Six weeks before the US mid-term vote, Bill Clinton, is fighting back Republican charges that he did not do enough to fight terrorism. Two points drew  particular attention:

One was Clinton ’s statement that he had authorized the CIA to kill bin Laden and even “contracted with people to kill him” and his assertion of a plan to attack Afghanistan , overthrow the Taliban and hunt for bin Laden after the attack on the USS Cole. The former president explained he held back because: “The CIA and FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible. Clinton did not explain their refusal.

In fact it touched on an abiding US taboo on mention of the channel through which international counter-espionage agents helped al Qaeda plant penetration agents in the United States between 1991 and 2001 until the 9/11 attacks). This taboo implies that the channel has not been completely uncovered by American intelligence agency.

The second was stated with great emphasis by the former president: “There is not a living soul in the world who thought Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down or was paying attention to it, or even knew al Qaeda was a going concern in October ’93.”

However, occupants of the New York office of the former UN secretary general Butrous Butrous Ghali were fully aware that the Somali Muslim militia warlord Mohamed Aideed who controlled the Mogadishu souk was armed by al Qaeda and acted on its directives. There was also foreknowledge in the UN Secretariat of an al Qaeda conspiracy to ambush American peacemakers if they attacked the Aideed militia.

Clinton and US intelligence found out about the plot when US special operations forces arrived in Somalia in the first week of November 1993, raided the UN’s Mogadishu offices and took copies and photos of the documents and evidence in their files. But they were not the only “living souls’ with that knowledge.

By 1993, the Egyptian double agent Ali A. Mohamed, who spent 1985-1989 at the US Special Forces facility in Fort Bragg, had been tagged by the CIA and FBI as an agent of Osama bin Laden. While wearing US military uniform, he was tied closely to the Muslim refugee center in Brooklyn, New York and was friends with El Sayyid A. Nosair, the Muslim terrorist who assassinated the Jewish right-wing leader Rabbi Meir Cahane in 1990. The al Qaeda cell planted in the Brooklyn center planned and executed the first attack on New York ’s Twin Towers in February 1993.

From that date to the end of the 1993, Mohammed protected his guise as double agent by passing to the FBI a profusion of data on the military machine bin Laden was fashioning in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa for overthrowing the Saudi monarchy.It is plain now that Mohammed was senior enough in al Qaeda ranks and close enough to bin Laden to be in on their plans to humiliate the US force in Somalia. But he did not betray the jihadist group.

By 2000, when Clinton chose to attack Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban and hunt for bin Laden after the attack on the USS Cole, the FBI and CIA were reluctant to certify al Qaeda’s responsibility because they had still not sorted out to what degree their double agent operation using Muslim assets like Mohammed was working for America and against al Qaeda.This uncertainty was still unresolved when the Bush administration took office and was confronted with the Sept 11 calamity.

Western rhetoric on the global war on terror is often muddled, riddled with fuzzy definitions, unclear as to goals and overtaken by real events. For too long, United States thinking was governed by the optical illusion of a triumph over the forces of radical Islam in Afghanistan. It was generated by the rapid US-led victory over the ruling Taliban and al Qaeda in October-November of 2001. This illusion was rudely dissipated in the past year.

Fact is that Taliban-al Qaeda fighting forces were never subdued; they lived to fight another day by following one of the Prophet Muhammad’s war maxims: never try and break through a solid wall, but retreat and wait until the cracks form - and then drive back as hard as you can. The at the time, vanishing act performed by Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar with in Muslim eyes, they were imparted with a certain mystique and glamour at the expense of their pursuers.

Plus by turning a blind eye to the Saudi airlift which broke the US-led siege of Konduz in the early days of the war, the United States allowed most of the Saudi nationals fighting with al Qaeda and the Taliban to be whisked to safety. This mid-war rescue operation was orchestrated by Prince Turki bin Faisal, ambassador to the United States and then head of Saudi General Intelligence.

The Bush administration next ignored forewarnings that Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay had prepared a guerilla army to resist the US-British led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Al Qaeda only jumped into Iraq in the summer of 2003, when Bin Laden’s decided to sanction his protégé Zarqawi’s  methods.

Thus a recently released NIE report, states that the global jihadist movement “is spreading and adapting to counter-terrorism efforts”; that the number of jihadists are “increasing in both number and geographic dispersion,” and that the war in Iraq had become “the cause celebre” for jihadis around the world, “breeding a deep resentment of U.S involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

But where today, bin Laden has become more of a figurehead or icon, it is al-Zawahiri who, with his more frequent media appearances, is the organization's authoritative commander. For example, when al-Zarqawi was in need of correction, it was al-Zawahiri rather than bin Laden who penned the letter of reprimand. And when groups in Egypt and Algeria have joined forces with al Qaeda, it has been al-Zawahiri who announced the new alliances. This ability to direct major operations however, bears directly on - and nurtures – bin-Laden’s leadership standing in the radical Muslim world.