India Jumps on the Bandwagon to Apprehend bin Laden

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 4, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer, | Timothy W. Maier

The Clinton administration tried to kill Osama bin Laden a year ago, but U.S. cruise-missile strikes in Afghanistan left in their wake just a bunch of smoldering tents. Now the effort to get the Islamist terrorist leader -- the man behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa -- is being redoubled, and India appears to be the latest ally to be enrolled.

Last month, news alert! reported that the administration has been pressuring the Pakistani government of Prime Minister Nazar Sharif to provide a platform for a direct U.S. assault on the Afghanistan base of bin Laden, where he is protected by the fundamentalist Taleban government. U.S. diplomats have been canvassing elite figures in Pakistan one on one, trying to build support for a plan which would include both aerial bombardment and covert force on the ground. Sharif has been dithering, fearing that to go along with the U.S. plan would mean the probable collapse of his already deeply troubled government. The Taleban has strong sympathetic support in Pakistan, where its cause is pushed by Pakistani Islamists such as Maulana Sami-ul-Haq. They also are sympathetic to bin Laden. And the Pakistani intelligence service continues to supply the Taleban with arms.

A far more enthusiastic New Delhi now is being enlisted to help with the U.S. bid to get bin Laden and to punish the Taleban for protecting the terrorist leader. Mike Sheehan, assistant secretary of state in charge of counterterrorism, is to visit India in the next few weeks to follow up a just-concluded and unheralded trip to Washington by two senior officials from India's Ministry of External Affairs. The officials, Alok Prasad and Vivek Katju, held two rounds of talks with Karl Inderfurth, assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs; James Steinberg, deputy national-security adviser; and counterterrorist official Edmund Hall.

In the talks, which also were attended by Pentagon officials, the Indians claimed that bin Laden has been stirring the pot in the recent military clashes between India and Pakistan in the disputed Kargil region of Kashmir, according to diplomatic sources. When Sheehan visits New Delhi later this fall, his Indian counterparts are expected to provide him with a detailed dossier of bin Laden's activities along the Kashmir border.

Indian officials also appear to have gone some way in persuading the administration that the Taleban's opponents in Afghanistan, the Northern Forces of Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Masud, should be more "sympathetically" treated by the West. The Indian government secretly has been supplying weapons to the Northern Forces. According to Indian sources, the talks represented an "unprecedented exchange of ideas and information about events in the region."