The Guardian reports: Documents found in the house where Osama bin Laden was killed a year ago show a close working relationship between top al-Qaida leaders and Mullah Omar, the overall commander of the Taliban, including frequent discussions of joint operations against Nato forces in Afghanistan, the Afghan government and targets in Pakistan.
The communications show a three-way conversation between Bin Laden, his then deputy Ayman Zawahiri and Omar, who is believed to have been in Pakistan since fleeing Afghanistan after the collapse of his regime in 2001.
They indicate a “very considerable degree of ideological convergence”, a Washington-based source familiar with the documents told the Guardian.
The news will undermine hopes of a negotiated peace in Afghanistan, where the key debate among analysts and policymakers is whether the Taliban – seen by many as following an Afghan nationalist agenda – might once again offer a safe haven to al-Qaida or like-minded militants, or whether they can be persuaded to renounce terrorism.
One possibility, experts say, is that although Omar built a strong relationship with Bin Laden and Zawahiri, other senior Taliban commanders see close alliance or co-operation with al-Qaida as deeply problematic.
Western intelligence officials estimate that there are less than 100 al-Qaida-linked fighters in Afghanistan, and last year the United Nations split its sanctions list to separate the Taliban and al-Qaida.
Unfortunately, neither Omar nor binLaden were major national leaders so, it seems there’s no there there. Taliban had been invited to WashDC by Clinton. Does that mean that we were telling it what to do and then, for reasons unknown, it switched on us to binLaden? Same with binLaden, we fed him $millions and arms! Ironically, we who saw Hanoi as a Communist Internationalist regime, despite the Sino-Soviet split, suddenly stopped seeing it that way once we left. So it will be the the alQaeda-Taliban alliance. The sad part is that dumb generals who think themselves able to sell iceboxes to Eskimos are wasting the lives of soldiers that we can’t replace at less that $100,000 each…and I won’t mention the material costs. All for what? Take note of this US Army analysis of post-Vietnam War Vietnamese Communist Army:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20079292?uid=3739808&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=56124554133
Suddenly, per our military, it was no longer the beast we had to defeat in order to save SE Asia; nope, it was this dumb useless thing, corrupt and incompetent. And we the losers were now the judges!
I saw so many young men raised by their parents to become someone they would be proud of just step on some twigs or just raise their heads in the dark and, BOOM!, all the dreams of mom and dad shattered to little pieces. CIA got the jerks because the military had to get both the best mil and intel, whatever the cost. And look at what we’ve got for our money: the equivalent of men in loin cloths whose killing we celebrate because they “hit us at home.” But to this day no one is wondering how it is that they managed to do 9/11…even now as we’re expecting an encore!
The truth is that irresponsible airlines made it possible, not that alQaeda are supermen. But so long as we cover for the airlines by attributing everything to big bad binLaden instead of airlines irresponsible dereliction of duty, we’re going to be chasing ghosts at $1billion a pop. When will the idiot generals be demoted or pink slipped as after Vietnam so we can see if we can find more able replacements instead of letting them tell our media what to tell us?
We can’t afford to fear “Creatures From the Black Muslim Lagoon” and give the responsibility of getting them to the worst and the dullest. They couldn’t even capture an unarmed old man (I won’t mention how, once again, as in 1979, their $multimillons helicopters broke down) so they had to blow him to bits! There was a time when we had real quiet spooks, not bulls in china shops like Mossad. We proved nothing by killing binLaden, just as we prove noting by killing Talibans. For many young Muslims revenge is a motive and “Crusader Evil” a cause that we feed every time we show-off our mass-murder gadgets. The mission must be done discretely so that every failure can be as silent as every success. The days of the big army sent to war by a big America that can afford it are over because we burned $billions as if toy money. Now we must be discrete and stop releasing “documents” that show the obvious while indicting our national character as nation of butchers…just like alQaeda!