October 31, 2001	Wednesday	Shaba’an 13, 1422

WASHINGTON, Oct 30: The United States may have missed cryptic signals from the Taliban suggesting that Osama bin Laden was not under their control and the US could try to capture him.

This is suggested in a story in Monday’s Washington Post that quotes a former CIA station chief who oversaw US covert operations in Afghanistan in the 80s, Milton Bearden, as saying: “We never heard what they were trying to say. We had no common language. Ours was ‘Give up (Osama) bin Laden’. They were saying, ‘Do something to help us give him up’.”

On Feb 3, 1999, the Post says, then assistant secretary of state for South Asia, Karl Inderfurth, had met Taliban officials in Islamabad and delivered a “stern” message: the US would henceforth hold the Taliban responsible for any act by osama.

Imediately after this warning, Taliban forces took Osama from his Kandahar compound and spirited him away to a remote site and seized his satellite communications.

Publicly, the Taliban said they no longer knew where Osama was, and Mr Inderfurth now says that the US interpreted such statements as an effort on the part of the Taliban to evade their responsibility. However, Mr Bearden, according to the Post, believes that every time the Afghans said Osama was lost again, they were saying he was no longer under their protection.

“They thought they were signalling us subtly, and we don’t do signals.”

The paper says US officials met in public and secretly at least 20 times with Taliban representatives over three years to discuss ways the regime could bring Osama to justice, and even after Sept 11, the Taliban’s “mysterious manoeuvering continued”.

Mr Bearden was said to have telephoned a Taliban representative, Mr Rahmatullah Hashmi, in Kandahar earlier this month. He seemed full of optimism that Saudi scholars and an upcoming OIC conference would give their blessings to America’s demand that the Taliban should “cough up” Osama. There was a 50-50 chance that something could happen if the Saudis stepped in, Mr Hashmi reportedly told Mr Bearden. But the move never “clicked”.

The Post story will undoubtedly raise questions again about whether US policy in not publicly recognizing the Taliban and in not engaging it in serious negotiations was well conceived.