This article at Newsweek does not exactly make one feel good:
The Americans were getting close. It was early in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden’s redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the Qaeda leader’s 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove “the Sheik,” as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using the code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide. According to Said, bin Laden had decreed that he would never be captured. “If there’s a 99 percent risk of the Sheik’s being captured, he told his men that they should all die and martyr him as well,” Said told Omar Farooqi, a Taliban liaison officer to Al Qaeda who spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter in Afghanistan.
So close, yet so far.
The secret word was never given. As the Qaeda sentry watched the U.S. troops, the patrol started moving in a different direction. Bin Laden’s men later concluded that the soldiers had nearly stumbled on their hideout by accident. (One former U.S. intelligence officer told NEWSWEEK that he was aware of official reporting on this incident.)
And so it has gone for six years. American intelligence officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK ruefully agree that the hunt to find bin Laden has been more a game of chance than good or “actionable” intelligence. Since bin Laden slipped away from Tora Bora in December 2001, U.S. intelligence has never had better than a 50-50 certainty about his whereabouts. “There hasn’t been a serious lead on Osama bin Laden since early 2002,” says Bruce Riedel, who recently retired as a South Asia expert at the CIA. “What we’re doing now is shooting in the dark in outer space. The chances of hitting anything are zero.”
I sure am glad that Bruce Riedel does not put it too bluntly.
…
How can that be? With all its spy satellites and aerial drones, killer commandos and millions in reward money, why can’t the world’s greatest superpower find a middle-aged, possibly ill, religious fanatic with a medieval mind-set? The short answer, sometimes overlooked, is that good, real-time intelligence about the enemy is hard to come by in any war, and manhunts are almost always difficult, especially if the fugitive can vanish into a remote region with a sympathetic population. (Think how long—five years—it took the FBI to track down Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic bomber, in the wilds of North Carolina.) That said, the U.S. government has made the job harder than necessary. The Iraq War drained resources from the hunt, and some old bureaucratic bugaboos—turf battles and fear of risk—undermined the effort. The United States can’t just barge into Pakistan without upsetting, and possible dooming, President Pervez Musharraf, who seems to lurch between trying to appease his enemies and riling them with heavy-handed repression.
True enough: but I have heard it say that if you want to find one man, your best way to find him is by looking for him with a small group, not with an entire army. The person who I heard this say was a WWII special operations veteran. In other words, if you want to find Bin Laden, one could argue that an entire, big war is not necessary. The US does not need to go into Pakistan with 100,000 men.
Anyway – the article at Newsweek is more than interesting, I suggest you all head on over there and read it. At times it is frustrating – to say the least – how the US has failed to capture the terrorist leader, but it should be read by all. This man is responsible for 9/11 and many more terrorist attacks. He has become a symbol, and an inspiration for many thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of extremists everywhere (albeit especially in the Muslim world of course): the West cannot afford to let him live much longer. The West should invest as much as it can in the hunt for the man responsible for thousands of deaths.
Meanwhile, I do not quite see how the US can hope to kill Bin Laden if it does not change its strategies and the risks it is willing to take. Musharraf might be in trouble, but if the US does not go into Pakistan to search for Bin Laden, well: there will be only one way for Bin Laden to die then – a natural death. And that might take 20 or even 30 years (of course he could get ill and die but in theory it could take many years, even decades).
One of the mistakes the US made was that it decided not to send many forces into Afghanistan at the moment Bin Laden was cornered. Instead, the CIA had to rely on tribal leaders. It now seems that one of the tribal leaders was probably paid off by Al Qaeda to let Bin Laden escape. Many other Afghans may not have liked Bin Laden, but they decided not to hand him over because of the so-called Pashtunwali (an ancient honor code) they defended their ‘guest,’ no matter how high the financial reward for turning in OBL.
To read the entire article click here.
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