Bin Laden, Taliban Are Seen as Inexorably Linked

For many Americans, the end to Afghanistan’s agony begins with a simple step: Just show the door to Osama bin Laden.

After all, he’s a foreigner--a Saudi exile whose very presence has completed the diplomatic isolation of his Afghan hosts and brought more suffering to a people whose plight is already desperate after decades of war.

The ruling Taliban’s refusal even to consider such an option--even though the stance has drawn four days of U.S. airstrikes and raised the prospect of the regime’s demise--seems baffling to many in the West. It also reflects a startling disconnect between American expectations and Taliban capabilities in the wake of last month’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

“To a mind not in tune with this region, the answer is easy: Give him up,” noted Amir Usman, a former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan. “But it’s not like that. For anyone to think that the Taliban will handcuff him and say, ‘OK, you can take him’--that will never happen.”

One important reason: Bin Laden is no simple visitor.

His wealth, his role in fighting Soviet invaders during the 1980s and his connections to the corridors of power in other Muslim countries make him a powerful player in Taliban decision-making. He also is said to control a sizable Arab fighting force inside Afghanistan that some believe provides personal security for the Taliban’s reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

One symbol of just how closely Bin Laden and the Taliban are intertwined is that the man suspected by the United States in the Sept. 11 attacks is believed to be married to one of Omar’s daughters.

“He is one of them,” summed up Ahmed Rashid, author of “Taliban.” “The Taliban and Al Qaeda are fully integrated now.”

Al Qaeda is a loose network of terrorists, for the most part young and relatively well-educated Arab men. Western intelligence agencies believe that some of its members come from the ranks of Bin Laden’s Afghanistan-based fighting force, a kind of Islamic Internationale drawn from a number of countries by the Saudi militant’s personal aura and anti-American mission.

Kamal Matinuddin, a retired Pakistani general who has written extensively about Afghanistan, including the book “The Taliban Phenomenon,” believes that Bin Laden’s money is another important strand of power. He calls it a key source of income for a Taliban regime bereft of development aid and ruling over a destitute nation.

“He’s the goose that lays the golden egg,” Matinuddin said. “He helps Taliban hold 95% of what they have; he bankrolls their military operations.”

Rashid agreed. “Money from Bin Laden’s charities and drug trade is extremely critical for the Taliban, especially after U.N. sanctions imposed last January,” he said.

Those sanctions, passed by the Security Council after the Taliban failed to respond to earlier demands that it hand over Bin Laden, tightened economic controls on the country, restricted overseas travel by Taliban officials and forced the closure of the regime’s diplomatic missions and offices of the state-owned Ariana Airlines.

Some believe that such efforts to punish the Taliban for its ties to Bin Laden have only increased the Saudi’s influence within Afghanistan.

“Bin Laden’s power has gradually evolved partly as a result of the Taliban’s increasing isolation,” Rashid said. “As embassies shut down, it is his network that provides supplies, spare parts and ammunition. It is his contacts that are the links with the [oil-rich states of the Persian] Gulf.

“Taliban’s only contact with the outside world is through his network,” he said. “It’s a string of embassies. This has not been properly understood.”

Many observers thus believe that the United States must first bring down the Taliban in order to capture or kill Bin Laden. “Even though the Americans aren’t publicly declaring it, I’m sure that’s what their intelligence is telling them,” Rashid said.

Some go so far as to claim that Bin Laden and his Arab force run the Taliban. One proponent of this thesis is Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who in the mid-1990s played a key role in supporting the Taliban’s ascendancy to power. Her government had hoped that the religious movement’s rise would end a civil war that had plunged Afghanistan into chaos.

“They are Arabs from different countries together, and they drive around in shaded cars and no one crosses their path,” she said of Bin Laden’s force during a recent interview with Reuters in London. “He intimidates, and his force really runs the place like a vassal.”

There are Afghans as well who believe that the wealthy, sophisticated Saudi rules the roost.

“It’s Bin Laden who should be asked to turn over Mullah Omar, and not Mullah Omar who could turn over Bin Laden,” said Afghan refugee Dr. Sima Samar, who runs a network of clinics and schools on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. “Who is Mullah Omar anyway? I don’t think he’s anybody. I don’t think he can write his own name. He has been used, poor man.”

Others, such as former Pakistan envoy Usman, agree that Bin Laden is powerful but reject such assessments as exaggerated. Usman, a member of the same Pushtun ethnic group as the Taliban leaders, believes that other factors only vaguely understood by the West also prevent the Taliban from taking a path that seems so logical to an American.

In an interview, he maintained that what has helped reinforce the Taliban’s refusal to turn over Bin Laden are what he called the Afghans’ more “emotional, sentimental” Eastern mind-set, their sense of Muslim brotherhood and the powerful Pushtun code of protecting those who seek asylum.

On top of all this, he said, is the moral obligation felt by the Taliban to shield a prominent foreigner who helped rid the country of its Soviet occupation.

“He wasn’t from Afghanistan, but he fought and risked his life there, so he became an important person in this society,” Usman said. “Now he’s wanted by someone 10,000 miles away who isn’t very well-liked. I was surprised at how far the Taliban was prepared to go” toward meeting the U.S. demands.

Since Sept. 11, the Taliban has responded to American calls to turn over Bin Laden by offering to try him before an Islamic court on the basis of evidence presented by the United States. The Bush administration rejected the offer.

Omar also called a council of about 1,000 Afghan religious leaders to discuss Bin Laden’s fate and, to the surprise of many, received only a lukewarm endorsement for continuing to protect him. The clerics urged that Bin Laden leave their country voluntarily.

Despite this, few who know the Taliban and its ties with Bin Laden predict a change in its position.