Afghanistan, al-Qaida and 9/11 — Ted Rall has a slightly different take

Rall this week gives his clearest enunciation to his thesis that Osama bin Laden did NOT orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.

Well, who, then? Is Rall a conspiracy theorist?

The answer to the second question is no. Rall doesn’t believe George W. Bush or Mossad orchestrated the attacks. He does finger Muslim radicals.

Only, he points the finger at the Egyptian-originated Islamic Jihad, not al-Qaida. Now, that said, Islamic Jihad was founded by bin Laden right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri, and in June 2001, Zawahiri officially merged it with al-Qaida.

So, if I’m reading Rall correctly, he’s arguing that Zawahiri had at least started this operation before the merger, and that he kept independent control of it afterward, to the degree he still had any hands on the operation in those last three months.

I think Ted is hair-splitting a bit here. Zawahiri and bin Laden were together long before the formal merger of their organizations. Even if bin Laden didn’t start the idea, he certainly was involved. That said, after the merger, Islamic Jihad controlled six of nine seats on the combined entities’ “board of directors.”

Anyway, this is a sidebar to Rall’s belief that we, contrary to Democrats who still want one war, shouldn’t be in Iraq OR Afghanistan.

First, as he notes, if we want(ed) bin Laden, well, he was almost certainly in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, on 9/11. There, he’s right. And, considering that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence had built up the Taliban hosts of al-Qaida and Islamic Jihad for years, we should have done more with Pakistan. Rather than warn Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to play ball with us, if we had any CIA capability, we probably should have looked at overthrowing him. At the least, we should have told him we would blockade the country if he didn’t seal his border against Afghanistan, and hand over bin Laden ASAP.

Anyway, back to Rall’s take on Afghanistan. He says that since Afghan President Hamid Karzai only controls about 15 percent of the country, even less than the official U.S. estimate of 30 percent, we’d be pounding sand down a rathole to follow up on Barack Obama’s “mini-surge” idea of sending 3,000-8,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Beyond the strategic issues are the social and natural geography ones: Afghanistan’s population is about 20 percent larger than Iraq’s and its land area about 50 percent greater.