The Hunt For Bin Laden
Whatever their number, some are clearly of Arab descent, but many others are Chechens and Uzbeks, fighters who moved to the area from Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat there, married, and started families. All, theoretically, could fall under the laws of melmastia and badal . Matiullah, a Pashtun who lives in the city of Wana, in Waziristan, wears a traditional pagri, a kind of woven cloth cap. He has a Yemeni son-in-law, he says, and there are no circumstances under which he would consider turning the man over to the authorities. "How can I surrender a piece of my heart?" Matiullah asks. "This is not only fatherly sentiments, but it is also a matter of tribal tradition. . . . If it [the government] has some compulsions, then I, too, have some compulsions. Pakistan's compulsion is America, and my compulsion is my tribal traditions."
More difficult still is Musharraf's delicate political situation. The day after it was revealed that the eight Pakistani troops had been executed at point-blank range, there were demonstrations across Pakistan, and most of Parliament walked out. A three-day jirga of tribal elders in Peshawar concluded that it would oppose any further military operations in their territories. Part of the reason for the opposition is the historic independence of the tribal lands. British colonial mapmakers deliberately left them as buffer zones between the British and Russian empires, with only the loosest governing authority by Pakistan. Under Pakistani law, the tribal lands, which stretch for 1,000 miles along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and hold some 6 million people, are roughly equivalent to American Indian reservations, where federal intervention is legally permissible but only under certain circumstances.
For these and other reasons, Musharraf has felt that he cannot allow any American presence in these areas, at least officially, and Pentagon officials emphasize that they are observing his wishes. "I'm not sure anybody else can hold it together," a senior U.S. commander says. ". . . There's probably no more critical ally to us in the global war on terrorism than Pakistan." Adds another: "We've hooked our wagon to Musharraf because he's our only hope."
Still, Pentagon officials say, their troops have been frustrated. On several occasions in Afghanistan, after picking up what they believed to be the trail of senior al Qaeda members--at least once including bin Laden--U.S. forces had to halt their pursuit after the men they were chasing vanished across the border into Pakistan. "We've been on what we thought was the tail of senior leaders only to lose them in some part of the game," a senior commander said, "and they, you know, skirted across the border." One instance prompted Pentagon brass to offer Musharraf an AC-130 Spectre gunship and crew. The AC-130 is one of the most lethal weapons in the U.S. arsenal, a heavily armed, low-flying attack plane fitted out with 25-, 40-, and 105-millimeter guns and advanced, forward-looking infrared radar. Musharraf was intrigued, but when it was explained that the AC-130 functioned most effectively with a forward air controller on the ground, calling in the plane's withering sheets of fire, he declined. No American boots on Pakistani soil.
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