- KABUL, Afghanistan - Within
the secretive Taliban hierarchy that ran this country for five years, it
was not hard to figure out how Osama bin Laden derived much of his
influence.
When the Saudi-born heir to a construction fortune called on Taliban
officials,
according to a former minister, he often brought wads of cash and
distributed
it freely -- sometimes taking out $50,000, even $100,000 at a time.
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- "He had money in his pocket," recalled Mohammed
Khaksar, who served as the Taliban's deputy interior minister. "Any
time he wanted, he would just pull it out and give it to them."
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- What bin Laden got for all this largess was equally clear
-- the freedom to operate his al Qaeda terrorist network from Afghanistan
without interference. "There wasn't anybody who had power over
Osama,"
Khaksar said. "He did whatever he wanted."
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- For the first time, a former senior Taliban official
has emerged publicly to provide a glimpse inside the militia that created
perhaps the world's most repressive Islamic state and a haven for
international
terrorists blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Once a close friend of the Taliban's supreme leader, Mohammad Omar, Khaksar
broke with his compatriots when they fled Kabul earlier this month and
last week declared his support for the Northern Alliance now in charge
in the capital, becoming the highest-ranking defector from the Taliban
inner circle.
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- In an interview today at the comfortable Kabul compound
where he still lives with his wife and tends his garden, Khaksar portrayed
a regime bought and paid for by bin Laden's millions. The alleged terrorist
lavished gifts on Taliban leaders -- cash, fancy cars and other valuables.
If the Taliban was planning an attack in the years-long civil war with
Northern Alliance guerrillas, he said, bin Laden would have 50 pickup
trucks
delivered to ferry fighters to the front.
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- "Al Qaeda was very important for the Taliban because
they had so much money," Khaksar said without offering any precise
figures. "They gave a lot of money. And the Taliban trusted
them."
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- The relationship between bin Laden and the Taliban
leadership
clearly also had roots in an ideological convergence: their common belief
in radical Islam and their anti-Western views. But Khaksar said he was
struck by the primary role that money came to play in recent years. While
his account of his own actions is impossible to confirm and may be colored
by his desire to distance himself from the Taliban, reports by U.S.
intelligence
agencies have described in detail how bin Laden bankrolled the Taliban,
providing an estimated $100 million in cash and military assistance since
1996.
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- A bearish man with searching eyes, a long beard streaked
with white and a weather-worn face making him look older than his 41 years,
Khaksar played an important role in the Taliban from the beginning. An
ethnic Pashtun like most members of the Taliban, he was one of the early
key figures in the movement, which emerged in 1994 and swept to power in
Kabul in 1996.
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- He served first as intelligence chief of the movement
and later as deputy interior minister, supervising security in the capital,
where brutal tactics were often used to enforce restrictions on women and
modern life. While Omar remained in his home base in Kandahar, much of
the rest of the government operated out of Kabul, and Khaksar had a place
at the table through many of its most controversial decisions.
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- Over the years, however, he became disenchanted,
particularly
by the arrival of bin Laden and his foreign fighters. He complained off
the record to reporters as early as 1999 and kept up a regular secret
dialogue
with the top military commander on the other side, Ahmed Shah Massoud,
who was assassinated in September, allegedly by bin Laden
operatives.
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- Abdullah, the Northern Alliance foreign minister, said
the information provided by Khaksar was particularly valuable. "It
was enough to make him an exception to all the Taliban leadership,"
he said, noting that for years, "Commander Massoud was in constant
contact with him."
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- Khaksar said today that he also served as a clandestine
contact for U.S. intelligence services while serving the Taliban. Agents
disguised as journalists visited him to solicit inside information, he
said. "They came two or three times, and they knew about my policy
and about my opinion," he said.
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- In Washington, CIA spokesman Tom Crispell said the agency
does not comment on such matters but that CIA policy is to not use American
media organizations as cover for clandestine operations.
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- Khaksar has provided enough intelligence to the Northern
Alliance to win him continued freedom despite his prominent position in
the Taliban. While the alliance has vowed to imprison or kill other senior
Taliban leaders, Khaksar remains in his own home, able to travel at will,
still guarded by some of the same fighters who surrounded him while he
was a Taliban official. He denied any complicity in "actions against
humanity."
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- Spared from retribution by his onetime enemies, Khaksar
probably has more to worry about from his former friends. He would be an
obvious target for any Taliban operatives or sympathizers still hiding
out in the city, but he brushes off concern, placing his trust in his
well-armed
guards and even declining an offer to relocate him to a safer location
in Golbahar, about 50 miles to the north.
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- In his second-floor office, sitting in front of a
bookcase
filled with religious texts, Khaksar described his transformation from
Taliban security enforcer to lonely dissenter.
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- "From the beginning, I was against Arabs and other
foreigners coming to Afghanistan but the other Taliban told me I must not
say that," Khaksar said. "At that time, I felt when foreigners
come to our country, our country would be destroyed. And now you see what's
happened."
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- Khaksar said he met bin Laden once, in 1996, and the
two did not hit it off. "I told him, 'Now there's no jihad in Afghanistan. Afghanistan can solve our own problems. We don't need you,' "
he recalled.
"He got very upset and I never saw him again."
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- Khaksar became one of the Taliban's most persistent
skeptics
of the increasingly close relationship with bin Laden. As time wore on,
bin Laden tried to win him over, but Khaksar said he never accepted money
or cars. Once bin Laden had intermediaries contact him to seek a truce.
"I told them to tell Osama bin Laden that I had the same opinion as
before: Just leave our country."
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- Besides Omar, who enjoys a close relationship with bin
Laden, the al Qaeda leader had several strong champions within the Taliban,
according to Khaksar, including interior minister Abdul Razaq, defense
minister Obaidullah, information and culture minister Amir Khan Mutaqqi,
security chief Qari Ahmadullah, eastern regional leader Abdul Kabir and
prominent commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.
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- Khaksar became especially disgruntled in March when the
Taliban leadership decided to destroy two ancient Buddha sculptures at
Bamian, saying they offended Islam. Documents unearthed since the Taliban's
retreat from Kabul suggested that al Qaeda pushed the Taliban into the
action that earned international opprobrium.
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- "It's a historic sculpture; they should not have
destroyed it," Khaksar said. "I felt like I lost a member of
my family when they destroyed this sculpture."
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- Khaksar said he had no warning about the Sept. 11
operation
to crash airplanes in Washington and New York and did not know if Omar
or any other top leaders did. But like many Americans, he immediately had
no doubt in his mind who was responsible. The day after the attacks, senior
Taliban officials, except for Omar, met in a palace in Kabul to discuss
what to do.
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- "I told the other ministers, 'I told you before
the guy would do something bad, and now it will have a bad effect on
Afghanistan,'
" Khaksar said. "They told me: 'You're going crazy. You shouldn't
speak so much.' They said Osama hasn't done such a thing, but if he has
done it, it's a good thing that he did. I told them these civilian people
who died and these two buildings, they were God's creation. They weren't
military soldiers; they were civilians. God will be angry that this was
done."
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- But his colleagues refused to turn over bin Laden,
leading
to the U.S. bombing campaign that began Oct. 7 and helped weaken Taliban
defenses enough to enable the Northern Alliance to overrun the north and
finally Kabul. Facing imminent defeat, the Taliban ministers met again
on the night of Nov. 12 and agreed to flee the city. Khaksar decided to
stay and take his chances with the enemy.
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- "I told them it's my country, I want to live
here."
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- Source: The Washington
Post
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