(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden [1]

['John F. Harris', 'October']

Date: 2001-10-15

President Bush rejected an offer from Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to turn over suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden to a neutral third country yesterday as an eighth day of bombing made clear that military coercion, not diplomacy, remains the crux of U.S. policy toward the regime.

"They must have not heard: There's no negotiations," Bush told reporters on the White House South Lawn after returning from Camp David. That brusque dismissal came on a day when Attorney General John D. Ashcroft warned in television appearances that nearly 200 people with potential links to the Sept. 11 attacks -- some of whom he believes are probably terrorists themselves -- remain at large in the United States.

Administration officials also said they have no evidence linking the discovery of small amounts of anthrax in three states to bin Laden's al Qaeda network, or to terrorists of any variety. But Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said law enforcement authorities are acting on the assumption that anthrax-tainted letters were sent by someone with terrorist designs. "It certainly is an act of terrorism to send anthrax through the mail," he said on "Fox News Sunday."

New York officials said a police detective and two lab scientists were exposed to minute amounts of anthrax from handling an envelope mailed to NBC News but that they are not in danger of contracting the disease.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice sounded a more reassuring note. On CBS's "60 Minutes" she dismissed speculation that terrorists may have a nuclear bomb. "We have no credible evidence at this point of a specific threat of that kind," she said.

Bush's words were a response to remarks by Afghan Deputy Prime Minister Haji Abdul Kabir, who told reporters in Jalalabad that if the United States halts bombing, "then we could negotiate" turning bin Laden over to another country, so long as it was one that would not "come under pressure from the United States."

Bush has rebuffed similar offers in the past, and administration officials rejected the latest move as a desperation-driven delaying tactic. Bush repeated his stance that to halt the bombing, the Taliban regime must unconditionally "turn him [bin Laden] over. Turn his cohorts over. Turn any hostage they hold over. Destroy all the terrorist camps."

Drawing a line in colloquial terms, Bush added: "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty. Turn him over. If they want us to stop our military operations, they just gotta meet my conditions, and when I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations."

Bush's reference to eight foreign aid workers held in Afghanistan was notable because until yesterday he had avoided calling them hostages, instead using language like "unjustly imprisoned." His decision to strip away euphemism suggested the rising intensity of the war on the Taliban.

U.S. warplanes continued to pound multiple targets in Afghanistan, setting the stage for what defense officials say could be helicopter assaults and Special Forces raids in the days ahead. Bombs fell during daylight hours on the southern city of Kandahar, headquarters of the country's ruling Taliban militia, and heavy bombing of the Afghani capital, Kabul, began as night fell. The Taliban also reported bombing in the cities of Mazar-e Sharif, Jalalabad and Herat.

At the Pentagon, a spokesman said the raids were designed "to keep the pressure on over there. That's what we'll continue to do each day."

Defense officials had no comment on Taliban claims that U.S. bombing had killed 200 people in Karam, a village in the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan. Taliban representatives took foreign journalists to the village, marking the first time since the bombing began Oct. 7 that foreigners had been escorted into areas controlled by the Taliban. Enraged villagers surged toward the journalists upon their arrival in Karam, the Associated Press reported.

The latest shower of bombs destroyed Kabul's international telephone exchange, military officials said, eliminating one of the nation's last ways of communicating outside its borders.

Meanwhile, an array of senior Bush administration officials were on the Sunday public affairs shows, most bearing messages bluntly underscoring the continued risks facing Americans more than a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Ashcroft said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that authorities have arrested and detained 700 people to date, some of them with direct associations with the Sept. 11 hijackers, others with more tangential reasons for arousing suspicion or questions. But he added that about 190 people that authorities want to talk to have not been found -- and that some of those almost surely had terrorist designs.

"I believe that it is very unlikely that all of those individuals who were associated with or involved with the terrorism events of September 11 and other terrorism events that may have been prepositioned and preplanned have been apprehended," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Rice took the lead in defending the administration on two sensitive points. One is that the the United States is courting an anti-American backlash across the Muslim world with its attack on Afghanistan. Pleading for a sense of proportion, Rice said, "You're seeing thousands of people demonstrate in countries that have millions of people."

In addition, she said the administration's effort to replace the Taliban with a coalition government is not a reversal of Bush's stand against "nation building" that he sounded so often during his presidential campaign, when he accused the Clinton administration of foreign policy naivete{acute}.

"So, there's nothing wrong with nation building, but not when it's done by the American military," she said, implying that international organizations and diplomacy will be used to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan. "And that's what the president was speaking to -- during the campaign and after."

Preventing the war from destabilizing other countries in the region -- both in the near- and longer-term -- is Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's mission on a trip that began yesterday to Pakistan and India, where he hopes to bolster key U.S. allies in South Asia and to ease tensions between those two countries.

Powell will show support for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, whose government is being rocked by protests from Taliban supporters. The United States is counting on Musharraf's government to provide intelligence to help find bin Laden, bases for U.S. forces, air rights and assistance with masses of Afghan refugees fleeing the fighting.

The United States is also looking for Pakistani support for a political process that would lead to a broad, loose confederation of Afghan ethnic and political groups.

One possible tension is the length of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. "I think the longer this operation lasts, the greater the damage, and collateral damage, and the larger the number of Afghan refugees that enter Pakistan, the greater will be the worry and concern in Pakistan," Pakistan's Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said yesterday on ABC's "This Week."

Powell will press the two countries to settle their rival claims over the region of Kashmir. India wants the United States to take a hard line against Pakistani groups engaging in acts of terrorism there, while the administration is eager to avoid adding to problems in Pakistan.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said in an interview on WJLA's "Capital Sunday" that "very high on [Powell's] agenda is to try to work both sides to lower the temperature somewhat and bring down the tension."

In addition, some administration officials have advocated that the United States start to discuss ways to improve security for Pakistan's nuclear weapons, which some experts believe could number between 30 and 50. But it remained unclear whether Powell had decided to address the sensitive issue at this time, and some experts say that certain safeguarding measures could increase the danger of Pakistan deploying its weapons.

People familiar with discussions within the administration said that Powell is likely to urge both Pakistan and India to return to the Lahore initiative, an attempt by both to take confidence-building measures to reduce the possibility of a nuclear exchange.

The administration continued to walk a fine line on the issue of future targets in America's war on terrorism, seeking to get better cooperation from some coalition partners who have harbored terrorist groups without wrecking the coalition on Afghanistan. "The president made the decision that in this phase, we are concentrating on al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. So I think that the decision has been made, and that's where our focus is," Armitage said. "If after solving this problem and resolving this problem, the coalition felt it was necessary to go after terrorist groups in other countries, this would be a matter for the coalition to discuss among themselves."

Staff writers Mike Allen, Vernon Loeb and Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

President Bush repeats, "There's no negotiations" for Osama bin Laden.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/10/15/bush-rejects-taliban-offer-on-bin-laden/bc0ec919-082b-40e6-91ca-55e5ca34a70a/

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/