U.S. attack may have cemented bin Laden, al-Qaida alliance

WASHINGTON — The U.S. cruise-missile strike on an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan in 1998 was meant to kill Osama bin Laden. But he apparently left shortly before the missiles struck, and newly declassified U.S. documents suggest the attack cemented an alliance with his Taliban protectors.

The State Department documents released Wednesday provide details of the evolving relationship between Taliban leader Mullah Omar and al-Qaida chief bin Laden over four months in 1998. The period begins Aug. 21, 1998, one day after the U.S. launched 62 Tomahawk cruise missiles at two al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan as retaliation for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7 of that year. Bin Laden was believed to be at one of the camps, but he left shortly before the missiles struck.

Omar said publicly on Aug. 21 that he would continue to protect bin Laden. But the next day, he told a State Department employee in private that he would be open to negotiating bin Laden's presence in Afghanistan, where he had been since he was expelled from Sudan in 1996.

Those talks took place sporadically over the next few months in 1998, according to documents obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In the interim, however, bin Laden had traveled south in Afghanistan to Kandahar. There, he would be close to Omar, who wanted to "keep a watch on him," according to a secret cable sent from Islamabad, Pakistan, to U.S. diplomatic and military posts on Sept. 9, 1998.

The U.S. once had believed the Taliban's ambitions were confined to turning Afghanistan into a Sunni Muslim theocracy. Now, however, there were signs that Omar's association with bin Laden was driving him toward a greater goal — unification of all Muslims under a single Islamic state.

The rest of the documents detail unsuccessful U.S. attempts to persuade the Taliban to expel bin Laden. Bin Laden remained in Afghanistan until after Sept. 11, 2001, when he apparently was driven out by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. He is believed to be hiding in western Pakistan's border area.