THE DEADLY HUNT
As U.S. troops step up their manhunt—and suffer casualties—the war's endgame raises some tough questions

If you were looking to disappear, the Afghan province of Helmand would be the place to do it. Hundreds of miles of desert, hills and mountains are interrupted only by the occasional huddle of mud-brick houses. The remote village of Musa Qal'eh in Helmand is still Taliban country. When Kandahar fell in December, as many as 1,500 Taliban fighters and their leaders are thought to have passed through the village. One of them may have been Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former ruler of Afghanistan and America's second-most-wanted man.

After weeks of fast triumphs, the war on terrorism has drifted into a frustrating endgame, a double manhunt for Omar and Osama bin Laden. Every day seems to bring a new theory about bin Laden's whereabouts. Is he dead in a Tora Bora cave? Hiding out along one side or the other of the Afghan border with Pakistan? Safe in Chechnya, Iran or even Saudi Arabia? The Pentagon has tabled plans to send additional U.S. troops to hunt in the mountains of Tora Bora. And there was never a chance that Pakistan would want the U.S. to deploy the troops necessary to seal off its 1,510-mile border with Afghanistan. Doing that, says a U.S. intelligence official, "would have taken hundreds of thousands of people holding hands."

The war is now entering a lower gear. You could hear the new tone last week from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Look at the difficulty the United States of America has tracking down the ten-most-wanted criminals," he said. "There are people who have been on those lists for years and years."

If things weren't already murky enough, they grew darker on Friday, January 4, when Green Beret Sergeant Nathan Ross Chapman became the first U.S. serviceman to die from enemy fire during the three-month campaign. (In all, five Americans have died in Afghanistan.) Chapman, a 12-year-veteran communications specialist from San Antonio, Texas, was killed by small-arms fire Friday during an ambush near Khost, a city a few miles from the Pakistani border, near where U.S. warplanes had attacked an al-Qaeda training camp earlier in the week. A CIA officer was wounded in the same ambush.

For many Afghans allied with the U.S., it seems that the fighting should be over. After all, the Taliban—the group of Islamic extremists that has ruled Afghanistan since 1996—has been defeated. But the U.S. has a major goal still unsatisfied: to get Omar and bin Laden. To understand where the war is headed as American and Afghan paths diverge, a few questions are in order:

Where is Osama?
"We don't know where bin Laden is," says Army General Tommy Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command. "We've been pretty honest about that. We've said he is either dead or alive, and he is either inside Afghanistan or he isn't." While some leaders of the new Afghan government believe bin Laden is hiding with Omar near Baghran, American officials are skeptical. They believe that if he survived the bombing of the Tora Bora caves, he is most likely to be in hiding on one side or the other of the Afghan border with Pakistan.

The White House is convinced that Pakistan's military is dead serious about finding bin Laden and can be counted on to turn him over to U.S. authorities if he is captured. As many as 60,000 Pakistani troops have been deployed at border checkpoints, partly to take the place of border police who might be more susceptible to bribes. Moinuddin Haider, Pakistan's Interior Minister, says the border patrols have so far detained 245 foreigners, mostly Saudis and Yemenis, who are being held in high-security prisons in and near the frontier town of Kohat. "We are well geared up," he says. Last week the Pakistanis handed over Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, al-Qaeda's chief terrorist trainer, to the U.S. military in Kandahar. They also deported back to Afghanistan the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef. He is now in U.S. custody.

What if Osama is already in Pakistan?
Even if it becomes certain that Osama has escaped there, the Bush Administration has no plans to deploy U.S. special-operations forces or CIA paramilitary teams to hunt for him. In the White House view, Pakistan's army and intelligence service are far better suited to the task. "They know their own turf," says a U.S. intelligence official. If bin Laden is in Pakistan, he adds, "it would be much preferable that he be captured or killed by local authorities than by us."

POISON PEN Though most cartoonists in the Arab world opposed the U.S. bombing, they have started to criticize bin Laden. This Arab News drawing shows him summoning a nuclear threat.

If bin Laden has crossed the border, U.S. intelligence officials don't believe he has moved too far into Pakistan. He would find the safest harbor in the remote tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, where the authority of the central government is spotty and where many of the local tribes are Pashtun, the ethnic group from which most of the Taliban were also drawn. In some of those parts, bin Laden could count on a warm welcome. In Pakistan's Dabori Valley last week, where bin Laden stayed briefly after he was kicked out of Sudan in 1996, villagers say they would give him shelter as a fellow Muslim, even if they would urge him to leave. They say that a wounded al-Qaeda fighter turned up last week and was given food and money. "People did not inform the authorities," says Hasan Mehmood, who lives in the village of Naryab. "This Arab left the same night."

How bad are the civilian casualties?
As the war has wound down, there have been rising questions about the number of casualties suffered by Afghan civilians caught in American bombing raids. The issue became more acute with reports that as many as 100 villagers were killed during recent U.S. air strikes in the province of Paktia. The Pentagon says the Paktian village of Niazi Qala harbored Taliban ammunition dumps.

The issue of Afghan casualties has begun to erupt in the European press, where columnists have been citing figures compiled by Marc Herold, an economics professor at the University of New Hampshire. Drawing mostly on world-press reports of questionable reliability, Herold contends that 3,767 Afghan civilians had died by December 6—more than were killed in the U.S. on September 11. The Pentagon insists that civilian casualties are the lowest in the history of war. Human-rights groups say they have been unable to make any worthwhile assessment. It is probable that summer will come and go in Afghanistan before anyone has a handle on how many innocents have died there.

Questions

1. Which goals of the war on terrorism have been met? Which goals remain unrealized?

2. Where do U.S. officials believe bin Laden is?