'Elvis' Bin Laden Is No Joke; Unfound, He Begets Legend
BY PETER BENESH
Feature Story
Friday, January 4, 2002
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
A dead Osama bin Laden will be a martyr for militant Muslims. Taken alive, he'll cause political and legal chaos. But what if he escapes, or his corpse is never found?
Bin Laden would then take on mythic qualities and inspire his al-Qaida followers to greater acts of terror, experts say.
For now, it looks as if he got away. U.S. forces have not found his body. Dark jokes about "Elvis" bin Laden and the spectral sightings to come have already started circulating.
But it's no joke, says Stephen Gale, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist and terrorism expert.
"He's been planning carefully for 10 years. In his videotapes he doesn't sound like he was running scared or that there was no place for him to turn," Gale said.
The scraps found in the caves suggest that bin Laden left long ago, Gale says. "He had two months to prepare, and he took all the stuff that was valuable."
Bin Laden's network will hide him, according to Gale. "Enough people would be committed to protecting him for him to blend in somewhere and disappear," he said.
Bin Laden is likely still alive, agrees British author Simon Reeve, author of "The New Jackals."
Where would he have gone? First to Pakistan, where the government would not want to find him. Said Reeve: "President Pervez Musharraf won't want bin Laden captured on his soil or by his men. If they did, they'd try to do some deal to smuggle him to Afghanistan to be captured by U.S. special forces."
'Little Control'
Gale said Musharraf "has little control over his country's dissidents. The chances of Musharraf living through this are slimmer and slimmer."
Legions of Pakistanis would give bin Laden sanctuary, Reeve says. His money funded 10,000 fundamentalist schools, known as madrassas.
"He set them up to provide fodder for the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s. The madrassas churned out 375,000 fighters with hard-line views," Reeve said.
"But if he's left the region, that's the nightmare scenario," Reeve added. He thinks bin Laden could have moved on from Pakistan by now.
Bin Laden's best refuge is likely Yemen, his family's ancestral land, says Reeve. "Yemen is rough country and an easy place for people to hide," Reeve said.
Gale said Yemen "is almost impenetrable."
Bin Laden could stay at large a long time, says Robert Steele, a former intelligence officer and author of "On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World."
"There is no indication that Islamic governments like Pakistan, Malaysia or Indonesia are willing to use their full powers to find him," Steele said.
Even without bin Laden's direct control, al-Qaida remains a terrifying menace, says Magnus Ranstorp, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
"The al-Qaida network is steered from below as much as above. Cells can activate themselves, do local reconnaissance, pick targets and attack without leadership," Ranstorp said.
Bin Laden need not even be on hand for al-Qaida to grow and train new members, says Steele. "Recruits can be trained one at a time."
The Dec. 22 attempt by shoe bomber Richard Reid to blow up an American Airlines plane over the Atlantic could be an example, says John Arquilla, a Rand consultant and co-author of "Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy."
"Bin Laden is going to be an inspiration to his zealots no matter what happens," Arquilla said. "Our top goal today has to be to prevent an attack on America with weapons of mass destruction. It's better to focus more on al-Qaida and less on bin Laden."
Bin Laden alive and active is more useful than bin Laden dead or captured, Arquilla says. "If he is around and trying to control or direct the network, that gives us more opportunities to connect the dots.
"If he is neither caught nor found dead, the Elvis factor will always be a concern. But let's not spend all our time trying to get him." |
