Bin Laden

4 Pages 876 Words

As America fought wars around the globe in the 20th century, one principle guided U.S. alliances: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

In the war against Hitler, the United States found common cause with Stalin. In the war against Japan, America aided Vietnamese rebel Ho Chi Minh. In Third World struggles, America helped Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein.

And as Afghan rebels fought Soviet invaders in the During the 1980s, the United States gave aid from afar while Saudi exile Osama bin Laden provided support from within Afghanistan.

Bin Laden emerged quickly after the September 11th attack on America as the prime suspect, directing a global network of terrorists from camps in Afghanistan.

His apparent role in the attacks and the possibility of retaliation generated acute interest in Omaha, home to about 300 former Afghan refugees and the nation's only Center for Afghanistan Studies.

Before most of the world knew who bin Laden was, Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Afghan program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), spent several months studying him for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan in 1996 and '97.

Gouttierre, who has 37 years experience dealing with Afghanistan, used his sources to confirm for then-U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali that bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan after leaving Sudan.

In his office, Gouttierre still has his bin Laden file, including maps showing the locations of his training camps in the mountainous Central Asian nation.

The UNO scholar never met bin Laden but saw his compound in the city of Kandahar and once saw his motorcade pass as the terrorist leader traveled protected by security vehicles.

Gouttierre also spent part of his U.N. duty meeting and studying the Taliban, radical Muslim clerics who were and still are fighting for control of Afghanistan. The Taliban reportedly control about 95 percent of the country now.

Even before la...