- Weeks before the terrorist attacks on 11 September, the
United States and the United Nations ignored warnings from a secret Taliban
emissary that Osama bin Laden was planning a huge attack on American soil.
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- The warnings were delivered by an aide of Wakil Ahmed
Muttawakil, the Taliban Foreign Minister at the time, who was known to
be deeply unhappy with the foreign militants in Afghanistan, including
Arabs.
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- Mr Muttawakil, now in American custody, believed the
Taliban's protection of Mr bin Laden and the other al-Qa'ida militants
would lead to nothing less than the destruction of Afghanistan by the US
military. He told his aide: "The guests are going to destroy the guesthouse."
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- The minister then ordered him to alert the US and the
UN about what was going to happen. But in a massive failure of intelligence,
the message was disregarded because of what sources describe as "warning
fatigue". At the same time, the FBI and the CIA failed to take seriously
warnings that Islamic fundamentalist students had enrolled in flight schools
across the US.
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- Mr Muttawakil's aide, who has stayed on in Kabul and
who has to remain anonymous for his security, described in detail to The
Independent how he alerted first the Americans and then the United Nations
of the coming calamity of 11 September.
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- The minister learnt in July last year that Mr bin Laden
was planning a "huge attack" on targets inside America, the aide
said. The attacks were imminent and would be so deadly the United States
would react with destructive rage.
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- Mr bin Laden had been in Afghanistan since May 1996,
bringing his three wives, 13 children and Arab fighters. Over time he became
a close ally of the obscurantist Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
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- Mr Muttawakil learnt of the coming attacks on America
not from other members of the Taliban leadership, but from the leader of
the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yildash. The organisation was
one of the fundamentalist groups that had found refuge on Afghan soil,
lending fighters for the Taliban's war on the Northern Alliance and benefiting
from good relations with al-Qa'ida in its fight against the Uzbek government.
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- According to the emissary, Mr Muttawakil emerged from
a one-to-one meeting with Mr Yildash looking shocked and troubled. Until
then, the Foreign Minister, who had disapproved of the destruction of the
Buddhist statues in Bamian earlier in the year, had no inkling from others
in the Taliban leadership of what Mr bin Laden was planning.
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- "At first Muttawakil wouldn't say why he was so
upset," said the aide. "Then it all came out. Yildash had revealed
that Osama bin Laden was going to launch an attack on the United States.
It would take place on American soil and it was imminent. Yildash said
Osama hoped to kill thousands of Americans."
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- At the time, 19 members of al-Qa'ida were in situ in
the US waiting to launch what would be the deadliest foreign attack on
the American mainland.
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- The emissary went first to the Americans, travelling
across the border to meet the consul general, David Katz, in the Pakistani
border town of Peshawar, in the third week of July 2001. They met in a
safehouse belonging to an old mujahedin leader who has confirmed to The
Independent that the meeting took place.
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- Another US official was also present - possibly from
the intelligence services. Mr Katz, who now works at the American embassy
in Eritrea, declined to talk about the meeting. But other US sources said
the warning was not passed on.
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- A diplomatic source said: "We were hearing a lot
of that kind of stuff. When people keep saying the sky's going to fall
in and it doesn't, a kind of warning fatigue sets in. I actually thought
it was all an attempt to rattle us in an attempt to please their funders
in the Gulf, to try to get more donations for the cause."
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- The Afghan aide did not reveal that the warning was from
Mr Muttawakil, a factor that might have led the Americans to down-grade
it. "As I recall, I thought he was speaking from his own personal
perspective," one source said. "It was interesting that he was
from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, but he gave no indication this was a
message he was carrying."
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- Interviewed by The Independent in Kabul, the Afghan emissary
said: "I told Mr Katz they should launch a new Desert Storm - like
the campaign to drive Iraq out of Kuwait - but this time they should call
it Mountain Storm and they should drive the foreigners out of Afghanistan.
They also had to stop the Pakistanis supporting the Taliban."
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- The Taliban emissary said Mr Katz replied that neither
action was possible. Nor did Mr Katz pass the warning on to the State Department,
according to senior US diplomatic sources.
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- When Mr Muttawakil's emissary returned to Kabul, the
Foreign Minister told him to see UN officials. He took the warning to the
Kabul offices of UNSMA, the political wing of the UN. These officials heard
him out, but again did not report the secret Taliban warning to UN headquarters.
A UN official familiar with the warnings said: "He appeared to be
speaking in total desperation, asking for a Mountain Storm, he wanted a
sort of deus ex machina to solve his country's problems. But before 9/11,
there was just not much hope that Washington would become that engaged
in Afghanistan."
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- Officials in the State Department and in UN headquarters
in New York said they knew nothing about a Taliban warning. But they said
they would now be looking into the matter.
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- Mr Muttawakil is now unavailable for comment - he handed
himself in to the Afghan authorities in the former Taliban stronghold of
Kandahar in southern Afghanistan last February. He is reported to be in
American custody there, one of the few senior members of the Taliban regime
the US has managed to arrest.
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- As America steadily broke the Taliban's military machine
last autumn, there were no Taliban defections. Apart from Mr Mutawakil's
one vain attempt to warn the world, the Taliban remained absolutely loyal
to their leader's vision.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=331115
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