America's dilemma -- super-powerful but nothing to aim at

Julian Borger

Richard Norton-Taylor Guardian News Service London

Having mustered the most impressive array of firepower in Asia since the 1991 Gulf conflict, the United States is finding that all the hi-tech super-lethal weapons in the world count for nothing if you do not know which direction to fire them in.

That requires the most important weapon of all in the new war against terrorism -- intelligence. And in intelligence terms, the U.S. no longer feels like a superpower. Its spy satellites and sophisticated electronic surveillance systems failed to provide warning of the Sept. 11 attack. Until the disclosure in the London-based Guardian newspaper on Monday that Osama bin Laden had been tracked down to the Afghan capital, Kabul, last week, the U.S. also appeared to have been left stranded by their prime suspect.

The information on Bin Laden's last known whereabouts underlines the fact that the CIA badly needs human intelligence. Such is the urgency that it has had to go cap in hand to low-tech states it had hitherto seen as hostile to build a coalition of spies. It is a coalition that is more unlikely but even more pivotal than the parallel military and diplomatic alliances being hastily improvised around the world.

Russia, China and Iran have all been canvassed for their help in tracking down Bin Laden, and each has a common interest in eliminating the Taliban and the Islamic insurrection that the Afghan militia exports. The most important allies in the motley intelligence coalition are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two supposedly friendly states who have a patchy record on cooperation.

This is not the first time such a shady and improbable collection of intelligence agents has come together. They cooperated in the 1980s to undermine the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But the Soviet Union is now dead and buried, and the mojahedin forces that the CIA and its friends helped to create are now a much more potent threat. In U.S. intelligence circles they even have a word for such unintended consequences -- "blowback".

The "blowback" has spread deep into Pakistan where it undermines US attempts to reach its enemies. The country's directorate for inter-services intelligence (ISI) was founded by a British army general in 1948 and was instrumental in creating the Afghan mojahedin. It worked alongside the CIA in setting up training camps and supplying weapons, but unlike the CIA the ISI's covert action division did not pull out after the Soviet defeat.

Between 1983 and 1997, it is estimated the ISI trained 83,000 mojahedin, and used them to fight a proxy war against India in Kashmir province and to maintain control over Afghanistan. In the intelligence world, the Taliban is widely seen as an ISI project. The export of Afghan opium has provided a flow of income for the ISI and allowed it to become a corrupt state within a state, which has itself become increasingly Islamist in outlook.

The former ISI director, Hamid Gul, has emerged as a leading spokesman for the fundamentalist cause in Pakistan and has portrayed the Sept. 11 attacks as a U.S. pretext for declaring war on Islam.

"The ISI are part of the problem, but they could be part of the solution if President Musharraf is able to convince them to help," Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter- terrorism, said.

"They have people in the camps training Afghans to fight, and you can't train the Afghans without the presence of the Arabs there. The ISI has direct contact with the Arabs there. They know where they are, but the question is now: will they share that intelligence? Hamid Gul retains a good deal of influence."

Saudi intelligence has more reason to see Osama bin Laden captured or killed and his al-Qaida terrorist network uprooted. He represents a threat to the Saudi royal family, but the Saudis have been cautious about intelligence sharing, in part because it would be politically unpopular. US attempts to question suspects in attacks on its soldiers in Saudi Arabia have been blocked by the Saudi authorities, who on one occasion executed five suspects before the FBI could get to them.

Saudi intelligence also appears to suffer from considerable infiltration by al-Qaida sympathizers. A number of assassination attempts against Bin Laden are reported to have been thwarted. According to a U.S. intelligence source, two Saudi agents inside al-Qaida were compromised shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks. One was executed and another managed to escape.

To make matters worse, the intelligence apparatus itself is in turmoil. The longstanding spymaster Prince Turki al-Faisal was fired in August, for reasons which remain unclear. His successor, Prince Nawass bin Abdulaziz, Prince Turki's uncle, is a businessman with little recent intelligence experience.

Russian and Chinese promises of cooperation are also of limited help and liable to be conditioned on distinct agendas. The Russian defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, has offered intelligence help but warned that the sharing of information should not be "one-way traffic".

In particular, Moscow wants information and possibly help in tracking down Chechen guerrilla leaders who have links to the training camps in Afghanistan. China is similarly interested in crushing Islamic guerrillas in its far western Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Meanwhile, Iran has more reason than any of Afghanistan's neighbors to see the fall of the Taliban militia, with which Tehran went to the brink of war in 1998. But collaboration with the U.S. is anathema to Iranian intelligence.

Even if the Iranians were willing, there are many in Washington who would oppose collaboration with states accused of acting as sponsors of terrorism. It is a recipe, they argue, for more "blowback".

In what is likely to be an extremely dirty intelligence war, the CIA's post-cold war scruples over choosing its friends are beginning to look like a luxury.

The problem is that among the brotherhood of spies being assembled, those most willing to help know least of Bin Laden's whereabouts. Those who know most, like Pakistan, have their own reasons to ration their collaboration. And at the core, intelligence analysts agree, stands the ISI -- British-built, yes, but as a spy service no one is quite sure whose side it is on.