Leaked US files burnish bin Laden mystique

Financial Times:

US intelligence files published by WikiLeaks feature a series linking Osama bin Laden to suicide bombings in Afghanistan, a plot to assassinate President Hamid Karzai and financial dealings with North Korea.

Sensational as the claims may be, a lack of corroboration and opaque sourcing suggest the raw reports will do more to burnish the al-Qaeda leader’s mystique than help reveal his whereabouts.

If true, the insights would challenge a widely held view that the Saudi dissident has been forced to relinquish operational command and serve more as an icon for aspiring jihadis since masterminding 9/11.

What can be said with more certainty is that Mr bin Laden’s flight from a hailstorm of US bombs in Afghanistan in 2001 was among the catalysts that turned Pakistan’s tribal areas into one of the deadliest cauldrons of Islamist violence.

While the US grapples with the war in Afghanistan, the emergence of an al-Qaeda-inspired militant federation spanning from Pakistan’s borderlands to its cities may pose a greater threat to the west.

“The new situation transcends Osama bin Laden,” said Imtiaz Gul, a Pakistani journalist and author of The Most Dangerous Place, a new book on the tribal agencies. “We don’t know whether Osama is still alive, but his legacy is very much there and it’s multiplying, and so are the militant leaders.”

Documents from among the cache of 75,000 Afghan war files posted earlier this week by WikiLeaks, a website that publishes classified information, detail operations involving Mr bin Laden since 2004, although the accounts cannot be verified.

Mr bin Laden is linked to a purported plot to use suicide bombers to kill Mr Karzai and is placed at meetings in 2006 with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of Afghanistan’s Taliban. Another report alleges that Amin al-Haq, Mr bin Laden’s money man, travelled to North Korea via Iran in 2005 to buy anti-aircraft rockets.

Western officials say a campaign of drone strikes by the US Central Intelligence Agency has curtailed the ability of al-Qaeda leaders to mount attacks.

However, containing Mr bin Laden may be easier than purging his ideas. Mr Gul argues that the US-led invasion of Afghanistan triggered an influx of al-Qaeda fighters who taught techniques including suicide bombing and internet propaganda to Pakistani militants.

Mr bin Laden’s global ideology provided the glue facilitating closer co-operation between Pakistani Tehrik-e-Taliban guerrillas and Sunni extremists cells from the populous Punjab province. The result is an increasingly fluid network united by a common hatred of US foreign policy whose members can pool resources to conduct more sophisticated attacks.

“The reality is this is a confederation of groups,” said a US military official. “The distinctions are never as clear as we tend to make them on our briefing slides.” Some analysts saw evidence of such collusion in twin assaults on mosques in Lahore in May that killed more than 90 people.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols