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Bin Laden kept Taliban afloat
Compiled from Times wires KABUL, Afghanistan -- Within the secretive Taliban hierarchy that ran this country for five years, it wasn't hard to figure out how Osama bin Laden derived much of his influence. When the Saudi-born heir called on officials of the Taliban, according to a former minister, he often brought wads of cash and distributed it freely -- sometimes $50,000 to $100,000 at a time. "He had money in his pocket," recalled Mohammed Khaksar, who served as the Taliban's deputy interior minister. "Any time he wanted, he would just pull it out and give it to them." What bin Laden got for all this largesse was equally clear: the freedom to operate his al-Qaida terrorist network from Afghanistan without interference. "There wasn't anybody who had power over Osama," Khaksar said. "He did whatever he wanted." For the first time, a former senior Taliban official has emerged publicly to provide a glimpse inside the militia that created perhaps the world's most repressive Islamic state and a haven for international terrorists blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks. Khaksar, once a close friend of Taliban supreme leader Mohammed Omar, broke with his compatriots when they fled Kabul this month, but he also was in secret contact with senior Northern Alliance commanders for the past four years. Khaksar said he had been in close contact with commander Ahmed Shah Massood, the alliance's defense minister who was assassinated on Sept. 9, since 1997. Khaksar became disillusioned with the Taliban leadership after they captured Kabul in 1996. Last week, he declared his support for the Northern Alliance now in charge in the capital, becoming the highest-ranking defector from the Taliban inner circle. In an interview Thursday at the comfortable Kabul compound where he lives with his wife, Khaksar portrayed a regime bought and paid for by bin Laden's millions. The terrorist lavished cash, fancy cars and other valuables on Taliban leaders. If the Taliban were planning an attack on the Northern Alliance, he said, bin Laden would have 50 trucks delivered to take soldiers to the front. "Al-Qaida was very important for the Taliban because they had so much money," Khaksar said. "They gave a lot of money. And the Taliban trusted them." The relationship between bin Laden and the Taliban leadership clearly also had roots in an ideological convergence: their common belief in radical Islam and their anti-Western views. But Khaksar said he was struck by the primary role that money came to play. While his account of his own actions is impossible to confirm, reports by U.S. intelligence agencies have detailed how bin Laden bankrolled the Taliban, providing an estimated $100-million in cash and military assistance since 1996. Khaksar, 41, played an important role in the Taliban from the beginning. An ethnic Pashtun like most of the Taliban, he was one of the early key figures in the movement that emerged in 1994 and swept to power in Kabul in 1996. The former merchant served first as intelligence chief of the movement and later as deputy interior minister, supervising security in the capital. While Omar remained in his home base in Kandahar, much of the rest of the government operated out of Kabul, and Khaksar had a place at the table through many of its most controversial decisions. Over the years, however, he became disenchanted, particularly by the arrival of bin Laden and his foreign fighters. He complained off the record to reporters as early as 1999 and maintained a regular secret dialogue with Massood. "At the beginning, I expected that the Taliban would bring peace and stability, especially to the people who suffered from 23 years of war," Khaksar said. "But they didn't. So I contacted Massood." Khaksar has provided enough intelligence to the Northern Alliance to win him continued freedom despite his prominent position in the Taliban. While the alliance has vowed imprisonment or death for other senior Taliban leaders, Khaksar remains at home. He denied any complicity in "actions against humanity." Khaksar probably has more to worry about from his former friends. He would be an obvious target for Taliban sympathizers, but he brushes off concern. Khaksar said he met bin Laden in 1996, and they did not hit it off. "I told him: "There's no jihad in Afghanistan. Afghanistan can solve our own problems. We don't need you,' " he said. "He got very upset and I never saw him again." From then on, Khaksar was no longer in the Taliban's inner circle. He became one of the Taliban's most persistent skeptics of the close relationship with bin Laden. Once, bin Laden had intermediaries contact him to seek a truce. "I told them to tell Osama bin Laden that I had the same opinion as before: Just leave our country." Khaksar said he had no warning about the Sept. 11 operation to crash airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and did not know if Omar or any other top leaders did. But, like many Americans, he immediately had no doubt who was responsible. The next day, all the senior Taliban ministers other than Omar met to discuss what to do. "I told the other ministers, "I told you before the guy would do something bad, and now it will have a bad effect on Afghanistan,' " Khaksar said. "They told me: "You're going crazy. You shouldn't speak so much.' They said Osama hasn't done such a thing, but if he has done it, it's a good thing that he did. I told them these civilian people who died and these two buildings, they were God's creation. They weren't military soldiers; they were civilians. God will be angry that this was done." -- Information from the Washington Post and Knight Ridder was used in this report.
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