US troops focus on border's caves
news.ft.com
By IAN FISHER with JOHN F. BURNS
ASADABAD, Afghanistan, Aug. 23 — After months of frustration, American commanders appear to have concluded that Osama bin Laden is probably still alive and moving between mountain hideouts somewhere on a 250-mile stretch of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The hunt for Mr. bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has proved to be as murky as the silted rivers flowing through these inhospitable mountains. Nearly a year after Sept. 11, and nearly nine months after Mr. bin Laden's associates delivered their last videotape of him discussing the attacks in New York and Washington, hard facts about the quest are elusive.
But some American officers, speaking privately, say the assumption driving the manhunt is that the men are alive. They cite Afghan and Pakistani intelligence reports, mostly sketchy, that have spoken of Mr. bin Laden and an entourage of several dozen moving more than once since the American bombing of the Tora Bora mountains late last year.
Some of those reports, the officers say, have suggested that the fugitives may have moved through the mountains on horseback, probably on cloudy nights to elude aerial surveillance. The region being searched covers four provinces — Kunar, Nangahar, Paktika and Paktia — and the adjoining Pakistani tribal areas.
At the time of the biggest American ground battle of the war — at the Shah-i-Kot Valley, 100 miles southwest of Kabul, in March — American commanders said Qaeda and Taliban fighters, who resisted American troops for 11 days, might be protecting Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahiri.
But after the battle, no trace of the Qaeda leaders was found. United States military spokesmen said some Qaeda men appeared to have slipped through mountain passes toward Pakistan.
A spokesman for the American command, Lt. Col. Roger King, said Special Forces units deployed to bases like the one at Asadabad were working on the assumption that applying pressure on any possible hideout was the best means of exposing their quarry.
"I'd say it's a reasonable conclusion that we feel that if bin Laden is alive, we're providing enough pressure to make sure he keeps moving," Colonel King said. "It's easier to spot a moving target."
The Special Forces units leading the hunt move by helicopter or in camouflaged Humvee jeeps, often followed by clusters of helmeted soldiers clutching assault rifles.
Operating deep in tribal areas where suspicions of outsiders run high, the soldiers show an edginess that hints at the hazards and the importance of their mission. Twice in August, the Americans opened fire on Afghans in the Asadabad area, killing five men. On one occasion, the Americans acted after a man in a passing vehicle appeared to be aiming his rifle at them.
The victims turned out to be relatives of a local tribal chief with past Taliban connections, but many here say the Americans killed men with no current links to Islamic militants.
Who is on whose side, whom to trust, whom to regard as a potential enemy has been a conundrum for the Americans from the moment they arrived. Mostly the Americans have relied on local tribal leaders, but relations with them can be fickle.
On Wednesday evening, surrounded by some of the most powerful men in Asadabad, Hajji Rohullah Wakil, a tribal leader, said it was "possible" that Al Qaeda was regrouping in the mountain fastnesses. But Mr. Wakil said he had his doubts and had passed them on to the Special Forces, who set up a base here several months ago.
"I told them, `If there are Al Qaeda, tell us and we'll take care of them,' " Mr. Wakil, 42, said as he sat on a pile of mats in his compound, in the satisfied afterglow of a dinner for a new regional governor. As if to prove the futility of the American quest, he added, "It's been three months, and they haven't caught any Al Qaeda."
A few hours after that conversation, American soldiers made a surprise swoop in Asadabad, and their target could hardly have been a bigger surprise: Mr. Wakil and 11 of his associates, all of whom were tied up with plastic handcuffs, were loaded aboard a helicopter and whisked off to the American military headquarters at the Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul.
American troops on both sides of the border have dropped leaflets urging the people to turn in any Qaeda "terrorists" who seek refuge and proclaiming the $25 million reward that Washington has posted for Mr. bin Laden. One Pashto-language pamphlet handed out in Torkham, a Pakistani border town, read: "The Taliban and Al Qaeda have devastated your country. They are your, and our, enemies, so help us arrest them."
In public, American commanders continue to say what they have for months: that Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahiri may be alive, or they may be dead, and that if they are alive, they may be in Afghanistan or in Pakistan.
Those statements form a pattern of understatement adopted after the failure last year to find any fugitives at Tora Bora. The Pentagon believed then that it had the Qaeda leader trapped in the caves southeast of Jalalabad, but failed to find any trace of him after pulverizing the caves with waves of B-52 bombing.
In the recriminations that followed, with some American officers saying poor strategy had allowed Mr. bin Laden to escape to Pakistan through snow-clogged passes that the American forces had failed to seal, the Pentagon's approach shifted. Instead of declaring the capture of Mr. bin Laden and other top Qaeda leaders to be their prime objective, the commanders began saying their aim was to disrupt Qaeda's ability to function by "mopping up" its remnants in the hinterland.
[When they have been asked about Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahiri, senior officers have been elusive, as Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of the American military effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was in a news conference at Bagram on Sunday.
["What I will say is that we have not seen convincing proof that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are dead," he told reporters, standing before a huge American flag for a morale-boosting pep talk to some of the 7,800 American troops in Afghanistan. "So what we do is we continue to confirm or deny the intelligence reporting that we get."
[The general added: "Now, am I going to say where i think bin Laden is right now? No, I'm not. Because I wouldn't want to give anybody any source of alert. I actually don't know whether he's alive or dead. I do know that a great many nations on this planet are very interested in the man if he is still alive. And I'll leave you by saying, `If he's still alive, it's only a matter of time.' "]
The Special Forces unit also briefly detained and questioned a photographer for The New York Times who took their pictures. They demanded that the photographer clear his photographs from his digital camera and hand over a roll of exposed film, saying photographs of them could compromise their mission. Some photographs survived.
The American units have technical advantages, especially helicopters and surveillance satellites and drones. But the terrain also presents big handicaps to pursuers. Roads are little more than goat tracks. Villages lie scattered deep in gorges, or high on the mountain shoulders, and the tribespeople, living in mudwalled compounds, are heavily armed.
Culture and faith, too, seem to favor the fugitives. Despite the rewards offered by the Americans, anyone who turned in Qaeda leaders would be inviting certain punishment locally.
The frontier areas have long been strongholds of militant Islamic groups that began to flourish in the 1980's, when Muslim guerrillas fought Soviet occupation troops. In addition, the Pashtun people who predominate on both sides of the border have a strict tribal code that makes it a binding duty to offer hospitality to strangers and protect them from enemies.
In Asadabad, as at other American bases along the border, the soldiers get accustomed to the danger of sudden attacks.
[In late August, the Asadabad base came under rocket attack from the neighboring mountainside twice in two days, though none of the rockets hit the base. After the second attack, commanders at Bagram dispatched two A-10 ground attack aircraft that pounded the mountainside, but no attackers were found, alive or dead.
[The attacks came hard on the heels of the arrest of Hajji Wakil, and seemed to fulfill the predictions made by his supporters after he was seized.
["I don't know why the Americans did this," said Muhammad Amin, an intelligence officer on the new governor's staff, who is part of a local establishment that at least nominally is allied to the Americans. "But I can see it will upset the tribes here, and it will create problems."]
For the Americans, Mr. Wakil could stand as a metaphor for the uncertainties they face. He seems the model of an American ally — veteran of the American-backed guerrilla war against the Soviet invaders in the 1980's, a man grown wealthy from frontier trade and other businesses, a member of the tribal assembly that elected Hamid Karzai president in June.
But some Afghan military commanders paint a different picture, of a man suspected of having ties to Arab militants. Those Afghans suggest that Mr. Wakil might know quite a lot more than he had disclosed to the Americans about Qaeda activities in the area — that he might, in effect, have been a sort of double-agent, keeping contacts with the Americans so he could pass information to fugitives in the mountains.
Adding to the complexities, the hunt has led to new strains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with each country seeking to move the focus of the American search into the other's territory. Government leaders in Islamabad and Kabul have engaged in a tit-for-tat, with first one, then the other, citing intelligence reports indicating that Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahiri, if alive, are no longer on their territory. |
