Inderfurth,Karl

From 911Encyclopedia:

Former assistant secretary of state for South Asian Affairs from August 1997 to January 2001, now senior advisor to the Nuclear Threat Reduction Campaign (NTRC). The NTRC is a project of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and The Justice Project. In 1999, Inderfurth met Taliban's New York representative, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid to get more information on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. After this meeting Mujahid claimed, that they don't know where he is, but religious scholars from the Taliban, who met with bin Laden two weeks earlier told him he could no longer use Afghanistan for political or military operations. http://europe.cnn.com/US/9902/17/us.bin.laden/ As Niaz Naik(->), former Pakistani minister for foreign affairs, told in some interviews with French television and the BBC, Inderfurth was in a mid-July 2001 meeting in Berlin, together with senior Americans, Russians, Iranians and Pakistanis. On the American side was Tom Simons, a former US ambassador to Pakistan, and Lee Coldren, who headed the office of Pakistan, Afghan and Bangladesh affairs in the State Department until 1997. Naik claimed that Tom Simons issued a stern ultimatum that impressed upon him the significance of this meeting and the end of the negotiations route. Naik quotes Simons as having said, "in case the Taliban does not behave and in case Pakistan doesn't help us to influence the Taliban, then the United States would be left with no option but to take an overt action against Afghanistan." The military action would then start in October 2001.