One week after the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam were bombed on 7 August 1998, with the loss of 260 lives, the US reacted by launching missile attacks against three camps in Afghanistan alleged to be training terrorists loyal to Osama bin Ladin and his Al Qa'ida [The Base] network of operatives. Meanwhile, the international dragnet was closing in on the Saudi-born renegade, hiding out in Kandahar, the Taliban capital.
The US kept up the pressure on Kandahar to yield up Osama bin Ladin, as much out of respect for consistency as for any great wealth of evidence. On 4 November 1998, the Manhattan Federal Court issued a sealed indictment -- the usual procedure for a fugitive from justice -- chronicling 238 separate charges against the Saudi, from participating in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing and funding Islamist groups in New Jersey to conspiring with Sudan, Iran and Iraq to attack US installations. Informed sources said the indictment contained little hard evidential detail on bin Ladin's involvement in the East African bombings of August 1998, for which he denied responsibility while still condoning the actions of the 'real' perpetrators.
In a press conference around the same time, at a tent in the desert near Kandahar, he was his usual equivocal self in responding to queries as to whether he had acquired yet more terrifying weapons in the struggle to 'liberate' Saudi Arabia from US occupation. "We don't consider it a crime if we have tried to have nuclear, chemical or biological weapons," he opined sniffily, adding "we have a right to defend ourselves and to liberate our holy land." This was three months after the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, banned him from media comment and two months after the Manhattan indictment, much of which was based upon the confession of former tyre store manager, Wadi Hage, a friend of the chief suspect in the Nairobi conflagration. Bin Ladin admitted to knowing his accuser, though he claimed they had not met in years.
Four days after the indictment was issued, the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Reward Programme dangled a US$5 million bounty for information leading to the arrest of bin Ladin and 'another man', each of which was more than double the previous reward ceiling. "It might tempt some of these groups to deliver him," observed a percipient US official, "they are very poor people." The other man, bin Ladin's evident equal in the hit parade of terror, was Sheikh Taysir Abdullah, a former Egyptian police officer who had been the Saudi's right-hand man since 1983. The CIA insisted that Sheikh Abdullah was the real engineer of the Nairobi bombing, a charge which the Egyptian rejected. Bin Ladin took a very different view of the cupidity of his nearest companions: "I did not even change one of my bodyguard as a result," he said. "None of the 'Arab Afghans' are so cheap as to be bought by the Americans."
If bin Ladin sounded relaxed at this point, the strain was definitely telling on the Taliban. Karl Inderfurth, the US assistant secretary of state for South Asia, had let it be known that there was no alterative: give up bin Ladin or face further bombardment. The day after Washington posted its reward, on 9 November, Mullah Mohammed Omar approved the creation of a judicial enquiry to examine western allegations against bin Ladin according to the principles of sharia, fixing a deadline of 20 November for the submission of evidence implicating the man in acts of terrorism.
There was no public response from Washington, which was in no mood to have its own exhaustive enquiries, however flawed, dismissed by a cabinet of illiterate and compliant mullahs. The Emir was bound to protect the defendant by ties of friendship, the laws of Pashtun hospitality and the Taliban's still vague sense of solidarity with the Islamist crusade to liberate the holy places in Mecca and Medina. But the one-eyed Mullah was also of the view that the surrender of bin Ladin would lead quickly to reconciliation with the US, a fast track to recognition, the return of the UN and an avalanche of donor investment. If so assured, Omar's next moves were either deeply confused, or suicidally honourable.
In US eyes, the case against bin Ladin was rock solid. Some 80 alleged confederates had been picked up from as far apart as Malaysia and Montevideo, and Washington claimed that bin Ladin's Al-Qa'ida network had penetrated 25 countries, including the US. Efforts to freeze bin Ladin's fortune -- officially revised downwards from several billion to a more manageable US$250 million -- had come to nothing: the funds were disguised behind scores of front companies, while transfers were affected by unknown intermediaries, briefed by satellite phone -- in true Afghan style.
But a backlash was gathering against Washington's theory of a global Islamist conspiracy. Former CIA official, Milton Bearden, with more than a passing knowledge of the anti-Soviet jihad to his credit, warned that the Clinton administration was turning the Saudi renegade into a 'North star' for the entire Muslim world. In Kandahar, a different story was rehearsed about the wealth of its permanent guest. Bin Ladin was impoverished and living on remittances from an elder brother; he was no longer able to fulfill his promise to build in the Taliban's spiritual capital the second largest mosque in the world.
To visiting journalists, bin Ladin played the family card. He passed the day, he said, playing football, riding horses deep into the desert, or with his three wives and many children.
On 11 November, Chief Justice Noor Mohammed Saqib, the judge in the Taliban enquiry into bin Ladin's activities, said: "America is looking for an excuse to fire more rockets at our dear Afghanistan and that excuse is bin Ladin." If the comment gave an inkling of the state of heightened expectancy in Kandahar, it also underlined the one sure outcome if the court decided to acquit. One day later, the Taliban leader flirted with that prospect when he ruled that the Manhattan indictment, with its 238 charges, was inadmissable evidence, because it was "old material which was not convincing enough", effectively pre-empting the court's decision. On 30 November, Saqib officially closed the case against bin Ladin for lack of evidence, declaring him "a man without sin". Mohammed Omar's attempt to solve his bin Ladin problem had proved to be a game of legal and political solitaire.
On 13 February 1999, bin Ladin vanished. "He left his residence in Kandahar some days ago without telling where he was going," the one-eyed Mullah related. "We think he is hiding somewhere, perhaps inside Afghan territory." The Taliban had confiscated his satellite phone some days earlier, stripping him of any further room for financial or defensive manoeuvre. But other motives behind his evasion emerged as speculation and rumour fused to produce a riddle at once mythic and disingenuous. There had been a shoot-out in February between bin Ladin's bodyguard and the Taliban squad assigned to restrain him. The Emir had snubbed his old comrade at the feast of Eid-il-Fitr. "Bin Ladin was made to wait for two hours outside and, when they met, [Mullah Mohammed Omar] was very cold. Bin Ladin understood that he was not wanted any more."
But what other havens were accessible? The Taliban's sole diplomatic coup in the preceding months had been a promise of recognition by the breakaway republic of Chechnya, although notables from the Yemen paid court to the fugitive in late November to "discuss further anti-US operations". Some appropriate asylum might be arranged in either location, but each required a dangerous transit across exposed terrain, as did other mooted bolt-holes in Iraq and Somalia. In the third week of February, the absconder was variously reported to have crossed the Iranian border; to be in Kunduz or Baghlan; in Jalalbad, where he needed access for his kidney complaint; or about to join forces with Saddam Hussein, a prospect that sent a delicious -- but improbable -- shiver down the spine of a suggestible western press. The two men, after all, were the fangs of hugely different snakes.
Several witnesses -- most notably the Emir's secretary, Mullah Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil -- claimed in garrulous moments that the Saudi had left Kandahar by night in a convoy of 20 Land Cruisers, accompanied by his teenage sons, Ali and Abdallah; his military commander Sheikh Tayseer Abdullah; Ayman al-Zawahiri, head of Egypt's Jihad movement; the sons of the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who allegedly inspired the World Trade Centre bombing; 10 Taliban guards; and his security cordon of loyal Arab Afghans, armed with Stingers to ward off pursuit by helicopter. The last was old drug smugglers' trick.
Swathed in road dust and a halo of satellites and stars, the party headed north to a derelict mujahedin base in the Sheikh Hazrat mountains, 50km from Kandahar. By such Pimpernel tactics -- and in such august company -- bin Ladin dissolved into an Islamist mirror image of the Arthurian legend of the wounded king, ready to arise with his sons and comrades where the call to battle once again resounded.
A rigorous radio silence was imposed as the convoy slunk away between the sands.
Also by Michael Griffin:
Mission to cleanse?
Reaping the whirlwind: The Taliban movement in Afghanistan by Michael Griffin is published by Pluto Press (www.plutobooks.com/).
