WASHINGTON, Dec 20: Former US president Bill Clinton’s hunt for Osama bin Laden was “marked by caution against an enemy that the president and his advisers knew to be ruthless and bold”, and he had defined the enemy as an individual terrorist, not the providers of sanctuary for attacks against the United States.

This is claimed in a series of two articles by staff writer Barton Gellman published in The Washington Post documenting how the Clinton administration had grappled with the Osama bin Laden problem.

The publication of the second instalment of the article on Thursday coincides with the completion of 100 days of the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism”.

The article reveals that the CIA’s directorate of operations had recruited, trained, paid or equipped surrogate forces in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and among tribal militias inside Afghanistan, with the common purpose of capturing or killing Osama.

The Pakistani channel and its Uzbek counterpart never bore fruit. Inside Afghanistan, tribal allies twice reported to their CIA handlers that they fought skirmishes with Osama’s forces, but they inflicted no verified damage.

The article says while then prime minister Nawaz Sharif was reluctant to end support for the Taliban, he had offered to create a small commando force, trained and equipped by the Central Intelligence Agency, to try and kill Osama, but the proposal was seen as playing for time and soon afterwards Sharif was ousted from power by General Musharraf.

It is said that while his government came to believe that “the Taliban were inextricably tied to Osama, Clinton never seriously entertained the use of military force against the Islamic regime, still less the kind of broad campaign that removed the Taliban from power 10 days ago”.

Some other interesting excerpts from the Washington Post article are as follow:

* At least twice, Clinton dispatched senior emissaries to the Taliban with threats no less stark than the formula Bush laid out in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept 20. Osama bin Laden, they said, was an enemy of the United States, and a regime that provided him sanctuary should be prepared for the consequences.

* Clinton administration officials believed the Taliban would interpret the warning as a military threat.

* The administration never made good on it. Put baldly, several principal advisers said recently, the political and diplomatic market would not bear such a war.

* “Until Sept 11,” said Karl F. Inderfurth, who was assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, “there was certainly not any groundswell of support to mount a major attack on the Taliban. This is just a reality.”

* To supplement direct military efforts, the CIA’s clandestine service recruited three separate proxy forces for the bin Laden hunt. One came at Pakistan’s initiative. Throughout the first nine months of 1999, the Pakistani government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif — caught between its restless pro-Taliban military and its desire to curry Wes