However, the left's outrage over the factual inaccuracies in the docudrama cannot obscure the historical record of Clinton's shortsighted, and failed, bin Laden policy.
John Podhoretz says in today's NY Post that "Clinton never took bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States and the West seriously enough."
Precisely. The Clinton strategy of capturing or killing bin Laden reflected a lack of understanding of the gathering threat posed to the United States by the al Qaeda/Taliban axis. As an intelligence aide to Ahmed Shah Massoud told Steve Coll, the Clinton policy was like "a game of chess [that] would capture the king without touching any other piece on the board."
Massoud also told the CIA delegation that U.S. policy toward bin Laden and Afghanistan was doomed to fail. The Americans directed all of their efforts against bin Laden and a handful of his senior aides, but they failed to see the larger context in which al Qaeda thrived. What about the Taliban? What about the Taliban's supporters in Pakistani intelligence? What about its financiers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?
"Even if we succeed in what you are asking for," Massoud told the CIA delegation, his aide and interpreter Abdullah recalled, "that will not solve the bigger problem that is growing."
The CIA officers told Massoud they agreed with his critique, but they had their orders. The U.S. government rejected a military confrontation with the Taliban or direct support for any armed factions in the broader Afghan war. Instead, U.S. policy focused on capturing bin Laden and his lieutenants for criminal trial or killing them in the course of an arrest attempt. If Massoud helped with this narrow mission, the CIA officers argued, perhaps it would lead to wider political support or development aid in the future.
"What was irritating was that in this whole tragedy, in this whole chaotic situation," recalled one of Massoud's intelligence aides who worked closely with the CIA during this period, "they were talking about this very small piece of it: bin Laden. And if you were on our side, it would have been very difficult for you to accept that this was the problem. For us it was an element of the problem but not the problem."
Unlike Clinton, Bush saw that covertly shaping the battlefield in Afghanistan, by insuring the victory of Ahmed Shah's Northern Alliance over the Taliban and bin Laden, was a matter of national security.
Members of the Bush Cabinet met at the White House on Sept. 4. Before them was a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive, a classified memo outlining a new U.S. policy toward al Qaeda, Afghanistan and Massoud.
It had been many months in the drafting. The Bush administration's senior national security team had not begun to focus on al Qaeda until April, about three months after taking office. They did not forge a policy approach until July. Then they took still more weeks to schedule a meeting to ratify their plans.
Among other things, the draft document revived almost in its entirety the CIA plan to aid Massoud that had been forwarded to the lame-duck Clinton White House -- and rejected -- nine months earlier. The stated goal of the draft was to eliminate bin Laden and his organization. The plan called for the CIA to supply Massoud with a large but undetermined sum for covert action to support his war against the Taliban, as well as trucks, uniforms, ammunition, mortars, helicopters and other equipment. The Bush Cabinet approved this part of the draft document.
Other aspects of the Bush administration's al Qaeda policy, such as its approach to the use of armed Predator surveillance drones for the hunt, remained unresolved after the Sept. 4 debate. But on Massoud, the CIA was told that it could at least start the paperwork for a new covert policy -- the first in a decade that sought to influence the course of the Afghan war.
On September 9, 2001, Ahmed Shah was killed by two suicide-bombers posing as journalists who were sent by bin Laden because if, as Steve Coll notes, "the 9/11 plot did not succeed, he knew that he would be at war in Afghanistan, and that Massoud was by far the most formidable tactician that he faced."
Clinton had years to give Massoud the help he needed to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda but didn't because not only did he not take bin Laden seriously enough he also didn't take Ahmed Shah Massoud seriously enough.
