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CNN Live At Daybreak

America's New War: U.S. Removing Taliban Support

Aired September 25, 2001 - 07:04   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: I want to check in right now with Joshua Cooper Ramo, who is a senior editor of "Time" magazine, for some quick reflections on what has happened on the diplomatic front.

JOSHUA COOPER RAMO, SENIOR EDITOR, "TIME" MAGAZINE: Well, there's no question the Bush administration is trying to do everything they can to push the Taliban regime out of power. They're not going to talk openly about this as a policy objective because it's not something they want to be measured against if they fail. However, they've recognized that in order to do that what you want to do as much as possible is knock the props of support out from under the Taliban regime. And those are financial, they're diplomatic and they're political.

And so what you've seen is really a sustained offensive over the last week, really since the president's speech, to make sure they remove those one by one. So there was a lot of pressure on the Saudis to cut those last diplomatic ties. You'll probably see the Pakistani ties remain just because somebody needs to have a relationship with the Taliban so that if they decide it's time to back down they've got somebody to talk to.

ZAHN: Realistically, though, once you freeze the funding for these various terrorist groups and the splinter groups, how long will it take for that to actually have any impact on anything they might have planned?

RAMO: Well, one of the questions that we have is how much of this funding is coming from sources that we can keep an eye on? One of the challenges is that we believe a lot of the funding may come from private fundraising operations working inside Arab countries and those are very hard to stop. I mean it's one thing to freeze a bank account in Switzerland that you can identify. But if people are having weekend parties in Saudi Arabia and everybody quietly donates $10,000 before they walk out the door and then that money is wire transferred to Germany and then wire transferred to somewhere in the U.S. it's much, much harder to track.

So it's great that the U.S. is setting up these massive structures to freeze this international movement of capital, but it is not the transfers of $100 million that they have to worry about. It's the transfer of $50,000 or $20,000, much, much harder to keep track of. ZAHN: All right, Joshua, if you would, please stand by. You're going to be joining us throughout the morning to give us your insights as we follow other developments.

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