The LA Times had an article on the front page yesterday highlighting a key 9/11 Commission conclusion: al Queda and Osama bin Laden enjoyed support from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia helped set the stage for the Sept. 11 attacks by cutting deals with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden that allowed his Al Qaeda terrorist network to flourish, according to several senior members of the Sept. 11 commission and U.S. counter-terrorism officials.
The financial aid to the Taliban and other assistance by two of the most important allies of the United States in its war on terrorism date at least to 1996, and appear to have shielded them from Al Qaeda attacks within their own borders until long after the 2001 strikes, those commission members and officials said in interviews.
“That does appear to have been the arrangement,” said one senior member of the commission staff involved in investigating those relationships.
The officials said that by not cracking down on Bin Laden, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia significantly undermined efforts to combat terrorism worldwide, giving the Saudi exile the haven he needed to train tens of thousands of soldiers. They believe that the governments’ funding of his Taliban protectors enabled Bin Laden to withstand international pressure and expand his operation into a global network that could carry out the Sept. 11 attacks.
Saudi Arabia provided funds and equipment to the Taliban and probably directly to Bin Laden, and didn’t interfere with Al Qaeda’s efforts to raise money, recruit and train operatives, and establish cells throughout the kingdom, commission and U.S. officials said. Pakistan provided even more direct assistance, its military and intelligence agencies often coordinating efforts with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, they said.
Kevin Drum, among others, saw this article and thought it fell comfortably in the painfully-obvious category of news.
I feel like I’ve been living under a rock for the past two years. Is this really news? I mean, I know that the Pakistani and Saudi Arabian governments has long issued pro forma denials of collusion with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but this article acts as though everyone has believed these denials up until now.
I hardly ever disagree with the artist formerly known as Calpundit, but this is one of those times.
Yes, Kevin’s right that this isn’t exactly a new breakthrough, but for me, part of this story’s significance is about contextual timing. The Bush White House continues to insist, to the point of nausea, that there were links between al Queda and Saddam Hussein. It’s generated a fairly useless semantic debate over the meaning of the word “connections.”
The LA Times report, meanwhile, raises a different issue that makes the Iraq debate seem even more ridiculous: if we’re looking for countries that cooperated with bin Laden, here are two countries that literally offered him aid, instead of ignoring his calls for cooperation.
As Salon’s Geraldine Sealey put it, “What’s important to understand here… is that commission members are saying other countries had much more active, productive contacts with al-Qaida than Iraq — surely not one of the White House talking points.”
Moreover, the LA Times report seemed odd when contrasted with Cheney’s frequent references to the alleged “Bush doctrine.”
“In what will surely rank as one of the most important strategic shifts in our nation’s history, the President declared that we would take the war to the enemy. And he established the Bush doctrine, which holds that any person or regime that harbors or supports terrorists is equally guilty of terrorist crimes and will be held to account.”
This rhetoric seems a little silly at this point, doesn’t it? If this administration’s guiding principle is the belief that we will make no distinction between terrorists and countries that help terrorists, shouldn’t we be calling for a new round of “regime change” in these countries we know were helping al Queda up until 9/11? What, pray tell, does Cheney propose we do to hold Saudi Arabia and Pakistan “to account” for their “support” of bin Laden?
In fact, I’m reminded of Tom DeLay’s multi-tiered standards for invading another country, laid out several months before the war in Iraq began. As DeLay saw it, military action is justified when, among other things, a country sponsors terror, has WMD, has threatened Israel, persecutes religious and ethnic minorities, and thwarts democracy. By these standards, pre-emptive attacks on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan may have even been more reasonable than invading Iraq.
On the other hand, an election is coming up and I don’t want to give the White House any bright ideas — unnecessary wars seem to give Bush temporary boosts in the polls and Karl Rove might be desperate at this point.