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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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Taliban Defector Was A CIA Informant For Years
12-1-1
KABUL, Afghanistan - Within the secretive Taliban
hierarchy that ran this country for five years, it was
not hard to figure out how Osama bin Laden derived
much of his influence. When the Saudi-born heir to a
construction fortune called on Taliban officials,
according to a former minister, he often brought wads
of cash and distributed it freely -- sometimes taking
out $50,000, even $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 largess was equally
clear -- the freedom to operate his al Qaeda 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 on New York
and Washington. Once a close friend of the Taliban's
supreme leader, Mohammad Omar, Khaksar broke with his
compatriots when they fled Kabul earlier this month
and last week 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 today at the comfortable Kabul
compound where he still lives with his wife and tends
his garden, Khaksar portrayed a regime bought and paid
for by bin Laden's millions. The alleged terrorist
lavished gifts on Taliban leaders -- cash, fancy cars
and other valuables. If the Taliban was planning an
attack in the years-long civil war with Northern
Alliance guerrillas, he said, bin Laden would have 50
pickup trucks delivered to ferry fighters to the
front.
"Al Qaeda was very important for the Taliban because
they had so much money," Khaksar said without offering
any precise figures. "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 in
recent years. While his account of his own actions is
impossible to confirm and may be colored by his desire
to distance himself from the Taliban, reports by U.S.
intelligence agencies have described in detail how bin
Laden bankrolled the Taliban, providing an estimated
$100 million in cash and military assistance since
1996.
A bearish man with searching eyes, a long beard
streaked with white and a weather-worn face making him
look older than his 41 years, Khaksar played an
important role in the Taliban from the beginning. An
ethnic Pashtun like most members of the Taliban, he
was one of the early key figures in the movement,
which emerged in 1994 and swept to power in Kabul in
1996.
He served first as intelligence chief of the movement
and later as deputy interior minister, supervising
security in the capital, where brutal tactics were
often used to enforce restrictions on women and modern
life. 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 kept up a regular
secret dialogue with the top military commander on the
other side, Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated
in September, allegedly by bin Laden operatives.
Abdullah, the Northern Alliance foreign minister, said
the information provided by Khaksar was particularly
valuable. "It was enough to make him an exception to
all the Taliban leadership," he said, noting that for
years, "Commander Massoud was in constant contact with
him."
Khaksar said today that he also served as a
clandestine contact for U.S. intelligence services
while serving the Taliban. Agents disguised as
journalists visited him to solicit inside information,
he said. "They came two or three times, and they knew
about my policy and about my opinion," he said.
In Washington, CIA spokesman Tom Crispell said the
agency does not comment on such matters but that CIA
policy is to not use American media organizations as
cover for clandestine operations.
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 to imprison or kill other senior
Taliban leaders, Khaksar remains in his own home, able
to travel at will, still guarded by some of the same
fighters who surrounded him while he was a Taliban
official. He denied any complicity in "actions against
humanity."
Spared from retribution by his onetime enemies,
Khaksar probably has more to worry about from his
former friends. He would be an obvious target for any
Taliban operatives or sympathizers still hiding out in
the city, but he brushes off concern, placing his
trust in his well-armed guards and even declining an
offer to relocate him to a safer location in Golbahar,
about 50 miles to the north.
In his second-floor office, sitting in front of a
bookcase filled with religious texts, Khaksar
described his transformation from Taliban security
enforcer to lonely dissenter.
"From the beginning, I was against Arabs and other
foreigners coming to Afghanistan but the other Taliban
told me I must not say that," Khaksar said. "At that
time, I felt when foreigners come to our country, our
country would be destroyed. And now you see what's
happened."
Khaksar said he met bin Laden once, in 1996, and the
two did not hit it off. "I told him, 'Now there's no
jihad in Afghanistan. Afghanistan can solve our own
problems. We don't need you,' " he recalled. "He got
very upset and I never saw him again."
Khaksar became one of the Taliban's most persistent
skeptics of the increasingly close relationship with
bin Laden. As time wore on, bin Laden tried to win him
over, but Khaksar said he never accepted money or
cars. 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."
Besides Omar, who enjoys a close relationship with bin
Laden, the al Qaeda leader had several strong
champions within the Taliban, according to Khaksar,
including interior minister Abdul Razaq, defense
minister Obaidullah, information and culture minister
Amir Khan Mutaqqi, security chief Qari Ahmadullah,
eastern regional leader Abdul Kabir and prominent
commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Khaksar became especially disgruntled in March when
the Taliban leadership decided to destroy two ancient
Buddha sculptures at Bamian, saying they offended
Islam. Documents unearthed since the Taliban's retreat
from Kabul suggested that al Qaeda pushed the Taliban
into the action that earned international opprobrium.
"It's a historic sculpture; they should not have
destroyed it," Khaksar said. "I felt like I lost a
member of my family when they destroyed this
sculpture."
Khaksar said he had no warning about the Sept. 11
operation to crash airplanes in Washington and New
York and did not know if Omar or any other top leaders
did. But like many Americans, he immediately had no
doubt in his mind who was responsible. The day after
the attacks, senior Taliban officials, except for
Omar, met in a palace in Kabul 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."
But his colleagues refused to turn over bin Laden,
leading to the U.S. bombing campaign that began Oct. 7
and helped weaken Taliban defenses enough to enable
the Northern Alliance to overrun the north and finally
Kabul. Facing imminent defeat, the Taliban ministers
met again on the night of Nov. 12 and agreed to flee
the city. Khaksar decided to stay and take his chances
with the enemy.
"I told them it's my country, I want to live here."
Source: The Washington Post
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