The Hunt For Bin Laden
"They are the enemies of the
whole world. If you ask
where their country is, they
point to the far-off horizon."
British agent Herbert Edwardes,
about inhabitants of
Pakistan's tribal lands, 1847.
The most wanted man in the world is living among Edwardes's storied enemies of the world, the hard men of wild beards and wicked daggers with a long history of hobbling armies of faraway empires. Osama bin Laden, senior military and intelligence officials say, has forsaken his Arab bodyguards and, when the need arises, travels with a small number of Pashtun tribesmen in Pakistan's untamed borderlands. Here the fertile floor of the subcontinent pushes relentlessly skyward toward the high wastes of Central Asia, but it is not a trackless land. If anything, there are far too many tracks--narrow goat paths and steep, rock-strewn ravines, through which a single man and a handful of bodyguards can pass virtually without notice. This, say several senior military officials assigned to find bin Laden and, if necessary, kill him, is where the al Qaeda leader and other members of his terrorist organization spend their days and nights. "Why would you be on the Afghan side of the border," asks a commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan who deals regularly with the Pakistani military, "if you had good sanctuary on the Pakistani side, and all you had to do was pay the tribal leaders?"
Odd as it may seem, Pakistan's tribal lands are perhaps the safest place in the world for bin Laden today. The reason arises from a welter of history, culture, and politics that has made America's global war against terrorism an infinitely more complicated challenge than it was in the days following the September 11 attacks, and not just because of the escalating violence following the fall of Saddam Hussein. Military and intelligence officials are quick to tell you that the terrorist threat to America and its allies didn't begin with bin Laden and won't end with his death or capture.
But spend a little time with the American soldiers and special forces troops scouring the Afghan side of the border for evidence of bin Laden and his confederates, and there's no mistaking how much capturing or killing him would mean. Never mind what it would do for George W. Bush, who, during the weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, kept an al Qaeda organizational chart on his desk in the Oval Office, checking off a name each time a key member was arrested or killed.
Hammer and anvil. Getting bin Laden, or one of his key lieutenants, would be huge. Just a few weeks back, televisions around the globe ran and reran grainy images from the tribal region of Waziristan after a fierce firefight erupted there between elite Pakistani strike-force troops and heavily armed foreign fighters. Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, the commander of Pakistani forces in the border area, speculated that a senior al Qaeda member appeared to have been surrounded. Intelligence reports had placed bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a radicalized Egyptian physician, in the area. Electronic eavesdropping equipment had intercepted a request for four men to carry an injured leader and 12 more to guard him. Before the fight was over, 46 Pakistani soldiers died, including eight hostages shot at point-blank range. Twenty militants were shot dead. No al Qaeda leader was found.
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