The Warnings Were on Page 1

I have come across some intelligence reports. They may shed light on how America was caught off guard Sept. 11.

Here is one dispatched from the forbidding mountains of Afghanistan by an American analyst. It concerns the Taliban.

“To anyone who has followed this Asian country’s ongoing tragedy, one question that comes to mind is: What will these boys and young men be doing in five or 10 years?”

This intelligence report is dated Aug. 7, 1996--five years, one month and four days before the terrorist attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon.

A few years later, this same American expert followed the trail to Europe. On Jan. 13, 2000, he prepared an intelligence report, quoting a French anti-terrorism authority: “More and more in the future, the United States is going to be a target that will replace the traditional targets, like France.”

Why didn’t this crucial information come to light sooner? Actually it did. And why didn’t we act on it? Well, for that each of us must answer because these were the intelligence reports of my journalist colleague John-Thor Dahlburg, and they were published on Page 1 of the Los Angeles Times.

Dahlburg, of course, wasn’t the only foreign correspondent to see attacks coming. But for my money, no one did a better job of it. Over and over again, for years now, he has been sounding warnings. He explained the motive and the means and predicted the timing.

If you could have pleaded this evidence in court, I doubt that any judge in the country would have refused a restraining order against the Taliban. It was that clear and convincing and, we now know, horribly provident.

Folks, there was no intelligence failure this time. That debate is a diversion created by politicians seeking scapegoats. Dahlburg and a whole lot of others, including you and me, the government and newspaper readers everywhere, saw this trouble brewing. Dahlburg held nothing back. His messages were direct.

Yawn, we spent the summer gossiping about Gary Condit and worrying about consumer confidence and wondering why George W. Bush looked so much more comfortable on camera when he wore blue jeans. Oh yes, I recall hearing something about a new anti-terrorism task force being created in the executive branch. Funny, I didn’t see it in the headlines until after Sept. 11.

If anyone is to blame for an intelligence failure, it is us, the stakeholders in our democracy. And, of course, those we elect to serve us.

But let’s not be too harsh on ourselves right now. Instead, let’s try to be constructive. Let’s look at another failure--a big failure--behind the mess we face in Afghanistan and the larger world of radical Islam. Maybe this will help explain why we so quickly turned our eyes from the obvious.

The failure was this: The U.S. had a lot to do with bringing this grief upon itself.

The CIA has a term for operations that go out of control: blowback. That’s what happened in Afghanistan.

These angry radicals who have now declared war on the West emerged from a movement we financed and armed. Then it turned against us. Blowback. These holy warriors are the children of an American foreign policy that once before, as now, split the world into friend or foe. The Soviet Union was our Cold War adversary in the late 1970s. The enemy of our enemy is our friend, the U.S. decreed. Our friends, these anti-Soviet rebels, received about $500 million a year in U.S. support and weaponry.

Then the blowback.

When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, our interest in this woe-begotten country faded fast. The U.S. and Soviets left behind a wasteland of hatred, guns and impoverishment. The rebels set upon themselves, continuing the destruction of their country, fueled by anger and desperation, with no friends except their god. In that caldron the Taliban was born.

Our onetime proxies in this hot front of the Cold War, like Osama bin Laden, have now dispersed into the Balkans, into the Far East, throughout the Mideast, into Western Europe and even the U.S. They carry with them the training and the devotion we encouraged and perhaps even the Stinger antiaircraft missiles we provided them.

“We are creating our own monsters,” a Russian diplomat told Dahlburg years ago. The State Department agreed. In the mid-1990s, it concluded that the Afghan war against the Soviet Union was the birthplace of the modern “transnational terrorist.”

We cannot say we weren’t warned. We can hope we’ll be wiser now.

I spoke with Dahlburg this week. He is in Florida, reporting on the movements of terrorists in the United States. Blowback is still on his mind. Much of the country is obsessed with Bin Laden, dead or alive. Dahlburg worries about another generation of boys and young men in Afghanistan and Pakistan who know nothing but cycles of violence and wrath, and who now seem destined to witness another. “What will they being doing five or 10 years from now?” he still wonders.