Pakistan, now lauded by President Bush as America's partner in the campaign against terrorism, was for a time one of the few countries in the world that recognized the Taliban.

Similarly, the report recalls, from 1999 through early 2001 the United States pressed the United Arab Emirates, "one of the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world," to break off ties with the Afghan regime. "These efforts achieved little before 9/11," the report says.

And the government of Saudi Arabia worked closely with high-level American officials "to solve the bin Laden problem with diplomacy," the report notes. But it was only after the Sept. 11 attacks that the Saudi and United States governments achieved "full sharing of important intelligence information."

The deadly 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers residential complex at an American air base in Saudi Arabia "highlights a central policy problem in counterterrorism: the relationship between evidence and action," the report says.

The caution exercised by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in affixing responsibility for the Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 19 Americans, may have worked to the terrorists' advantage, the report states.

"In the Khobar case, as in some others, the time lag between terrorist act and any definitive attribution grew to months, then years, as the evidence was compiled." Eventually, the Khobar Towers bombing was attributed to Hezbollah and Iranian extremists.

The Taliban resisted diplomatic pressure to dislodge Mr. bin Laden, the report recalls, "employing a familiar mix of stalling tactics again and again."

"The Afghanistan options debated in 2001 ranged from seeking a deal with the Taliban to overthrowing the regime," the report noted, referring to the situation before 9/11. Eventually, Bush administration officials just below cabinet level agreed at a crucial meeting upon a three-pronged strategy: the United States would send an envoy to Afghanistan to pressure the Taliban yet again to expel Mr. bin Laden.

If that move failed, pressure would be applied through a combination of diplomacy and encouragement of anti-Taliban Afghans.

And if the first two phases did not bear fruit, the United States would try to oust the Taliban "through more direct action."

The meeting at which the three-pronged strategy was adopted took place on Sept. 10, 2001.