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U.S. Tried to Woo Taliban in ‘90s
Thursday, September 20, 2001

WASHINGTON -- Boston Globe Online
During the Clinton administration, US diplomats held more than a dozen meetings with Taliban officials in a courtship aimed at getting the Afghan leadership to moderate its views and create the basis for a stable, broad-based government.

The meetings, at the level of ambassador and assistant secretary of state, took place off and on throughout the 1990s and were held in Washington and New York, in Kandahar and Kabul in Afghanistan, and in Peshawar and Islamabad in Pakistan.

That courtship persisted even after Osama bin Laden was blamed for the deadly attacks on two US embassies in Africa in 1998 and after US forces bombed his Afghanistan base.

At the same time, a similar private-sector effort was underway. A US-led consortium sought to win the Taliban’s backing for a Central Asian pipeline that would carry oil and gas through Afghanistan. As part of that diplomacy, Taliban members were entertained in Houston and hosted at the University of Nebraska in a bid for their support.

Though ultimately unfruitful, those contacts signified what US officials and others had hoped would be flexibility in the Taliban, a cast of fervent clerics and hardened war veterans who first emerged in Afghanistan in 1994.

“In the beginning, it was a question of who they were and whether they could establish some sort of law and order,” said Karl F. Inderfurth, who oversaw relations with Afghanistan at the State Department from 1997 to 2000. “The feeling was, ‘Gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have some commercial undertakings.’”

Inderfurth and other US diplomats insist that Washington never supported the Taliban, even though two of its main allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, were instrumental in the Taliban’s rise and conquest of Kabul in 1996.

“The idea that we ‘supported’ the Taliban was never true,” said Robin Raphel, Inderfurth’s predecessor as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 1993 to 1997.

“What we did do was treat them like the other factions,” Raphel said. “As time goes by, they became what they’ve become, which is extremely conservative, and indulged all their worst instincts.”
(More: Boston Globe Online News Source)

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