Bush rejected Taliban offers to hand over Bin Laden in October 2001

[cowcommander]

President George Bush rejected as "non-negotiable" an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.

Returning to the White House after a weekend at Camp David, the president said the bombing would not stop, unless the ruling Taliban "turn [bin Laden] over, turn his cohorts over, turn any hostages they hold over." He added, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty". In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir - the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime - told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

This article is over a decade old, but what are your thoughts? Let's say Gore won the presidency and he was in this position, would negotiating with the Taliban have been a better choice? Could this whole mess have been avoided by diplomacy?

[Turbineguy]

1. If he had taken their offer it would have blown everything.

Which is to say it would not have fucked up the world.

[musette_sf]

2. Well, duh, I remember this,

I remember hearing it on KGO while driving on Mission Boulevard in Fremont CA, to be exact. THAT'S how important this was to me and how enraged I was at hearing it.

(Duh is not directed towards you, it's a generic Duh as in, which part of Bu$hCo's insane Kabuki theatre of illegal war do most of us at DU NOT remember???)

Of COURSE diplomacy and international law enforcement was, is, and always will be the better choice. Not that I think a President Gore would have had to deal with October 2001 as a tragic aftermath - a President Gore (probably?) wouldn't have used the PNAC end game as his political game plan.

[sabrina 1]

3. They never had proof that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11

so they could not accept that offer. OBL was never charged with that crime. He was charged with the Embassy bombings. Because we never had a real investigation into that horrific crime, people still think OBL WAS charged with having orchestrated it.

[musette_sf]

4. So why couldn't he be taken on the Embassy bombing charges?

After all, they got Al Capone on tax evasion.

[sabrina 1]

5. True, but then there would have been no reason to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

[musette_sf]

8. Oh yeah, that PNAC game plan.

[thelordofhell]

6. If Gore won the presidency......911 wouldn't have happened

OBL would have been bombed

[MH1]

12. yes to your subject line.

Not sure if OBL would have been bombed, but Gore would have been much more on top of the intelligence. He understood the threat and the players. George the Lesser was clueless.

[thelordofhell]

21. He would have continued President Clinton's policy of bombing OBL

And I think Gore would have got him

[wizstars]

18. When Al Gore read that 'Bin Laden tdetermined to Strike US' his response wouldn't have been...

..."Okay, you've covered your ass now."

And history would've been drastically changed for the better.

[Kahuna]

26. Yep. Think of how that one person (Al Gore) could have affected

the history of the world for much better. Elections do have consequences.

ETA, The consequences of the 2010 elections also have led to dire consequences for our country. This is why I constantly blame the voters and non voters in 2010 for the state of affairs. Again, elections do have consequences.

[Bragi]

7. Yes, the Afghan war was quite avoidable

I remember it all quite well. Bush wanted to retaliate by bombing somewhere, and many Americans passionately supported almost blind retaliation.

At any rate, once OBL left Afghanistan in December 2001 for a safe house in Pakistan, there was no further reason for invading and occupying Afghanistan.

Contrary to bipartisan hype, the Afghanistan war was never a just or a good war.

[musette_sf]

10. And why didn't Bu$hCo's crack National Security Advisor

and Cold War expert under GHWB immediately assert, "If Russia/USSR lost their @ss in Afghanistan, that should tell us that we'll lose ours too if we engage in such folly"?

Anyone who's followed the news for the last 30 years could figure THAT out without a Ph.D in political science.

[Bragi]

14. Because Bush was hiding under his desk?

Bush was useless in the early hours. Cheney took over and he wanted a war. It was too early to invade Iraq, but Afghanistan looked like a cakewalk. Just bomb the place to shit, kill OBL and everyone around him, and get out.

But things got complicated. OBL fled to Pakistan and the protection of the ISI. The Taliban fled across the border. A puppet government was created and given enough time to fail. And there we are today.

[musette_sf]

16. Edit - got it now, it was Bu$hie who was hiding -

But Ms Rice knew damn well that Afghanistan was never going to be any "cakewalk".

Rummy's sick game of Risk A La PNAC was already cooked up with Cheney, and any caution that Ms Rice might have offered would have been ignored anyway. And from her lengthy tenure with Bu$hCo, it appears that loyalty to Bu$hCo superseded her knowledge and integrity.

[Bragi]

17. Pretty much, yeah

That's certainly consistent with what I saw go down.

[liberal N proud]

9. The bu$h regime needed a boogie man

So they could start wars and circumvent our civil liberties.

[UTUSN]

11. R#2 & k N/R

[grantcart]

13. Please, this silliness again.

The Taliban were playing a very transparent and laughable PR game.

Anyone knowledgeable of Afghan history and the terrible events that were coordinated and immediately prior to 9/11 knows that there is clear proof of prior knowledge of 9/11 by Mullah Omar.

Yes and Hitler was very sincere when he said that if Germany was only interested in protecting the German minority in Austria and if he could simply put a few troops over there he would leave all of Europe alone.

[Bragi]

15. You're just wrong

I think you're wrong in your assessment of the situation, wrong in claiming superior knowledge of the region, and wrong to dismiss any views other than yours as "silliness". Additionally, your Hitler comment is simply incomprehensible.

[grantcart]

20. Well I was involved in resettling 10,000 Afghan refugees between 1980 and 1985

and visited the region and the refugee camps a couple of times a year so if you have more intimate involvement than that then be my guest.

If you know any Afghans personally then ask them the significance of September 9th, a day that is much more significant to them than September 11th is to us.

Mullah Omar was deeply involved in the events of September 9th and every Afghan outside of the Taliban knows it. The events of September 9th were directly related to the events of September 11th.

It is the one thing that unites all Afghans. It is why no Afghan academic believes that the Taliban was ever interested in handing over bin Laden it was entirely for foreign consumption, in the same way that Hitler's justification for expanding into the Sudetenland to protect the German minorities was only for the gullible far away, people in the region knew the real reason.

The fact that you didn't reply to my point about events immediately prior to 9/11 makes it clear that you don't have any idea of their significance. Kind of like talking about the civil war and not knowing anything about Gettysburg.

[Rex]

23. So you where there for a period of time

decades before, that is great and all but does it really make you an expert on current events? No, not really.

[grantcart]

25. Well if you are asking if I have discoverd the Secret of the Sufi

I would answer you that I have not discovered it for myself but I know what it is that the Afghan Sufi seek.

I do manage to keep in touch fairly intimately in the area through my Muslim in law brother in law who is a translator for CNN in the area but I digress because you seem to be a much greater authority on all that is Afghan than I.

Let it simply be said that one can be the most basic neophyte on Afghan history and the mindset of the Afghan people to understand why the events that occured directly before September 11 undermine the wonderfully hubristic claim of the Taliban that they would hand over bin Laden, it rises to Captain Renault's astonishment that Rick's has illegal gambling.

[Cleita]

19. We were aware of this back then. I believe it

was part of the reason much of the world went out in the streets to protest an invasion, but the Bush administration, really headed by Dick Cheney, chose to ignore this offer and go to war instead. All the blood and destruction of the last ten years could have been avoided if the Supreme Court had not ripped the Presidency from the rightfully elected Al Gore. As much as I would like to see Bush and Cheney tried in the Hague for war crimes, I really would like to see the Supreme Court Justices impeached for their decision to overreach their jurisdiction and hand the Presidency to George Bush, a psychopathic idiot who should never have been our leader. I would want to see them publicly stripped of their judge robes and forbidden to practice law ever again. A prison sentence for treason would be nice too.

[patrice]

22. Thom Hartmann used to rant about this off & on for 4-5 years.

[Rex]

24. Well of course he did, what was the point of that?

PNAC needed to make trillions off of war while banksters robbed us blind. Evil men wanted people to die for profit and they got exactly what they wanted.