Published in Covert Action Magazine – 10/15/2021
On September 11, 2001—a day that will live in infamy in U.S. history—hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center in New York City and one side of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., which experienced destruction. President George W. Bush’s administration started a war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, after quickly blaming Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and Afghanistan’s Taliban for harboring bin Laden.
The Bush administration, however, had spurned an agreement by which the Taliban would have turned over bin Laden which was agreed to following al-Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. According to Kabir Mohabbat, an Afghan-American businessman and State Department envoy to the Taliban, by the end of 1999, in the face of crippling U.S. sanctions, the Taliban had come to see bin Laden and his training camps as “just a damn liability.”