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...Bashar Noorzai, the burly, bearded leader of one of Afghanistan's largest and most troublesome tribes, was not on a mission to case New York City for a terrorist attack. On the contrary, Noorzai, a confidant of the fugitive Taliban overlord, who is a well-known ally of Osama bin Laden's, says he had been invited to Manhattan to prove that he could be of value in America's war on terrorism. "I did not want to be considered an enemy of the United States," Noorzai told TIME. "I wanted to help the Americans and to help...
...several days he hunkered down in that hotel room and was bombarded with questions by U.S. government agents. What was going on in the war in Afghanistan? Where was Mullah Omar? Where was bin Laden? What was the state of opium and heroin production in the tribal lands Noorzai commanded--the very region of Afghanistan where support for the Taliban remains strongest? Noorzai believed he had answered everything to the agents' satisfaction, that he had convinced them that he could help counter the Taliban's resurgent influence in his home province and that he could be an asset...
...forces in the country has jumped more than 50% in the past year, to 27,000, a much bigger surge in percentage terms than is being argued over for Iraq. There are six times the number of soldiers as in 2002 when U.S. forces were staking out bin Laden in Tora Bora. Only now the enemy is not just the Taliban and al-Qaeda but also the proxy army of warlords that the U.S. helped enrich and empower--an army that America once hoped would be critical in the struggle against terrorism...
...special-forces soldiers; the strategy all but ensured that the U.S. would have to outsource the messy and labor-intensive duties of maintaining order in a power vacuum. This meant using, and paying, the existing warlords to do the U.S.'s dirty work against Mullah Omar's Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaeda...
...They want to know how much you know. Do you understand?" Noorzai replied, "I am telling them as much as I know, but I'm not going to say something baseless." The Americans then asked what he knew about al-Qaeda's high command. The answers were not illuminating. Bin Laden? Noorzai admitted to "seeing" him only once, in Kandahar in the late 1990s. What about 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Or Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's chief of military operations? "I'm telling you," Noorzai responded irritably, "I don't know any of the Arabs...