Do you have any worries about the war situation at all?
Well, look, in a situation where you have a country that had already suffered so much destruction, that was already decimated by the Taliban, there's always the danger of a further collapse. There's very little central government, the current head of state, Hamid Karzai, is about to address the U.N. and he could find himself less than welcome when he returns. That's not uncommon in places like Afghanistan. That said, given the commitment of the U.S. and the rest of the world, given the global response that this president's gotten has been profound -- it's less likely that you'll have a catastrophic outcome.
And I say that with some degree of experience. I mean, not with any hubris in all this, my real job, not withstanding all the controversy, my real job from 1983 to '86 was being the U.S. government's counterterrorism coordinator. I worked for a great president, but we didn't dream of getting the kind of cooperation this president's gotten. We couldn't get the dad-gum French to help when we were responding to Gadhafi's attacks. We couldn't fly over their airspace; we had to fly all the way around Gibraltar and two F-111 pilots died because of that. This president has been able to forge an extraordinary international consensus on this war. No matter how you feel about him you have to acknowledge that.
I do. I was impressed by the coalition he put together, and, honestly, I've been pretty surprised by his able handling of the war. Pleasantly surprised. I'm not one of those Bush haters who can't stand to see him succeed even in this.
Like Robert Altman.
No, I'm happy to live in this country. But one thing I'd press you on: Your old mentor, (Reagan CIA director) Bill Casey, was a big sponsor of the way we armed the mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Soviets, and there are many people who say we created the early success of Osama bin Laden, and then we walked out and left the country destroyed.
Well, let me agree with the last part -- we walked out, and we shouldn't have -- and disagree with the first. There's a lot of misinformation, some of it spread by bin Laden himself. We never gave bin Laden a single dollar, a single bullet. Most of his money came from rich Saudis and the Pakistani intelligence service, and eventually the charities he created. But he was not a recipient of U.S. assistance during the mujahedin uprising against the Soviets. He's seen to it that the credible resistance leaders that we did help are all dead. [Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah] Massoud is dead, murdered by al-Qaida suicide operatives, [Alliance leader Abdul] Haq was murdered trying to make his way back in from Iran. So if you look at the actual record of U.S. involvement, the mistake was not in arming the mujahedin, it was that Afghanistan was no longer on our scope from the mid-'90s on.
It wasn't the mid-'90s on. The neglect started earlier than that.
The Soviet withdrawal was 1989-'90. The U.S. stayed the No. 1 donor country after that, for years. It's still the No. 1 donor country through the NGOs and the U.N. What we didn't do in the 1990s was to elicit the kind of global support to keep Afghanistan from falling into the hands of the Taliban. Remember, the Taliban didn't come into power until 1995, and people want to blame Ronald Reagan and George Bush, well, Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer's, and George Bush was out of office. The guy who let that happen was Bill Clinton. His response was to throw Tomahawk missiles at it, which was totally inadequate. What should have been done was what's happening now, with real leadership, to say to the world: Something's gotta be done about what's going on there.
Well, to be fair, Salon covered the 2000 presidential race quite extensively, and I didn't hear George Bush making a big deal about the Taliban, Afghanistan or Osama bin Laden. Neither candidate made a big deal out of our vulnerability to terrorism, or the devastation of Afghanistan.
I happen to know a bit about how candidates are briefed on national security issues, because the National Security Council is in charge of that, and I was there for the 1984 campaign. There are briefings that are incredibly detailed for presidential candidates, gathered up from CIA, State Department, all the government agencies, so they know the issues. But our intelligence services were basically emasculated by 1995. Read Bob Baer's book on it.
"See No Evil" -- we reviewed it a couple of weeks ago.
He's right on the mark. He traces it back to the 1990s.
He traces it back earlier than that. I think this attempt to lay it all at the feet of Clinton is unfair. Earlier this month, Salon gave a cover story to Andrew Sullivan to lay out the case against Clinton, and clearly Clinton bears some of the blame. But nobody was talking about bin Laden when he first came into office, nobody knew the threat until 1998, and after that the response was pretty serious and muscular.
Dig a little bit in the files. Go back to 1995, 1996. Louis Freeh, now I am no Louis Freeh fan, but Freeh tried to get the state Department to deal with Khartoum. The government of Khartoum realized it had gone too far, it had had enough of Osama bin Laden, and decided maybe it was time to get this guy out of there, and would the Americans like to have him. There was State Department paperwork on this, and it was rejected by (former Secretary of State) Maddie Albright.
This is basically the story the London Times laid out, and to some extent the Washington Post?
Right. That's not just [CIA director] George Tenet trying to keep his job, and Louis Freeh trying to keep his legacy. That's a true story. Now, Maddie Albright insists it didn't happen. But I happen to believe the FBI had reason to take the guy, the government in Khartoum had reason to give the guy and Albright stopped it.
Albright personally stopped it?
Well, somewhere on the seventh floor, it got stopped. That's where the ultimate decisions get made. Albright is saying the State Department, broadly, didn't veto it. And that's 180 degrees away from what the FBI guys are saying.
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