden. They share his worldview not, as Bush claims, due to some irrational hatred of American elections and women who work, but because the Saudi has flamboyantly defied a superpower they see as a threat to their religion and way of life. "We underestimate Bin Laden's popularity," says Scheuer, arguably the intelligence agent who has followed Bin Laden most closely. "For better or worse, he stood with the Afghans for 25 years. And whether we like it or not, he's a hero. We're going to be awfully lucky to find a source willing to turn him over."
In the tribal belt that popularity has been nourished by a current of radicalism that swelled after 9/11. The provincial assembly is controlled by the MMA, a pro-Taliban coalition that has steadily attacked women's rights. Last week, the Pakistani government signed a peace deal with fundamentalist militants in Waziristan who publicly execute accused thieves and shut down music shops. Broiling hostility against America and the military president, General Pervez Musharraf, has never been higher.
The Bin Laden we know was forged in the hot fire of frontier radicalism. He arrived in Peshawar in the early 1980s, one of thousands of Arab idealists drawn by the jihad against the godless Soviets who had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Armed with nothing but his tycoon father's bank account, he set up an office in the well-heeled University Town neighbourhood under the mentorship of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian academic who had once lectured him in Jeddah. Azzam later died in a bomb blast that some blame on an ambitious Bin Laden. However, other allies from that period have proven more enduring. Intelligence officials believe that Bin Laden is supported by the forces of Younis Khalis and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, two of the seven mujahideen leaders whom the CIA and Saudi intelligence used to arm during the 1980s jihad.
Kunar, where Hekmatyar's men roam large, had the strongest Arab presence during the 1980s jihad. Not coincidentally, it is currently the province with the greatest concentration of American troops in Afghanistan, and some of the highest casualty rates. Some believe that Bin Laden is hiding there.
The other wild card in the Bin Laden puzzle is Pakistan. Cynics accuse the country's powerful ISI intelligence agency of, at best, not looking very hard for him and, at worst, helping him out, a notion that Pakistan angrily rejects. Officials point to the 600 al-Qaida suspects they have killed or detained, including the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, now being transferred to Guantánamo Bay for trial. "They are on the run," Musharraf told me during an interview at his office last April. "Wherever we locate them, we hit them." Intelligence cooperation with America is close. When an American Predator drone fired missiles at a mud-walled house in Bajaur last year - thinking, mistakenly, that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's deputy, was inside - Musharraf protested loudly. In fact, he had approved of the strike in advance. "For domestic reasons, we had to say we knew nothing," admitted a senior aide.
But after five years of searching, with the trail still cold, the recriminations have started. The US, frustrated at the limitations of its electronic surveillance, wants to develop more "human intelligence" - essentially, local tribesmen it can pay for information. "The outer shells [of his security] are more attenuated. They are the ones that can be turned," says one US official in Islamabad. But Pakistan's ISI refuses permission to roam the tribal areas, saying that it is too dangerous for any white man, much less an American. Tensions are rising. "We give Musharraf $300m a year in military aid alone," says the official. "People will start saying, 'What the hell are we getting for this? What are the results?'"
Americans also admit that they have themselves to blame. Infighting is one problem. The CIA recently shut down the specialised Bin Laden unit due to bureaucratic wrangling, Scheuer recently disclosed. The US official blames President Bush for employing the shoot-'em-up tactics that have alienated Muslim opinion in places where the US needed help the most. "It should have been presented as a search for justice using intelligence and law enforcement. If we kept it in that ideological space, simply asking Muslims for help in tracking down a criminal, we would have made headway," he says. "Instead, we regarded it as a war we could fight through the military with heavy and blunt instruments that were telegraphed for hundreds of miles."
The other pressure is Iraq. As with the army, many intelligence assets have been transferred from Afghanistan to the Middle East, Scheuer says. "What is left is now engaged almost fully in trying to prevent the fall of Hamid Karzai's government, not looking for Osama bin Laden," he says.
It may already be too late. Bin Laden has evolved into more of a symbol than an operator, some argue. Maulana Muhammad Alam, a radical preacher in the Dir valley, 80 miles above Peshawar, says: "Osama is not the name of an individual; it's a movement ... Osama is the right of every individual to fight and defend Islam." And anyway, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, is the true brains of the outfit. Scheuer disagrees. "This business that he's the puppet and Zawahiri is the string-puller is completely wrong. Bin Laden is dangerous because he is talented. He is a genuinely historic personality."
But capture, even if possible, would also bring problems. If it happened in Pakistan, Musharraf would face colossal public protest. In the US, they would face the prospect of the world's most potent media manipulator in a New York courtroom, on CNN, for possibly three years. "You only have to look at the trial of Saddam to see how that can go wrong," says one diplomat. In that case, the only solution is assassination, even at the risk of creating a martyr - perhaps the only thing that Bin Laden himself agrees with. In speeches, he repeatedly stresses that his own survival - a "slave of Allah" - is unimportant. One rumour has it that his bed is surrounded by landmines hooked up to a trigger.
In the meantime, we await the next tape or the next attack. A video message last weekend by Adam Yehiye Gadahn, a 28-year-old American al-Qaida convert urging US soldiers to embrace Islam, passed off largely unnoticed. But it could have an ominous significance. After 9/11, Islamic scholars criticised Bin Laden for failing to follow a Qur'an teaching that enemies should be offered a chance to convert before an attack. Now that obligation has been fulfilled, says Scheuer.
"The tape was directed at Muslims to show that [al-Qaida] has gone the extra mile to get us off the hook," he says. "It's a mug's game to guess when, but I wouldn't be surprised to see another attack in the United States before the end of this year"
Then again, who really knows? One man does. He is sitting in a concealed room, ringed by cagey men ready to die, sipping from a flask of green tea, thinking and plotting. He knows. But he's not saying - at least for now.

9/11 aftermath

How sympathy soured

Gerard Baker

The Times 6 Sept 2006

Support for America after 9/11 swiftly turned to anger at its foreign policy. Today the superpower is chastened - but we must hope that it will not stop trying to remake the world

A couple of days after 9/11 I happened to be in London, stranded on my way back to Washington from a spectacularly ill-timed trip to Asia. As I walked from my hotel that morning, still struggling, like everyone, to take in the full dimensions of what had happened, I noticed a blizzard of posters.
On almost every street lamp and available piece of wall were hastily printed sheets of A4 paper, bearing in bold lettering a simple request: “Please observe three minutes’ silence at 12 noon today in memory of those who lost their lives in the awful events in New York and Washington on Tuesday.”

I have no idea to this day who had posted the flyers — hundreds of them, all along the South Bank. To a cynic, I suppose, it might have been a devilishly clever ploy by the CIA to build support quickly for the US in world opinion. Or perhaps it was some desolate band of American tourists or City workers seeking to elicit sympathy from friendly hosts. But it looked much more like the simple, hurried work of ordinary Londoners, spontaneous and genuine.
That someone should go to the trouble of typing such a plea, printing all those flyers, then walking through Central London sticking them to lampposts and walls, struck me then as a remarkable gesture of human empathy, as poignant and profound in its way as Le Monde’s “We are all Americans now” headline or Buckingham Palace’s decision to have the band of the Household Cavalry play The Star-Spangled Banner.
Indeed, the flimsy bills were actually more heart-rending than those more famous expressions of condolence. This was not the work of a newspaper editor with an eye to posterity or some government official with a felicitous PR touch, but the ingenuous response of a distressed citizen to the unimaginable heartbreak that had unfolded over the previous 48 hours.
The intense little gesture captured, in fact, the mood in most of Britain, Europe and what we like to call the civilised world that September day five years ago.
For all its geopolitical ramifications, 9/11 evoked principally, at the time, the rawest of emotions at a fellow human’s plight. What eyes didn’t weep at the sight of those wretched figures leaping to their deaths? What stomach didn’t churn at the thought of those helpless pilots as their throats were slit in their cabins? What heart didn’t lift a little at the story of the desperate passengers on United Flight 93, fighting back against the monstrous aliens violently wresting control of their doomed lives?
The rest of the world has always had a complex set of attitudes towards America — a mixture of envy, admiration, disdain, gratitude, exasperation, hope and, sometimes, fear. But that day, that week, America evoked only the sort of strenuous affection that causes a complete stranger to go out and stick bills on lampposts.
But that instantaneous solidarity with a stricken superpower was not, as it turned out, anything like a good predictor of the history that would unfold over the next half a decade.
As it prepares to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks, America stands reviled in the world as never before. It is a remarkable turnabout. In the same amount of time that elapsed between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the Treaty of Versailles, in as many months as passed between Germany’s invasion of Poland and D-Day, the US has gone from innocent victim of unimaginable villainy to principal perpetrator of global suffering.
So complete has been this transformation in global sentiment that it is inconceivable now, should America be attacked again, today, that the tragedy would elicit the same response. There would be horror and sympathy in good measure, certainly, from most decent people. But there would also be much Schadenfreude, and even from the sympathetic a grim, unsmiling sense that America had reaped what it had sown.
The facts — the historical events — that have brought about this changed perception of America are not in dispute. They can be tracked chronologically, almost from the moment the twin towers came down.
Sympathy for a grieving America translated quickly into general support for the US war against the Taleban. But within a few weeks that support began to drain, as civilian casualties mounted and some questioned whether the US was doing enough to address the “root causes” of terrorism, in particular the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Then, in the view of most of the world, the US took a terrible detour: from the high road of regime change against the perpetrators and enablers of 9/11, the US descended into the thickets of Guantanamo, the “axis of evil”, pre-emptive war without UN authorisation, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib and the quagmire of Baghdad today.
The US and its dwindling ranks of supporters elsewhere, led by Tony Blair in Britain, argued that 9/11 required a change in the way that America reacted with the world. The threat of Islamist terrorism, conducted by suicide bombers whose goals were nothing less than the destruction of the West and the return of the Caliphate, required something radically new. Armed potentially with weapons that could kill millions, these death-glorifying terrorists presented a wholly different challenge from the threat of the Cold War, and therefore required a much more assertive approach to the international system, led by the US.
But this argument failed to persuade much of world opinion, especially when Iraq, designated the most immediate threat, turned out to have been something of a paper tiger. Instead, the rest of the world simply saw an arrogant bully blundering into the Middle East and stoking the fire under the very terrorism that it had pledged to extinguish.
For some time after September 11, many US critics distinguished between anti-Bush and anti-American sentiment. It was possible to argue that US actions after 9/11 did not reflect any deep national shift in strategic direction but were simply the result of decisions made by an unrepresentative leadership which had, some insisted, “stolen” the election in 2000. There had always been a hard-core right wing in America that distrusted the UN and believed in the aggressive assertion of US power. Given that foreign policy had played virtually no role in the 2000 election, and given how close it had been, perhaps the post-9/11 America would prove to be just a transient moment.
But after President Bush’s narrow but decisive election triumph in November 2004 that became less plausible. Americans had been given a chance to pass judgment on their leadership in the early years of the post-9/11 world. In John Kerry they had been presented with a candidate who explicitly articulated the critique of the rest of the world (He spoke French! He was clever! He liked the UN!) After 2004, confronted with the reality that President Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld really were the representative leaders of America, the rest of the world formed an alternative impression of the US — that 9/11 had, in fact, induced a dramatic change in the psychology of the nation. A nation that had not been attacked on its own soil in 60 years had overreacted and, through a combination of government lies and a complaisant media, had turned its back on co-operation with the world.

Conspiracy theories became even more popular. The US or its ally, Israel, was behind the 9/11 attacks precisely so that America could strike at its enemies in a broader clash of civilisations and battle for control of Middle Eastern oil resources. Even saner types who did not believe such fantasies still think that the US is a bigger danger to world peace than almost any other country in the world.

Far from driving us together in the face of a common threat, the events of September 11 have ripped the West apart. Now, the world’s distrust of and disdain for America borders on pathology. It doesn’t stop at opposition to US policies but seeks deeper explanations for American behaviour in society, economics and culture.
America is a country of religious zealots, it is said, typified by its president-zealot; a selfish and hypocritical people despoiling the planet even as they exalt their nationhood in their mega-churches. Its impact on the world is denounced not just for what its military does but for what its companies and workers do, from Exxon Mobil to McDonald’s.
When Rupert Everett described Starbucks as a “cancer” last month in a campaign to stop the coffee chain from opening a shop in his London neighbourhood, it seemed to reflect not just a rebellion against the vast anonymity of globalisation but a rejection of everything for which America is despised.
But global warming, religious observance, McDonald’s and even Starbucks were features of the US long before 9/11. In the end, deep as the cultural differences between Europe and America are, there is little doubt that it is the policies — the military and diplomatic stance of the US in the past five years — that have caused the rest of the world to turn away from its traditional ally.
If the 2004 election seemed to confirm that the world is ill at ease with America, it has since become clear that Americans themselves appear to be profoundly ill at ease with their country. The setbacks in Iraq in the past two years, compounded by the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the Government’s inadequate response to it, have cast a pall over Americans’ self-image.
Immediately after 9/11, more than 80 per cent of Americans told pollsters that they believed their country was on the right track. As US forces fought their way to Kabul, the figure was above 70 per cent. In the early days of the Iraq War, even after some setbacks, it was more than 60 per cent.
Five years later, though, it is not just Europeans or British who think that the US is misguided. Since last summer the proportion of Americans who believe that their country is on the right track has been about 25 per cent. More than 60 per cent say that the US is heading in the wrong direction. Majorities now believe that the war in Iraq was a mistake and that US policy has made the world less safe. President Bush’s approval rating among Americans is now below 40 per cent. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld score in the twenties.
As the nation’s mood has soured, Americans’ willingness to follow their administration’s leadership in other aspects of policy has dissipated. Senators, including most Republicans, late last year voted overwhelmingly to force the Bush Administration formally to forswear torture as a tool of US detention techniques. The courts have upheld the rights of detainees at Guantanamo to proper legal procedures. A jury in Virginia even declined to award the death penalty to Zaccarias Moussaoui, one of the most notorious terrorists in the US. In short, it seems to some that Americans are converging once again with the rest of the West’s views on how to handle the War on Terror and international relations in general.
It is doubtful that Americans will stop going to church any time soon, or develop an aversion to Starbucks and McDonald’s. But is it possible that the America that has so scared the world these past five years is unravelling? Will the last half-decade turn out to be some awful nightmare from which America and the world are about to wake? To some extent — and barely noticed in much of the world — there is already a chastened, more co-operative US.
Iran is the most notable example. Under Condoleezza Rice’s State Department’s leadership, the US has agreed to go along with the European Union’s softly-softly approach to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Some have even pronounced the death of the “Bush doctrine”. Philip Gordon, a former Clinton Administration official, wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs this month: “If the rhetoric of the Bush revolution lives on, the revolution itself is over. The question is not whether the President and most of his team still hold to the basic tenets of the Bush doctrine — they do — but whether they can sustain it. They cannot.”
But before the rest of the world starts pulling down metaphorical statues of President Bush and declaring the end of the tyranny, it should ponder what may come next in America’s relationship with the world. A chastened Bush team does not necessarily mean that America is ready to embrace the world again on the world’s terms. For one thing, there is a nasty strain of isolationism building in America at the moment. If you thought that ideological unilateralism was unpleasant, wait till you get a look at populist isolationism.
A growing number of Democrats, and even some Republicans, are now behind moves to get the US to pull out of Iraq — so far, so good, you might think. But many on the Left want to disengage America completely: “Bring the troops home,” is the cry, “and keep them there.” And on the Right, a new posse of “To Hell With Them” hawks seems to have decided that the US should abandon its ambitious plans to remake the world and stay home, rolling down the portcullis and venturing out only occasionally to whack recalcitrant regimes.
There is an ugly anti-foreigner mood in parts of the US political debate that smacks of the ruinous isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s. To see it in action, tune in to CNN any evening at 6pm New York time. There, on what used to be a news programme, the angry anchor Lou Dobbs lashes out at illegal immigrants, foreign companies destroying US jobs and US companies shipping their operations overseas. In an otherwise bleak broadcasting landscape for CNN, it is the only programme piling on viewers.
Earlier this year, Democrats led a campaign against the takeover of American ports from P&O by the Dubai Ports World Company, and they want to rewrite the rules of foreign investment in a way that would impair the ability of foreign companies, even those from friendly countries such as Britain, to buy American firms.
This is another part of the complex 9/11 legacy. The country remains fearful of further attacks, but having tried to remake the world, many Americans would now feel safer simply withdrawing from it. For all its appeal, this isolationism probably will not prevail. But it would also be wrong to assume that the Bush approach to foreign policy is dead. Political leaders on both the Right and the Left may be holding out against populist temptations, but there is little evidence that they are looking for a return to a pre-9/11 world of international harmony and co-operation.
If you look at who is likely to emerge in the next few years as Republican and Democrat contenders, you get a sense of how much the US was changed, permanently, by 9/11. The leading Republican candidates — Senator John McCain; former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; Mitt Romney, the Governor of Massachusetts; Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives — all share the view that the US must take a sharply different approach to the world than the one it took before 9/11.
All, to be sure, are very different characters from President Bush. McCain has a record of working with his political opponents to find compromise — he supports tough measures to combat carbon emissions, for example. Giuliani is an instinctive European-style liberal on social affairs such as abortion and gay marriage; Romney is much admired by the voters of Massachusetts, a place that makes Islington look like a haven for right-wing fundamentalists. But they all still favour an assertive US foreign policy, a break with pre-9/11 policies based on international co-operation.
Their style would surely be different from what we have seen in the past five years, but the thrust of their foreign policy — a readiness to upset allies and to defy international opinion, using American power in aggressive pursuit of its defence — would not change much.
Even the leading Democrats Hillary Clinton, former Senator John Edwards and former Virginia Governor Mark Warner tread carefully in the foreign-policy field. Edwards has recanted his support for the war in Iraq but is surrounded by foreign policy advisers who show no sign of shrinking from using US force. Clinton and Warner have declined even to acquiesce in growing Democratic pleas to renounce the war.
And for all the talk of a post-Bush America, no one is willing to commit the US to the kind of international rules beloved by Europeans.
In the Israel-Lebanon conflict, the US continued to show that it believes that its interests lie in confronting its enemies. The time may still come, under this President or the next, when it decides to confront Iran.
There is a reason for all this. Despite the woes in Iraq, despite the turmoil in the broader Middle East, despite the dismay at Guantanamo and the revulsion at Abu Ghraib, there is a wider acknowledgement that America is a changed place after 9/11, with changed priorities.
Before that fateful September day, America was a country that, having won the Cold War and thereby “ended history”, desired more than anything else to be left alone. It wanted neither the entanglements of foreign wars nor the constraints of international treaties on global warming or international criminal courts.
The biggest threat that America posed to the world before 9/11 was that it would shrink from the world. It says something about a superpower when the main threat it poses is a desire to get out of the way. It was not what we had to worry about from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
But 9/11 called a reluctant America from its torpor. To paraphrase Lenin, the world that day said to it: “You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.” It has spent the past five years trying, and perhaps in many ways failing, to remake the world. But the principal legacy of September 11 is that it will not stop trying.

UK Afghanistan Exit strategy?

Talk to Mullah Omar, if it saves British soldiers' lives

Hamid Karzai admits what our leaders can't: to achieve security in Afghanistan, he must do a deal with the Taliban

Simon Jenkins

Guardian September 6, 2006

This time there are no excuses. Every scrap of intelligence warned the government not to fight a war against insurgency in south Afghanistan. Ask the CIA, MI6, the former service chiefs Lord Inge and Lord Guthrie, and Nato allies who thought the then defence secretary, John Reid, was mad. Ask the Americans, who were losing more men than in Iraq and were wisely withdrawing. Read the reports published throughout 2004/5 that the Taliban were back in strength. These were veteran guerrillas, well armed, who could count on the tacit support of tens of thousands of tribal militias. What made Tony Blair think he could beat them with just 4,000 soldiers? The Soviets lost with 120,000.
This expedition ranks among the stupidest in recent British history - and there is serious competition. It was undertaken under the aegis of Nato, designed for a different purpose and notorious for incoherent decision. This meant British forces would not be masters of their fate but at the mercy of a caravanserai of some 36 nations in Kabul, most with no intention of getting hurt.
When I met the effervescent Lieutenant General David Richards, currently head of Nato operations, in June, I shared the view of all who visit British troops on the ground. I was impressed by their morale and technical competence. But such visits (which rarely stray off base) risk buying into the dangerous assumption that military competence can compensate for political folly. These British soldiers are not fighting "against terrorism" or dying "for democracy". They are dying because the Americans wanted out and George Robertson, the political head of Nato, craved a purpose in life. (The same Robertson, as defence secretary, protected the Eurofighter, aircraft carrier and Trident budgets at the expense of less glamorous kit now desperately needed in Helmand.)
What baffled me was Richards's naivete about the Taliban, on whom there was already a copious and alarming literature. He was full of "Malayan inkspot strategies", winning "hearts and minds" and not fighting the American way, such as bombing and strafing civilians. Richards said he had enough troops to do the job and was gung ho. I left his office in a daze. Was this how the British set off to the Dardenelles?
None of the objectives set by Reid in January was achievable. Commons bombast about gallant troops driving the "remnants of the Taliban ... into their last bastions", eradicating poppies and building schools, clinics and democracy, was drivel. So was Reid's talk of the "fundamental difference" between US counter-terrorism and British reconstruction. Semantics about rules of engagement and "not firing a shot" was equally hollow; in Helmand the British are consuming ammunition faster than at any time since the second world war.
British ministers involved in this war are way beyond their pay grade. Asked by Lord Astor last year about the troop balance between Iraq and Afghanistan, the defence minister Lord Drayson (recreation: sword-fencing) replied dismissively: "My lords, I am sure that noble lords will want to join me in congratulating the noble lord on his birthday." The aid minister, Hilary Benn, denies that British troops are waging war, "but supporting a process of reconstruction". Kim Howells of the Foreign Office wants to "defeat the drugs trade" and plans to waste £270m doing so. Armchair generals are bad enough, but armchair ministers are a menace.
Within three months of their full deployment, British troops have reportedly had to abandon the "platoon house" strategy of securing bases in isolated towns and villages. They were being pulverised by Taliban mortars. The publicity attached to the Nimrod disaster at the weekend was excessive. Any plane can crash. Death tallies, on both sides, are merely a sign of failure. To have to kill 200 young Afghans to secure a village for a day indicates that hearts-and-minds is not working. This is classic Vietnam syndrome, the military fantasy that war is a setpiece battle against a finite enemy (in this case "1,000 terrorists"). It implies that when 1,000 are dead, you have won.
The Afghans beat the Soviets in the 1980s by generating exactly the spirit of nationalist insurgency now fuelled by the brutality of the Nato occupation, especially its casual use of air power. When the Taliban seized control in 1994, they offered the country a sort of order, and even prosperity, based on opium. There is no doubt that they will return, at least to the south. Kabul cannot stop them. Nato certainly cannot. For Blair and Reid, architects of the current deployment, to lump the Taliban in with al-Qaida, 9/11 and the Sunnis in Iraq is an invitation to false strategy. British troops in their £1bn camp in Helmand are as trapped politically as they are militarily. The government is in denial.
Finding a way out of this morass is near impossible. British policy is in hock to Blair's Nato machismo, and early withdrawal is hard to imagine. Since British troops cannot conceivably "defeat" the Taliban, sending reinforcements will merely add to the latter's target list. The present retreat from hearts-and-minds to search-and-destroy may be important for troop morale, but it is the same failed policy adopted by the Americans in Iraq's Sunni triangle. And the Taliban make Iraqis look amateur. They fight as units, are better equipped and have rich allies over every border.
Karzai, besieged in Kabul, knows one thing. He must do a deal with the Taliban as he has with the northern and western warlords. His spring appointment of gangsters and drug-runners as police chiefs and commanders may have appalled his foreign paymasters. But Karzai has only one way to survive outside his capital: buying support from those who can repay with security. In the south that is commanders in league with the Taliban, even if it means Mullah Omar returning to Kandahar. The British could then argue that they have roughly honoured the pledge to achieve security. Either way there is no alternative to negotiation.
This is not a war that can be won on the battlefield. A prolonged campaign of attrition, as proposed by Des Browne, Reid's successor, would demand a terrible cost in lives and money. The Taliban can fight for ever. It is no good politicians in London shouting: "We cannot afford to fail in Afghanistan." Such chest-beating at the expense of other people's lives should be actionable. Blair and his colleagues have willed on the army a war they knew it cannot win. The least they owe it is an exit strategy.