Monday, May 12, 2008
Did a shadowy group of American diplomats threaten the Taliban last year, provoking the 9/11 attack? Many on the left think so. Now the diplomats tell their side of the story.
Aug 15, 2002 | In July 2001, a group of retired diplomats from the United States, Iran, Pakistan and Russia gathered in Berlin to discuss the future of Afghanistan. It was one of several brainstorming sessions about that troubled country sponsored by the United Nations last year. During the days, the men met in tony hotel conference rooms. At night, they shared drinks or dinner. And during every discussion, the diplomats focused on the Taliban -- how to make the radical Muslim group form a broad-based government and give up Osama bin Laden, who was suspected of masterminding several terrorist attacks.
These facts about the Berlin meeting are not in dispute. Everything else is. The question of exactly what was said in Berlin and how it was translated to the Taliban has become the centerpiece of a vast dispute about the Bush administration, Osama bin Laden and the buildup to the Sept. 11 attacks. On the left, it has become an article of faith for many that the U.N.-sponsored meetings were part of a concerted Bush administration effort to push for an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan. When the talks fell apart, it's been alleged, the administration used the diplomats to issue a military threat, which was carried back to the Taliban. Bin Laden, the theory goes, then decided to strike first, making the Sept. 11 attacks not a random act of terrorist violence, but rather a preemptive strike -- a calculated response to the Bush administration's love of oil, and its irresponsible saber-rattling in pursuit of it.
That tangled theory mostly hinges on one source: Niaz Naik,a member of the Pakistani delegation to the U.N. talks, who told the British press two weeks after Sept. 11 that the United States had issued a military threat at the meetings. He told the same story to several French reporters in the following months. In Naik's early telling, Tom Simons -- a U.S. delegate at the meetings and former ambassador to Pakistan -- issued a noteworthy ultimatum: "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."
The quote and Naik's account of the Berlin meeting took on lives of their own -- especially after a pair of French authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, made Naik a key figure in their international bestseller, "Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden." According to the book, Naik confirmed what the authors had been told by legendary FBI anti-terror czar John O'Neill before he died Sept. 11 -- that oil interests had hampered the investigation into Osama bin Laden's terror network, and provoked the U.S. into making a military threat that triggered Sept. 11. The Berlin threat Naik described, they argued, was the result of President Bush's attempt to access central Asian oil. "The suicide attacks of Sept. 11 were the outcome of this initiative -- an outcome that was as forseeable as it was tragic," the authors wrote in the French edition of their book, published earlier this year.
More than a year after the Berlin meeting, the theory is everywhere. One Web site calls "Forbidden Truth" "a major bombshell about the true origins of this conflict." Another, Democrats.org, tells readers how to buy "the book that Bush doesn't want you to read this summer." Customer reviews at Amazon.com lavish high praise on Brisard, Dasquie and their book. Even high-profile left-wing intellectuals like Gore Vidal continue to spread Naik's basic theory -- that Sept. 11 occurred because, in Vidal's words, "they knew we were coming."
Not every lefty has fallen for this line of thinking. David Corn has written several blistering condemnations of Brisard and Dasquie's efforts in the Nation, alleging that they've played fast and loose with the facts while making "an utterly illogical case." Ken Silverstein, writing in the American Prospect, has also punctured the idea that the Bush administration only invaded Afghanistan to access oil. Even Brisard and Dasquie have softened their rhetoric; the English version of the book that hit stores in July contains several new paragraphs that attempt to qualify earlier assertions. The line quoted above has been rewritten to say that the attacks were the "possible outcome" of Bush policies.
So who's right, Vidal and the French authors or their critics? Was oil a key motive behind Bush administration overtures to the Taliban last year? What were the U.N.'s so-called "Track 2" discussions, and what were they supposed to yield? Did the Americans, intentionally or unintentionally, issue a threat? Who is Niaz Naik anyway, and can he be believed?
There's an aura of mystery to most of the writing about these questions, as though getting to the truth requires penetrating a conspiracy wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma. Brisard and Dasquie, like much of the European press, treat the Track 2 meetings as cloak-and-dagger affairs. In "Forbidden Truth," they're characterized as "private and risky discussions," and the American delegates are part of a "secretive 'sub-group" that President Bush apparently sent on a very private mission. The French authors quote Naik directly, but never interviewed the Americans. In an e-mail, Brisard says he and Dasquie "didn't interview directly the U.S. delegation simply because there was enough evidence to prove that a threat was effectively stated in July in Berlin." Their absence from the book leaves the impression, however unintentional, that these shadowy figures have chosen to stay in the shadows.
That part of the story, at least, turned out not to be true. I tracked down the American participants in the July Berlin meeting, as well as Naik himself, and asked them what went on. All were eager to talk. Their answers don't necessarily add up to the truth, forbidden or otherwise, about their abortive diplomatic project, but they dispel some of the myths that have grown up around it.
Get Salon in your mailbox!