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Episode: S4 Episode 5 - "We Can Live With That"

Author: Blowback
Duration: 01:03:44

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The warlord years, and the rise of the Taliban.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Full Transcript

00:00:08 Speaker_02
In February 1997, as scientists announced the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep and UN sanctions drove Iraq to the brink of collapse, someone in the State Department boiled a pot of tea for a certain foreign delegation.

00:00:26 Speaker_02
Washington's guests that day were representatives from the Taliban, the new Islamic rulers of Afghanistan.

00:00:35 Speaker_02
The Taliban envoys were in town to discuss a promising and mutually beneficial plan for building a pipeline through their country, courtesy of the California petroleum giant, Unocal.

00:00:48 Speaker_12
Though the meeting with State went fine, this was a delicate situation.

00:00:53 Speaker_12
Women's rights groups had been protesting the liberal Clinton administration's rather cordial relations with the Taliban, whose government, after all, had eradicated most traces of political, civil, and social rights for women and imposed one of the most draconian patriarchies on the planet.

00:01:10 Speaker_02
Shortly after the meeting, a pack of journalists challenged a senior U.S. diplomat who explained the U.S. position on the Taliban. Quote, The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did.

00:01:25 Speaker_02
There will be pipelines, an emir, no parliament, and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.

00:01:35 Speaker_25
I can live with that. I can live with that. I can live with that. Yeah, I can live with that. I can live with that. I can live with that. I can live with that.

00:01:44 Speaker_08
I can live with that. I can live with that.

00:02:00 Speaker_02
Welcome to Blowback, I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwin. And this is Season 4, Episode 5, We Can Live With That. Last episode, we discussed the final phase of the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

00:02:13 Speaker_02
The arming, drug running, and battlefield success of the Mujahideen. And then in 1988, the beginning of the Soviet withdrawal.

00:02:22 Speaker_12
Now we're going to look at what came next, at how Afghan President Najibullah's government held on with surprising vigor, how the warlords took over when he fell, and how the period of outright civil war in Afghanistan paved the way for the rise of the Taliban.

00:02:37 Speaker_12
By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union would no longer exist, and even if it had survived, Secretary of State James Baker had already negotiated an end to Soviet assistance to the Afghan government.

00:02:51 Speaker_12
The American special envoy in Afghanistan sent cables home, predicting what would happen if Najibullah's regime fell to the Mujahideen.

00:03:01 Speaker_02
Quote, an extremist seizure of Kabul would plunge Afghanistan into a fresh round of warfare, which could affect areas adjoining Afghanistan.

00:03:10 Speaker_02
Should Golbadeen Hekmatyar get to Kabul, extremists in the Arab world would support them in stoking Islamic radicalism in the region, including the Soviet Central Asian republics, but also in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Arab world.

00:03:26 Speaker_12
Despite the end of the Cold War and the onset of the so-called end of history, the 1990s would plunge Afghanistan into what may be its bloodiest phase yet.

00:03:49 Speaker_24
We met President Najibullah at the presidential palace in Kabul. The Soviet army has finally left. Is your government going to be able to stand up on its own? Surely. No problem. No problem.

00:04:01 Speaker_02
March 1989. Afghan President Najibullah, by all accounts a competent and pragmatic communist, faced a broken nation. His capital was surrounded by rich, powerful, and eager warlords that had been financed and feted by foreign powers for over a decade.

00:04:20 Speaker_02
Still, against all odds, Najibullah showed a knack for hanging on to power. A headline in Newsday summed it up. Najibullah, Afghan leader with nine lives.

00:04:32 Speaker_24
President Bush has announced that he's going to continue to support the opposition. Would you give back all your arms to the Soviet Union if it would bring about peace and the cessation of the arms struggle?

00:04:46 Speaker_12
Yes. The Soviets had left behind significant resources at Najibullah's disposal that provided a necessary lifeline to the Najibullah regime, writes historian Shane A. Smith.

00:04:58 Speaker_12
And these included military weapons, property and other equipment worth billions of dollars. But despite Soviet assistance, the material conditions in Afghan cities remained quite dire.

00:05:09 Speaker_02
The Soviets shipped an average of 250,000 tons of wheat per year to Afghanistan and also furnished other essential commodities including kerosene for cooking and heating, tea, sugar, oil, soap and footwear.

00:05:25 Speaker_12
Although keeping people fed was a significant factor for stability, Najibullah's highest priority was keeping the Mujahideen from taking Kabul. The Soviets would not come to the rescue anymore.

00:05:37 Speaker_07
The Afghan rebels, the Mujahideen, had suffered heavily. But when we began filming in February, the picture seemed clear. It would be a race between the various Mujahideen groups to capture Kabul.

00:05:50 Speaker_07
With its Soviet defenders gone, the city lay helpless and vulnerable. No one expected it to hold out long.

00:05:59 Speaker_02
The USSR was not the only party that had left Afghanistan in 1989. Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia not long after.

00:06:10 Speaker_02
With the reputation now of a pious warrior from his time in Afghanistan, Bin Laden's credentials put him in demand as a speaker in mosques and homes, despite his soft-spoken, modest style, writes Anthony Shadid, the late New York Times reporter.

00:06:25 Speaker_02
Cassettes of Osama's sermons were passed around the kingdom in which he invade against the West and the non-Islamic world, in particular, the United States. But more on that later.

00:06:38 Speaker_12
Back in Afghanistan, with no more Soviet troops in the country, the first trial by fire for the Najibullah government came weeks after the withdrawal.

00:06:47 Speaker_12
The top Mujahideen warlords had hatched a plan with Pakistan to deliver what they believed would be the finishing blow to a weak Afghan government.

00:06:56 Speaker_24
Do you have a message that you'd like to give to the people of the United States?

00:07:01 Speaker_10
The last Soviet soldier has left. Afghanistan. What the people of Afghanistan need is more sympathy and economic assistance. Not more bombs and guns.

00:07:24 Speaker_17
Hold on a minute. Don't you think we ought to talk? What, about how I'm gonna run? Sure. About how you've managed to live as long as you have.

00:07:35 Speaker_02
A special double issue of Rolling Stone magazine from July 1990. Tom Cruise climbs out of the ocean in a wet t-shirt and jeans. Depeche Mode, the cover asks. As good as they look? And inside the issue, another question. Anarchy in the USSR?

00:07:53 Speaker_02
Quote, imagine the 60s, the Depression, Watergate, and the Civil War going on all at the same time, wrote music critic Anthony DeCurtis, and you'll get some sense of what's happening in the Soviet Union. No one can sense where things are heading.

00:08:09 Speaker_12
Rolling Stone may have been over-egging the pudding a bit, but the USSR was in free fall. In 1989, amid a global economic slowdown, the Soviet bloc was entering an economic crisis.

00:08:22 Speaker_12
The Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, were now home to growing anti-communist movements.

00:08:29 Speaker_12
The leaders of the Soviet system, writes Vladislav Zubak, didn't understand that the new creations of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, they didn't generate more consumer goods.

00:08:40 Speaker_12
They had simply cannibalized government revenue just when the USSR needed it most. The economic crisis translated into high inflation, prolonged shortages, and lengthy queues.

00:08:53 Speaker_02
The administration of George H.W. Bush formed a collective grin as the Soviet Union's economy contracted by about a sixth. The White House that summer decided not to support a $250 billion aid package to the USSR, a so-called grand bargain.

00:09:10 Speaker_02
Instead, the Soviet Union would get pennies on the dollar.

00:09:14 Speaker_12
Despite this, Gorbachev believed that more American aid would be forthcoming After all, what would have been the point of the last few years of diplomacy and negotiated reform if not to get American support when it really counted?

00:09:30 Speaker_02
What Gorbachev failed to understand was that the Cold War was still on, from the Soviet Union all the way to Afghanistan.

00:09:44 Speaker_07
On February the 10th, as the Russians were leaving, seven Mujahideen groups amid scenes of characteristic disorder gathered in Pakistan to form an interim government.

00:09:53 Speaker_02
During the Soviet withdrawal, the different factions of the Mujahideen agreed to a shotgun marriage, an alliance funded lavishly by Saudi intelligence. This excluded many from the Shia minorities, most notably the famous Ahmed Shah Massoud.

00:10:10 Speaker_07
The dominant figure in the interim government was a religious hardliner, Gulbadin Hekmatyar. He was subtle and unforgiving, and anyone who crossed him was liable to be branded a traitor or a heretic.

00:10:21 Speaker_02
Like anyone who wants to win, these united warlords called themselves the interim government of the country. They were all itching to carve up Afghanistan for themselves.

00:10:31 Speaker_02
Their ranks were by now swollen with several thousand so-called foreign fighters. Islamist radicals recruited from places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but also other regions including Africa and the Far East.

00:10:44 Speaker_12
It was Pakistan that most often called the shots on the ground.

00:10:48 Speaker_12
And the shot called in March 1989, after the Soviet soldiers had exited the scene, was for an assault on the city of Jalalabad, a heavily defended eastern Afghan city just miles from the border with Pakistan.

00:11:04 Speaker_02
The CIA was keen to be a part of any looming Jalalabad operation. And so that winter, the CIA paid for hundreds of the Japanese trucks so they could be used in the attack. The Soviets were gone, but the US-backed jihad was far from over.

00:11:38 Speaker_04
The resistance attacks were not coordinated. and they faltered, the resistance took heavy casualties.

00:11:45 Speaker_12
What ensued was a disaster, not for the weak Afghan government, but for the warlords. Najibullah's forces repelled one Mujahideen assault after another.

00:11:55 Speaker_04
I think it was about then that it became evident that the regime was going to survive longer than others anticipated.

00:12:04 Speaker_12
The bodies kept piling up well into the summer of 1989. By the winter, it was clear that after a near decade of fighting, Afghanistan was now lurching toward civil war.

00:12:29 Speaker_02
All of this was background noise to the administration of H.W. Bush. The one-time CIA chief-turned-vice-president-turned-president had a war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq on the horizon. The once laser-focused U.S.

00:12:43 Speaker_02
policy in Afghanistan was now disorganized, with some pushing for the warlords, others urging a moderating role, and still others uninterested entirely. The failure to capture Jalalabad was a major blow to the Mujahideen and their state sponsors.

00:13:02 Speaker_02
How could these rich and powerful armies fail to take down this lame duck in Kabul? But, in fact, time was on the side of the warlords. The Soviet lifeline to Najibullah would not last forever. The turning point came in 1991.

00:13:27 Speaker_02
The mujahideen won chunks of northern Afghanistan after a series of offensives, led most notably by Ahmed Shah Massoud. As shortages of goods surfaced, writes Shaney Smith, desertion rates of the Afghan security forces rose 60% over the previous year.

00:13:44 Speaker_02
That wasn't all. As the Soviet Union itself broke down, critical deliveries of aid to Afghanistan started coming up short.

00:13:53 Speaker_12
With no new official arms shipment scheduled for the warlords, the Americans turned to their campaign in the Persian Gulf against their former ally, Saddam Hussein.

00:14:03 Speaker_12
In the first instance of an unholy bond between wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the spoils from the war against Saddam were captured and then shipped to the Mujahideen.

00:14:15 Speaker_02
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, it took the Gulf War to end Osama bin Laden's stint as a celebrity, writes Anthony Shadid.

00:14:23 Speaker_02
Osama denounced King Fahd's decision to invite Western troops into the kingdom following the Iraqi invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990. The presence of infidels on Islam's holiest land was sacrilege, an unforgivable sin."

00:14:39 Speaker_02
In early 1991, after the Saudi royal family clamped down on Bin Laden for his dissident activity, he slipped out of the kingdom and by the next year had taken up residence in Sudan, the African nation ruled by a Muslim military elite.

00:14:55 Speaker_02
Bin Laden was banished from Saudi Arabia after the fact and officially renounced by his family. Exactly how cut off Bin Laden was from Saudi Arabia would remain an open question.

00:15:09 Speaker_02
As journalists Jean-Charles Brassard and Guillaume Dasquier report, several large Saudi-funded banks, some with connections to BCCI, transferred money to Bin Laden over the years, before and after his exile.

00:15:32 Speaker_17
In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lowered for the last time, and an era comes to an end.

00:15:43 Speaker_13
I am ceasing my activities in the post of President of the USSR.

00:15:48 Speaker_17
The tricolor banner of the Russian Republic now flies over the Kremlin.

00:15:53 Speaker_02
By 1992, the USSR was no more. Gorbachev, the would-be reformer of the Soviet Union, handpicked by Yuri Andropov to lead the USSR into the future, had instead overseen the death of the Soviet experiment.

00:16:07 Speaker_17
And from the White House, President Bush salutes the man who presided over the end of the Soviet Union.

00:16:14 Speaker_01
His legacy guarantees him an honored place in history and provides a solid basis for the United States to work in equally constructive ways with his successors, successors, successors.

00:16:29 Speaker_02
A hasty dismantling of the Soviet superpower was a fire sale for the Americans and the oligarchs inside the ex-Union.

00:16:37 Speaker_02
But it was a devastating blow to third world nations, such as Afghanistan, who had relied on the Soviets for aid, trade, and stability. Had the U.S.

00:16:46 Speaker_02
Secretary of State in 1991 managed to look into a crystal ball, writes Zuback, he would have seen the smoke billowing out of New York's Twin Towers and decades of American military occupation of Afghanistan.

00:17:02 Speaker_12
It was at this moment that Peter Thompson, the top-ranking diplomat handling Afghanistan, began sending urgent cables home.

00:17:11 Speaker_12
One ex-warlord, Abdel Haque, wrote to Thompson, saying that, quote, Afghanistan now runs the risk of becoming 50 or more separate kingdoms. Foreign extremists may want to move in, buying houses and weapons.

00:17:24 Speaker_12
Afghanistan may become unique in becoming both a training ground and munitions dump for foreign terrorists, and at the same time, the world's largest poppy field. Once Thompson left Afghanistan in 1992, it would be almost a decade before the U.S.

00:17:42 Speaker_12
had an ambassador or a CIA station there. Not until the year 2001.

00:17:48 Speaker_14
Afghan rebels officially took over the government of Afghanistan today, replacing the defeated Moscow-supported regime. but fierce fighting is still going on in some places against a holdout fundamentalist Muslim rebel faction.

00:18:04 Speaker_02
The fall of the Soviet Union quickly fulfilled Abdul Haq's prophecy. On March 18th, 1992, Mohammad Najibullah announced over radio that he would resign, having decided there was no hope left for his government.

00:18:20 Speaker_02
A few weeks later, on April 15th, the Afghan president officially stepped down. If only it had ended there for him. Unable to escape the country, Najibullah was arrested by his own former general, the communist-turned-warlord Rashid Dostum.

00:18:35 Speaker_02
Before the president's capture, as the mujahideen closed in within rocketing distance, the president laid down a prophecy not unlike Abdul Haq's.

00:18:45 Speaker_02
We have a common task, Afghanistan, the United States, and the civilized world, to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism, he told reporters in his palace office. If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years.

00:19:01 Speaker_02
Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs, turned into a center for terrorism. Najibullah, Steve Cole writes, could see the future, but there was no one to listen. The United States stood to the side. The U.S.

00:19:18 Speaker_02
ambassador to Pakistan had left Islamabad. Washington had just announced a new policy, hands off. India had planned to spirit Najibullah out of the country, but then abandoned him, worried it would cause a military standoff with his captors.

00:19:37 Speaker_02
Najibullah was imprisoned, and power was officially on its way to the Mujahideen.

00:19:49 Speaker_06
Much of Afghanistan has been devastated by this war, and until the fighting stops, rebuilding will have to wait. Terry Phillips for CBS News, Kabul.

00:19:58 Speaker_12
The Alliance of Warlords, known informally as the Seven, wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.

00:20:04 Speaker_02
The Warlords' competition for Kabul had been whittled down to two main rivals. Golbadeen Hekmatyar, approaching from the south, and Ahmed Shah Massoud, coming from the north.

00:20:20 Speaker_06
Some shops have reopened today. However, most people are staying off the streets, saying it's still too dangerous to leave home. Even that is risky. Many rockets are landing in residential neighborhoods.

00:20:32 Speaker_02
Hekmatyar had the plans, the manpower, the money, and the guns. From a village south of Kabul, he set up a base of operations, reports Kohl. Pakistani helicopters flew in and out, carrying ISI officers for consultations.

00:20:47 Speaker_02
Tanks, armored personnel carriers, multiple rocket launchers, and artillery rolled into the base, lined up for the final thrust toward Kabul. From his command center, Hekmatyar worked the radio, reopening talks with Afghan communists.

00:21:03 Speaker_02
Dozens of Arab jihadist volunteers, allies of Hekmatyar from the days of revolution in Peshawar, poured into the village. And with them came Arab journalists, prepared to document the final chapter of the Islamic revolution in Afghanistan.

00:21:18 Speaker_12
Hekmatyar's benefactors from the ISI, CIA, and Saudi intelligence rushed to Peshawar, the longtime Pakistani haven for the Mujahideen, bargaining with the hot-headed Hekmatyar about how best to put together an Islamic government that everyone could be happy with.

00:21:36 Speaker_12
One of the power brokers was none other than Osama bin Laden. The Saudi bad boy attempted to talk Hekmatyar into sharing power. Go back with your brothers, bin Laden implored his colleague.

00:21:48 Speaker_12
But Hekmatyar had zero intentions of sharing anything, let alone sharing power with his hated Tajik rival, Ahmed Shamasud.

00:21:56 Speaker_02
Even as he talked by radio with Massoud, Hekmatyar's forces moved toward the gates of Kabul. Green flags were attached to his tanks, Kohl writes. The cars were washed so they would gleam triumphantly when Hekmatyar rolled into Kabul the next day.

00:22:12 Speaker_02
He dispatched his agents to Kabul that night, and he went to bed believing that he would roll into the capital in a triumph the next morning. Afghans are weird, remembers an Arub reporter embedded with Hekmatyar.

00:22:26 Speaker_02
They turn off the wireless when they go to sleep, as if war will stop. So they switch the wireless off, and we all went to sleep. The sun comes up again, they turn on the wireless, and the bad news starts pouring in.

00:22:42 Speaker_06
Two rival factions are still fighting in and around the capital. Early this morning, the airport was shelled. Throughout the day, heavy artillery thundered in the hills around Kabul.

00:22:53 Speaker_12
The Kabul airport now belonged to Massoud, who had bribed enough ex-communists to join him in a preemptive strike against the hated and feared Hekmatyar. Transport planes poured into Kabul, carrying hundreds of Rashid Dostum's fierce Uzbek militiamen.

00:23:09 Speaker_12
They seized strategic buildings all across the Kabul Valley, writes Steve Cole. Hekmatyar scrambled to regain his ground, but Massoud proved the superior commander, dividing his forces, encircling Hekmatyar's militia in the city, and squeezing.

00:23:24 Speaker_12
On the morning of Hakim Etiar's imagined triumph, tank battles and street-to-street fighting erupted on Kabul's wide avenues, writes Cole. Fires burned on the grounds of the presidential palace.

00:23:35 Speaker_12
The president-turned-prisoner Najibullah sought shelter in a small, walled UN compound. And when the dust settled, Massoud entered Kabul triumphantly, from the north, on a tank strewn with flowers.

00:23:48 Speaker_12
That night, hundreds of his mujahideen fired their assault rifles into the air in celebration, their tracer bullets lighting the sky like electric rain. Angry and desperate, Steve Cole notes, Hekmatyar began to lob rockets, blindly, at Kabul.

00:24:04 Speaker_11
Once a city of roses and minarets, now a scene from hell. This is Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal.

00:24:23 Speaker_02
The gangs of former Mujahideen sliced up Afghanistan into their own private kingdoms, with their own private armies, their own drug operations, and their own shakedown rackets.

00:24:35 Speaker_02
In Kabul, the government had been replaced with a Mujahideen regime allied with Masood, with one-time jihadi, Bernadine Rabbani, serving as president.

00:24:46 Speaker_12
It was a devastating psychological blow, because for the first time in 300 years, the Pashtuns had lost control of the capital," writes journalist Ahmed Rashid.

00:24:57 Speaker_02
Day-to-day reality was bloodshed, as it had been for ten years already. And this time, Kabul was not spared.

00:25:07 Speaker_02
The once-bustling capital of Afghanistan was shredded by street fighting, all as highly motivated Pashtun fighters, opposed to the Masood coalition, bore down from the east.

00:25:19 Speaker_12
And between the bullets flying between Hekmatyar and Masud, Dostum and Sayyaf, quote, Afghanistan was in a state of virtual disintegration.

00:25:30 Speaker_02
We spoke with Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid about the nature of the warlord years from 1992 to 1996.

00:25:38 Speaker_00
Each side had various commanders from the Mujahideen period who now wanted to control Kabul. And so there was a very bloody bitter four or five-way struggle between the Pashtuns, the non-Pashtuns, tribes, etc. to control Afghanistan.

00:26:02 Speaker_00
It was the most destructive period. Kabul itself was almost destroyed by the internal fighting. And it unleashed, of course, many extremist groups.

00:26:15 Speaker_00
You had, you know, Al-Qaeda, you had other extremist groups developing under the umbrella of these warlords. The Saudis continued supporting the Pashtuns because they thought that these Pashtuns would knock out the Iranians.

00:26:33 Speaker_00
The Iranians were supporting the Shia Hazaras because they thought this would knock out the Saudis. And so there was this real dogged attempt to gain the maximum advantage.

00:26:46 Speaker_12
The Afghan politician Malala Joya, who would go on to become the country's youngest woman MP, was a teenager at this time. And she spoke to us about the warlord years.

00:26:57 Speaker_22
each of these extremist fundamentalists, they wanted to come in power and they belonged to different ethnic and first they destroyed our national unity in Afghanistan and then they banned women from their rights, they raped even

00:27:15 Speaker_22
young girls and grandmothers and they committed massacres, countless massacres. They looted our museum and they alone in Kabul there is reports more than 65,000 people they killed in Kabul.

00:27:33 Speaker_22
If we call that period what the crimes that they committed from 92 to 96 when they come in power, the small holocaust even is not enough to explain.

00:27:48 Speaker_02
While Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India, and Iran continued to back their respective proxies in Afghanistan, the Americans, having achieved their goals, pretty much packed up and went home, turning off the money spigot.

00:28:03 Speaker_02
With the exception of one program, to buy back any Stinger missiles still floating around Afghanistan.

00:28:12 Speaker_12
The Stingers, you'll recall, were the mascot of the Afghan war in the 1980s, a sign of how valuable American assistance was to the Mujahideen and how instrumental those missiles were in defeating the Soviets.

00:28:25 Speaker_12
But, even before the Soviet departure, the Stingers had begun dispersing to the four corners of the earth, writes investigative journalist Ken Silverstein.

00:28:36 Speaker_12
The surface-to-air beauty had already made it to Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Chechnya, and Algeria. Stingers inevitably turned up for sale on the international black market."

00:28:48 Speaker_12
Other nations who acquired them, either through sales, smuggling, or blueprints, include the United Arab Emirates, Somalia, Iraq, Qatar, Zambia, and North Korea.

00:28:58 Speaker_12
And in 1990, two Colombian drug dealers were arrested in Tampa, Florida, after attempting to arrange the purchase of Stingers for the Medellin cartel.

00:29:08 Speaker_12
In the early 90s, Silverstein adds, Stingers were used in a flurry of attacks against military and possibly civilian aircraft. The CIA embarked on a $65 million campaign to buy back the missiles.

00:29:21 Speaker_12
They began tracking them down and offering double for what they'd sold them for years earlier.

00:29:26 Speaker_12
Quote, they were offering so much that sellers on the black market could take the money and buy themselves cheaper anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry, reads one study on Stinger mania.

00:29:38 Speaker_02
Steve Cole calculates that by 1992, there were more personal weapons in Afghanistan than in India and Pakistan combined.

00:29:49 Speaker_02
By some estimates, more such weapons had been shipped into Afghanistan during the previous decade than to any other country in the world. Over the years, the USSR had supplied the Afghan army with tens of billions worth.

00:30:05 Speaker_02
The combined US, Pakistani, Saudi and Chinese aid to the much leaner, meaner Mujahideen was somewhere north of 10 billion. At least, that was what was on the books.

00:30:21 Speaker_11
Hekmatyar is also into his second year of raining massive rocket and artillery attacks on the citizens of Kabul.

00:30:33 Speaker_12
Among this sea of weapons lived Afghan civilians, about 500,000 of whom, in Kabul alone, depended on coupons for food in 1992. In the countryside, millions more lived with malnourishment, far from any reliable food source, Kohl writes.

00:30:49 Speaker_12
And the unfolding civil war between the one-time Mujahideen only further strained supply lines across the country.

00:30:57 Speaker_12
And alongside the warlords were the so-called foreign or Arab fighters, who were in reality a mixture of Islamist fighters still coming into the country from places like Indonesia, Malaysia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere, as CIA cables at the time noted, supported by Pakistan and Saudi intelligence.

00:31:34 Speaker_02
In June, The Guardian reported from an Afghan refugee camp, where more than 100,000 refugees were living in, quote, squalid conditions, short of food, water, and cooking fuel, six miles east of the city of Jalalabad.

00:31:49 Speaker_02
Five months later, in November 1994, the Knight Ridder News Service reported that in Afghanistan, 400,000 homeless in Kabul live among the rubble of what was once a prosperous city of several million.

00:32:03 Speaker_12
To the south in Kandahar, quote, international aid agencies were fearful of even working there as the city itself was divided by warring groups, writes Ahmed Rashid.

00:32:13 Speaker_12
The warlords seized homes and farms, threw out their occupants, and handed them over to their own supporters.

00:32:20 Speaker_12
And the commanders abused the population at will, kidnapping young girls and boys for their own sexual pleasure, robbing merchants in the bazaars, and fighting and brawling in the streets.

00:32:30 Speaker_12
Instead of refugees returning from Pakistan, a fresh wave of refugees began to leave for Pakistan.

00:32:38 Speaker_02
One of the many wars within the war was the campaign against ethnic minorities, such as the Hazara population in Kabul.

00:32:47 Speaker_02
In 1993, the fundamentalist warlord and Bin Laden ally, Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, on behalf of the government backed by Massoud and Rabbani, carried out a campaign of, quote, repeated human butchery, unquote, reported the BBC years later.

00:33:04 Speaker_02
Sayyaf's paramilitary forces, quote, rampaged through the Afshar district, murdering, raping, and burning homes. Eventually, you could map out which warlords owned which piece of the country. Dostum set up his own fiefdom in the north.

00:33:21 Speaker_02
Ishmael Khan controlled Herat in the west. Masud controlled most of the northeast. Several militias ruled Helmand in the south, but it was increasingly the fiefdom of drug lords, writes Artemy Kalinovsky.

00:33:34 Speaker_02
Kabul remained the ultimate prize, and so continued to burn year after year. With the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan all wrapped up, the U.S.

00:33:51 Speaker_02
government continued to cover up the tracks of their one-time clients at a major node in the mujahideen's recruitment network, the Kifa Center in Brooklyn, New York.

00:34:04 Speaker_12
In November 1990, for example, investigators looking into the murder of right-wing activist Meir Kahane turned up, quote, manuals from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, marked top secret for training, along with classified documents belonging to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, writes investigative journalist Peter Lance.

00:34:31 Speaker_12
In addition, scholar Peter Dale Scott notes, quote, the police found maps and drawings of New York City landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, and the World Trade Center.

00:34:46 Speaker_02
What's more, the Kahana assassin and his associates had plenty of sermons from Brooklyn's blind sheik, Abd al-Rahman, who ran the Kifa Center. Federal prosecutors narrowed the case down to the gunman, El-Sayed Nosair.

00:35:07 Speaker_02
That reduced the chances for unwanted questions about the men's trainer, an al-Qaeda-affiliated Afghan veteran named Ali Mohammed, who had both served in U.S. Special Forces and served as an FBI informant.

00:35:27 Speaker_12
While only Nusair went down for the killing of Kahana, his Al-Khifa associates would be tried for a different crime.

00:35:53 Speaker_14
Last winter, the FBI was praised for its speed in cracking the case of the World Trade Center bombing and bringing four suspects to trial.

00:36:00 Speaker_14
Now, there is some evidence that the FBI may have known of the plot in advance, through an informant, and might, might even have stopped the bombing that killed six people. Correspondent Jacqueline Adams has the story.

00:36:14 Speaker_03
FBI agents might have been able to prevent last February's deadly explosion at New York's World Trade Center. They discussed secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, but they didn't, according to the FBI's own informant, Imad Salem.

00:36:29 Speaker_03
Unbeknownst to the FBI at the time, Salem recorded many of his conversations with his handlers.

00:36:34 Speaker_02
It blew up at 12 noon, killing half a dozen people above the garage where the car was parked. Before long, a perpetrator had emerged. One of the bombers, a 24-year-old Pakistani named Ramzi Youssef, wrote letters to the press claiming responsibility.

00:36:52 Speaker_02
It would take about two years to catch Youssef, who was arrested in early February 1995 at the Sukhasa Guesthouse in Islamabad, Pakistan.

00:37:02 Speaker_02
After spending hours with Youssef and evaluating their evidence, the FBI, writes Steve Cole, found that Youssef was cagey about who had helped him bomb the World Trade Center. Cole continues.

00:37:15 Speaker_12
In a Manila apartment where Yusuf had hidden as a fugitive, investigators found a business card belonging to Muhammad Khalifa, a relative by marriage of Osama bin Laden.

00:37:27 Speaker_12
Yusuf said only that the card had been given to him by his colleagues as a contact in case he needed help. The agents asked if Yusuf was familiar with the name Osama bin Laden. He said that he knew bin Laden was a relative of Khalifa.

00:37:41 Speaker_12
He refused to say anything more.

00:37:44 Speaker_12
Pakistani investigators eventually learned that, for many months after the World Trade Center bombing, Yusuf had lived in a Pakistani guest house funded by Bin Laden, and they passed this information along to the FBI and CIA."

00:38:00 Speaker_02
An FBI report on Ramzi Yousef and his associates found that they had also, quote, discussed future attacks in the U.S., including flying a plane filled with explosives into the CIA building.

00:38:13 Speaker_02
In fact, one of the World Trade Center bombers said that, quote, in June of this year, he was able to travel to the U.S. and possibly attack a U.S. nuclear facility. How would Yousef have the funds to carry out these kinds of plots?

00:38:29 Speaker_02
Well, as investigators suspected, a man named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew a guy who knew a guy.

00:38:40 Speaker_23
We have people getting injured in the marketplace, trying to do shopping, trying to find something to eat. Just a normal, what we would call a normal life. Go out of your house, go shopping, take your bicycle, go to school.

00:38:54 Speaker_23
And a rocket will hit, can hit at any moment.

00:38:58 Speaker_21
The rocket came and hit the wall and all the pieces hit me.

00:39:06 Speaker_02
The average fighters in the Mujahideen during the 1980s were men who could, quote, recount their tribal and clan lineages, writes Ahmed Rashid.

00:39:15 Speaker_02
They could remember their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia and recount legends and stories from Afghan history. By the 1990s, however, a new generation had arrived on the scene.

00:39:28 Speaker_02
These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbors, nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that often made up their villages and their homeland.

00:39:43 Speaker_02
These boys were what the war in the 1980s had thrown up."

00:39:50 Speaker_12
largely teenagers to men in their 20s. These were a mixture of refugee camp youth and madrasa students, or sometimes both.

00:39:59 Speaker_12
In time, all they had come to know was a life defined by Sharia and lived by the sword, with many of them never having even lived with the opposite sex.

00:40:09 Speaker_12
Male brotherhood offered these youngsters not just a religious cause to fight for, but a whole way of life to fully embrace and make their existence meaningful."

00:40:19 Speaker_12
Though they were raised on stories of the jihad against the Russians, most had, quote, no first-hand knowledge about it. They were boys raised in madrasas, often children of parents who had been killed, writes historian Artemy Kalinovsky.

00:40:33 Speaker_12
These students, or Taliban, would be the foot soldiers of a new Islamic movement brewing in the south of Afghanistan. The leaders of that movement were the actual veterans of the war against the Soviet Union and Najibullah.

00:40:48 Speaker_12
Quote, we all knew each other because we were all originally from the same province in South Central Afghanistan and had fought together, one early Taliban leader told Rashid.

00:40:58 Speaker_12
And they would now fight together, with their younger, fanatic followers, under the banner of a militant religious revival.

00:41:06 Speaker_02
The original Taliban leadership, forged over years of war, was probably the most disfigured and disabled set of commanders in the entire world, Rashid writes.

00:41:17 Speaker_02
Its future foreign minister, the one-eyed Mullah Mohammed Ghaus Mohammed Ghaus recalled that the first crop of Taliban leaders, quote, would sit for a long time to discuss how to change the terrible situation in their country.

00:41:31 Speaker_02
Before we started, we had only vague ideas of what to do and we thought we would fail, but we believed we were working with Allah as his pupils.

00:41:44 Speaker_02
The Taliban's Islamic creed had come from what was originally a reformist strain of Islam born in British India a century earlier.

00:41:52 Speaker_02
Deobandi Islam, which had survived over the years thanks to tightly organized proponents, received a real shot in the arm during the religious revival in Pakistan under the late President Zia.

00:42:04 Speaker_02
As we've seen, in the Zia years, the Pakistani state doled out funds to madrasas of every denomination, including the Deobandis.

00:42:12 Speaker_02
Quote, the Deobandis took a restrictive view of the role of women, opposed all forms of hierarchy in the Muslim community, and rejected the Shia, writes Ahmed Rashid.

00:42:23 Speaker_02
But the Taliban were to take these beliefs to an extreme which the original Deobandis would never have recognized. End quote.

00:42:31 Speaker_02
Inside the madrasas in Pakistan and later Afghanistan itself, with funding from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the religious code of the Taliban reached its final form.

00:42:44 Speaker_12
In the violent, corrupt, and debased reign of the warlords, the Taliban's simple and direct code of law appeared even to some secular Afghans, like one guy named Hamid Karzai, as a possible cleansing force, at least if you were part of Afghanistan's Pashtun majority.

00:43:02 Speaker_12
Another future Taliban minister told Rashid that, quote, many people were searching for a solution in madrasas across Afghanistan. And so, this Taliban official said, we came to Kandahar, in the south, to talk with Mullah Omar.

00:43:19 Speaker_19
When do you think the war will be over? When all the cruel people of Afghanistan has been banished, they have been kicked out from the country, the war will be ended.

00:43:43 Speaker_02
The spiritual, military, and political leader of the Taliban was a battle-scarred enigma named Mullah Mohammed Omar. Like many of his comrades, the bearded, severe-looking Omar wore his battle days on his face, having lost his right eye.

00:44:02 Speaker_02
Omar had a dry sense of humor and a sarcastic wit, writes Rashid, and he remained, quote, extremely shy of outsiders, particularly foreigners. But among his own cadres, he was always accessible.

00:44:15 Speaker_02
Omar, according to reporter Carletta Gall, was a hard-headed fighter who would never flinch from a challenge. He'd grown up in a poor household, orphaned at a young age, and raised by his uncle, who himself was a village mullah.

00:44:30 Speaker_02
Some saw him in a less cinematic light. Quote, Mullah Omar was not even street smart, said one major landowner who protected Omar in the early 90s.

00:44:42 Speaker_25
He was so stupid it was easy for the ISI to use him.

00:44:48 Speaker_02
This notion, that the Pakistani Central Intelligence Agency, the ISI, essentially organized the Taliban like putty in their hands, is widespread in the region.

00:45:00 Speaker_02
And in fact, wherever the Taliban started to pop up, it was difficult not to find ISI agents nearby. Quote, the Taliban do not have minds of their own, according to one Pakistani journalist who spent time with them.

00:45:16 Speaker_25
As the brother of one suicide bomber put it, years later, quote, all Taliban are ISI Taliban.

00:45:31 Speaker_12
The most credible story of Omar's origins, according to Rashid, goes like this. In the spring of 1994, Omar's neighbors came to tell him that a warlord commander had abducted two teenage girls.

00:45:45 Speaker_12
Their heads had been shaved and they had been taken to a military camp and repeatedly raped.

00:45:50 Speaker_12
Omar enlisted some 30 Taliban, who had only 16 rifles between them, and attacked the base, freeing the girls and hanging the commander from the barrel of a tank. and, importantly, capturing arms and ammunition in the process."

00:46:07 Speaker_12
And months later, a reported dispute between two Kandahar commanders over who had the right to sodomize a boy escalated into a fight in which civilians died, and after which, quote, Omar's group freed the boy and public appeals started coming in for the Taliban to help out in other local disputes.

00:46:25 Speaker_12
Omar had emerged as a Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the rapacious commanders. His prestige grew because he asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to set up a just Islamic system."

00:46:41 Speaker_02
President Rabbani in Kabul offered to team up with the Taliban, so long as they aligned with him against the hated Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. But the Taliban put their Pashtun identity first, refusing to submit to the Tajik Rabbani.

00:46:55 Speaker_02
Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who had always been the cat's paw for his paymasters in Pakistan, had failed to take Kabul once again and wore the stench of failure. Late that October, the Taliban attacked an ISI convoy that had come in from Pakistan.

00:47:11 Speaker_02
After raiding it, they used their new resources to launch their own offensive to take over Kandahar from the warlords. The enemy commander, Rashid writes, was chased into the desert by the Taliban, captured, and shot dead with ten of his bodyguards.

00:47:28 Speaker_02
His body was hung from a tank barrel for all to see.

00:47:32 Speaker_12
Thousands of young Afghan Pashtuns from all over rushed to Kandahar to join the Taliban. And by the end of 1994, some 12,000 Afghan and Pakistani students had joined the Taliban in Kandahar.

00:47:46 Speaker_12
Although Benazir Bhutto's government denied supporting the Taliban, Pakistan stood by their Afghan clients, quote, as they immediately implemented the strictest interpretation of Sharia ever seen in the Muslim world, writes Rashid.

00:48:01 Speaker_12
And this was a cut above the thuggishness of even people like Golbadeen Hekmatyar, who, as we've discussed, once threw acid in women's faces.

00:48:11 Speaker_02
The Taliban pulled the rug out from under the warlords, first neutralizing the forces of Hekmatyar, then tangling with Ahmad Shah Massoud.

00:48:20 Speaker_02
And the Taliban, acting with a unity unseen in the squabbling Mujahideen, reinvested their spoils of war, their drug profits, and transport taxes from the tolls they had set up. Next, a prominent leader of the Hazara minority died in Taliban custody.

00:48:37 Speaker_02
Supporters claimed that he was pushed out of a helicopter on the way to a prison in Kandahar. This was an omen of things to come, a bloody ethnic and sectarian divide between Pashtun and Hazara, Sunni and Shia, bubbling below the surface.

00:48:54 Speaker_15
Kabul is surrounded by an army of Islamic fundamentalists, the Taliban, committed to its takeover or its destruction.

00:49:02 Speaker_02
The Taliban's campaign reached its climax in 1996. The Afghan president, Rabbani, organized one last tour of Asia, asking for support against the Taliban from backers in Russia, India, and Iran.

00:49:17 Speaker_02
Even Hekmatyar, after fighting Rabbani for four years, had now joined the government, which in turn accelerated the Taliban's assault on Kabul. More and more Taliban rockets flew into Kabul as the year went on.

00:49:31 Speaker_02
All the while, Saudi and Pakistani leaders were clearing the way, bribing rival warlords, one as much as $10 million, to simply let the Taliban through. And soon enough, it happened. In fall of 1996, the civil war was over.

00:49:50 Speaker_02
The Taliban stormed Kabul on the night of September 26, 1996.

00:50:00 Speaker_12
Although Massoud was able to flee, ex-Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah, who was still under house arrest, was not so lucky.

00:50:09 Speaker_12
Living in the UN compound since his resignation in 1992, Najibullah reportedly refused an offer to evacuate from his old foe, Ahmad Shah Massoud.

00:50:19 Speaker_12
A proud and stubborn man, writes Ahmed Rashid, he probably feared that if he fled with the Tajiks, he would be forever damned in the eyes of his fellow Pashtuns. And so he paid the price.

00:50:30 Speaker_12
Quote, the Taliban walked up to Najibullah's room, beat him and his brothers senseless, and then bundled them into a pickup and drove them to the darkened presidential palace.

00:50:41 Speaker_12
There, they castrated Najibullah, dragged his body behind a jeep, and then shot him dead. His brother was similarly tortured and then throttled to death.

00:50:51 Speaker_12
The Taliban hanged the two dead men from a concrete traffic control post just outside of the palace, only a few blocks from the UN compound.

00:51:05 Speaker_02
Mullah Omar and his men and their thousands of Toyota pickup trucks, originally paid for by the CIA, were now in control of Kabul.

00:51:15 Speaker_02
This meant that, despite holdouts in the north, they could and would call themselves the government, the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And now that the Taliban was in charge, it was ready to conduct the business of government.

00:51:33 Speaker_12
The three major areas where the Taliban could do deals were the drug trade, good old-fashioned pipeline politics, and its connections with the ever-increasing forces of militant Islam.

00:51:46 Speaker_02
Let's start with the drugs. As we discussed last time, the forerunners of the Taliban, the mujahideen, had for decades now turned the Afghan hinterlands into opium country.

00:51:57 Speaker_02
After the arrest of a major Pashtun drug trafficker by the DEA in late 1995, Benazir Bhutto's government in Pakistan tried to prove they were serious about cracking down on drugs, writes Cooley.

00:52:10 Speaker_02
The government claimed it had dismantled 15 heroin laboratories and seized 6.3 tons of heroin. If true, this would be a world record for heroin seizures anywhere, and equal to the total amount of drugs of all kinds seized in Pakistan the year before.

00:52:26 Speaker_12
Now, these implausible show raids were par for the course in the 1990s. And despite their pious message, the Taliban had in fact kept Afghan poppy production alive.

00:52:38 Speaker_12
And over the next several years, Afghanistan would double its production of opium, mobilizing land, labor, and capital to overcome its enormous poverty and ultimately produce 75% of the world's heroin, writes Al McCoy.

00:52:57 Speaker_16
This is the car, the number nine Ford Thunderbird, Bill Elliott's race car. This is Bill Elliott's motor oil, Unocal 76. It's won every grand national race he's won. It's the same oil you can buy for your car at 76 stations.

00:53:15 Speaker_16
And this, this is Bill Elliott. Ready, boys? Go with the spirit! Try Bill's motor oil.

00:53:27 Speaker_02
Despite their medieval reputation, the Taliban actually had a pretty decent understanding of modern PR. Even before they seized Kabul, they had powerful advocates representing them in one place that really mattered. Washington.

00:53:41 Speaker_02
Chief among them was Lely Helms, an Afghan-American, New Jersey suburbanite, political mover and shaker, and the niece of former CIA Director Richard Helms.

00:53:55 Speaker_02
Apart from her connection with the agency, the Afghan side of her family tree included former ministers to King Zahir.

00:54:03 Speaker_02
Leading up to the Taliban takeover, right French journalists Jean-Charles Brissard and Guillaume Dasquier, Lely Helms had quote, spearheaded several initiatives on the Taliban's behalf.

00:54:15 Speaker_02
She would work year after year, until September of 2001, to arrange TV broadcasts, media profiles, private consultations, and UN meetings with the men leading the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Her efforts paid off.

00:54:33 Speaker_02
One reporter from the New Republic recalled, in one encounter a few months before the Taliban entered Kabul, a mid-level bureaucrat at the State Department perched on his couch and tried to convince me that the Taliban was really not such a bad bunch.

00:54:47 Speaker_02
You get to know them, the state official said, and you find that they really have a great sense of humor.

00:54:54 Speaker_12
Much to the chagrin of human rights and women's rights groups inside the United States, the Taliban now policed a very valuable patch of land in Central Asia, and the U.S. wanted in.

00:55:06 Speaker_00
Now, one thing certainly the Americans did encourage was that there was large quantities of gas and oil in Central Asia.

00:55:16 Speaker_00
most prominently was Turkmenistan, which was a neighbor of Afghanistan on its western flank and had enormous quantities of gas which it couldn't sell anywhere because it was landlocked.

00:55:29 Speaker_00
So when the Soviet Union broke up and these Central Asian states became independent, they all tried to cut deals with their various neighbors to sell their oil and gas.

00:55:40 Speaker_00
And the Turkmen said, you know, to the Afghans and to the Americans, buy our gas and ship it to Pakistan and India by pipeline, where it's very badly needed. And the Americans liked this idea very much and supported an American company.

00:55:58 Speaker_12
With the Soviet Union six feet under, former Soviet republics Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan were being treated very nicely by massive Western oil concerns, such as Chevron and the aforementioned Unocal.

00:56:14 Speaker_12
The only problem was that Russia, now friendly with the US, but still interested in protecting its own economic lifeline, was stubbornly guarding access to its pipelines to transport oil.

00:56:27 Speaker_12
Meanwhile, Iran, sporting its own oil reserves and decisively anti-Taliban, remained a thorn in the side of the world's sole remaining superpower.

00:56:39 Speaker_02
And so the American government and its leading oil conglomerates worked hand-in-glove to court the Taliban, with the aim of building a pipeline across the Islamic Emirate.

00:56:51 Speaker_02
This may be at least partly why the State Department bureaucrats were laughing so hard at the Taliban's jokes.

00:56:58 Speaker_02
Further messaging was massaged by Zalmay Khalilzad, then a senior strategist at the RAND Corporation and one day to become the most powerful U.S. agent in Afghanistan.

00:57:10 Speaker_02
Quote, based on recent conversations, I am confident that the Taliban would welcome an American re-engagement. The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran. It is closer to the Saudi model. End quote.

00:57:26 Speaker_12
And so, upon taking power, the Taliban welcomed a bidding war to take on the contract for Afghanistan's Islamic oil pipeline bonanza.

00:57:35 Speaker_12
In one corner, the good folks at UNICAL, with connections to the chief of Saudi intelligence, and in the other corner, Brightus, a Brazilian competitor, but with connections to Pakistan's ruling clique.

00:57:48 Speaker_12
This was a tricky thing to navigate because word began to spread quite quickly of the massacres, executions, and swift elimination of all women's rights in Afghanistan. But the Taliban could always count on friends like Leili Helms.

00:58:04 Speaker_12
Her efforts on their behalf continued, write Broussard and Daskia, even after 1997, when the Taliban welcomed the now infamous Saudi terror financier, Osama bin Laden.

00:58:19 Speaker_02
After the Taliban took over, you enlisted to become an underground teacher of other women and girls who were forbidden to do so by the Taliban. What was this job like? How did you and other women go about doing this?

00:58:35 Speaker_22
So it was very dangerous. It was risky to be an underground teacher, as the burqa at that time, same like today, gave safety. to the women, especially activist women.

00:58:49 Speaker_02
You would hide the books in your burqa?

00:58:52 Speaker_22
Yes, I carried books under the burqa and I was a teacher for elementary classes and also for Telda High School. They just don't look to women as a human. They believe that women are only to be used to satisfy their sexual lusts and bear children.

00:59:13 Speaker_22
Anyway, but fortunately, the women of Afghanistan in the past until today, in different ways, showed their resistance.

00:59:34 Speaker_02
With Afghanistan devastated by civil war, the Sudanese capital of Khartoum took on new significance in the mid-1990s.

00:59:45 Speaker_12
In 1992, expelled from his homeland, Osama bin Laden laid down roots in Sudan, which, like Afghanistan, is a historic crossroads of world civilization. African and Arab civilizations meet there, anchored on the Nile by the capital Khartoum.

01:00:02 Speaker_12
With no more communists left to kill, bin Laden soon put his money to work in Sudan, quickly becoming part of the country's political elite. As the Sudanese Islamic revolutionary, Hassan al-Turabi put it, quote, he was a hero in those days.

01:00:19 Speaker_02
But despite their one-time collaboration in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Brooklyn, New York, the United States government saw bin Laden very differently.

01:00:31 Speaker_02
Increasingly, the agency's Khartoum station cabled evidence to Langley that Bin Laden had developed the beginnings of a multinational private army, writes Steve Cole.

01:00:47 Speaker_05
We have focused our declaration of jihad on striking at the U.S. soldiers inside Arabia, the country of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina.

01:00:56 Speaker_02
By early 1995, CIA analysts described bin Laden's Khartoum headquarters as something like a venture capital firm doling out terror grants, or, as one analyst put it, as the quote-unquote Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic terrorism.

01:01:16 Speaker_02
At the top of 1996, approval came down at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center to create a new Get Bin Laden team, codenamed Alec Station. Meanwhile, a new U.S. ambassador to Sudan was still trying for talks with Sudanese leaders.

01:01:39 Speaker_02
Maybe there could be a way to get the Sudanese to give Bin Laden up.

01:01:46 Speaker_12
The US ambassador negotiated with the Sudanese in March 1996 to see about surrendering Bin Laden to the Americans.

01:01:55 Speaker_12
Years later, Steve Cole writes, the question of whether Sudan formally offered to turn Bin Laden over to the United States became a subject of dispute. Sudan's government has said it did make such an offer. American officials say it did not.

01:02:12 Speaker_05
In our religion, it is not permissible for any non-Muslim to stay in Arabia. Therefore, even though American civilians are not targeted in our plan, they must leave. We do not guarantee their safety.

01:02:24 Speaker_02
Increasingly aware that Khartoum was no longer safe, Osama made contact with some old friends in Jalalabad.

01:02:33 Speaker_02
Sudan's government leased a jet for two flights between Africa and Afghanistan, reports Steve Cole, to move Bin Laden's family and furniture in the summer of 1996. Who did Bin Laden blame for kicking him out of Sudan?

01:02:51 Speaker_02
He made it clear in a now-famous interview that took place about a week after his departure.

01:02:59 Speaker_12
In a remote mountainous area of Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, to which he has returned from Sudan with hundreds of his Arab Mujahideen guerrillas, the 40-year-old Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden declared that the killing of 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia last month marked, quote, the beginning of war between Muslims and the United States.