Why Can't We Find Bin Laden?

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Why is bin Laden speaking now, and what does the audiotape say about him? U.S. intelligence analysts speculate bin Laden may have rejected videotape because it would reveal that he was ailing, wounded or disguised. They say they detected labored breathing in the tape--it is rumored that bin Laden suffers from kidney disease--and think he was reading from a script. But he may simply have used audio to make sure no watcher could glean information useful in tracking him down. Skilled at propaganda, bin Laden could have reasons for speaking now other than to signal an attack. "Terror groups don't like to be upstaged," says Brian Jenkins, a counterterrorism expert at the Rand Corp. "Bin Laden is reminding us that with all the world's attention focused on Iraq, al-Qaeda is still alive and well." And he may have wanted to not only reassert control over his organization but also dominate extremist movements flourishing elsewhere. By highlighting incidents that his organization probably did not mastermind, like the Chechen assault on the Moscow theater, "he's implying that those actions are a part of a campaign over which he presides," says Jenkins.

So where is he? The U.S. has followed leads putting him in a wide variety of places in the Islamic world, from Yemen to Saudi Arabia to Iran. But the trail went cold at the Afghan border with Pakistan in December 2001, when a voice believed to be his was last overheard in Tora Bora. Senior Bush aides admit privately that the month it took to build up forces for the invasion of Afghanistan gave bin Laden and his senior leaders plenty of time to carry out evacuation plans. The military is a lot less keen to confess that it blew its best opportunity to nab him in the December assault on Tora Bora. Washington committed too few American troops to the hunt, even some U.S. military officers say, while relying on iffy Afghan warlords to do the dirty work and indifferent Pakistani forces to cut off escape routes. Bin Laden vanished so completely that a few Administration officials regularly pronounced him dead.

But the troops were trying to find him. In late 2001 combined U.S. military and intelligence operatives in Afghanistan ran the hunt out of Bagram air base. Led by an Army commander, teams patrolled the "rat trail," the countless smugglers' paths that loop into the mountainous tribal zones of western Pakistan, where they had picked up a pattern of phone communication between bin Laden and friends. While the teams never got close to him, most intelligence analysts think bin Laden is still holed up in Pakistan's treacherous border zone, out among the clannish tribes who barely recognize national control, or tucked up by sympathizers among the 3 million residents of dusty Peshawar, the chief city of the Northwest Frontier.

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