The Bush administration sat on a Clinton-era plan to attack al-Qaida in Afghanistan for eight months because of political hostility to the outgoing president and competing priorities, it was reported this week.
The plan, under which special forces troops would have been sent after Osama bin Laden, was drawn up in the last days of Bill Clinton’s administration, but a decision was left to the incoming Bush team.
However, a top-level discussion of the proposals took place only on September 4, a week before the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington.
In the intervening months the plan was shuffled through the bureaucracy by an administration distrustful of anything to do with Clinton and that appeared fixated on national missile defence and the war on drugs, rather than the struggle against terrorism.
The news emerged as the political truce that followed the terrorist attacks is evaporating in the heat of looming congressional elections in November. It represents the strongest indictment so far of the Bush team’s preparedness for an attack.
The plan to take the counter-terrorist battle to al-Qaida was drafted after the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. Clinton’s terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, presented it to senior officials in December 2000, but it was decided that the decision should be taken by the new administration.
Time magazine this week reported that briefings were provided for Condoleezza Rice, President George W Bush’s National Security Adviser, in January last year, a few weeks before she and her team took up their posts.
Clarke, who stayed on in his job, repeated his briefing for Vice-President Dick Cheney in February last year. However, the proposals got lost in the clumsy transition process, turf wars between departments and the separate agendas of senior members of the Bush administration. — (c) Guardian Newspapers