I is for Infidel by Gannon Kathy;

Author:Gannon, Kathy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

Mullah Omar was given a choice: Hand over bin Laden and his al Qaeda network or be attacked. Pakistan, which until then had supported the Taliban wholeheartedly, was called upon by Washington to open talks with Mullah Omar to persuade him to hand over bin Laden.

General Mahmood Ahmed, the chief of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, led a group that also included some Muslim clerics. They went to Kandahar, supposedly to convince Mullah Omar to do the right thing.

The general was a religious zealot very much like Mullah Omar. He had been central to the military takeover of Pakistan in 1999 by General Pervez Musharraf. A hawk with pan-Islamic visions, he had been a staunch supporter of jihadis both from Pakistan and elsewhere. This was the man Musharraf sent to negotiate with Mullah Omar.

People present at the meeting and within the ISI revealed that Ahmed had a message for Mullah Omar quite different from the one that Washington had pressed his government to convey. He took the slow-talking Taliban leader aside and urged him to resist the United States. He told Mullah Omar not to give up bin Laden.

Ahmed traveled several times to Kandahar, and on each visit he gave Mullah Omar information about the likely next move by the United States. By then Ahmed knew there weren’t going to be a lot of U.S. soldiers on the ground. He warned Mullah Omar that the United States would be relying heavily on aerial bombardment and on the Northern Alliance.

Two weeks after the attacks on the United States, the immediate fear of a devastating retaliatory strike had passed and some within the Taliban had begun to think they could survive a U.S. assault. After all, one Taliban told me, they had survived the U.S. missile attack in 1998. Could this time be worse? He had no idea of the firepower the United States could bring to bear.

They had no concept of the magnitude of the events that had occurred in the United States. Neither Osama bin Laden nor Pakistan’s ISI chief explained to Mullah Omar the extent of the devastation that would be linked to his name and his movement.

Instead, bin Laden talked to Mullah Omar about the Hadiths (the sayings of the prophet). Bin Laden debated the Quran at length with Mullah Omar and brought up the words of Islam’s prophet that exhort the faithful to keep faith with fellow Muslims, to protect them against aggressors.

From Ahmed, Mullah Omar got military pointers. Mullah Omar didn’t know what targets the United States would hit. The Afghan military didn’t have any real command-and-control system; their antiaircraft defenses were guns on hilltops. Mullah Omar also didn’t know what weaponry would be available to the United States. He didn’t know anything of the ‘daisy cutters’ that could supposedly reach deep into caves and destroy everything inside. He couldn’t even conceive of a sophisticated fighter jet. Mullah Omar’s only experience with U.S. firepower had been the Tomahawk cruise missiles attack of 1998, which had done very little damage.

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