"In Hot Pursuit"

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE/AFP

If you have ever spent much time in the American Southwest, particularly the mesa-speckled border between New Mexico and Arizona, land which sits at roughly the same latitude as Afghanistan, you will have a sense of the terrain where the U.S. is now furiously searching for Osama bin Laden. The hills around Kabul, an area where bin Laden may be hiding, sit at nearly the same latitude as Phoenix, Ariz., though Kabul's elevation makes it colder, clearer and more exhausting to visit. At night this time of year, temperatures can fall into the 30s. During the day, the clear skies make a perfect canvas on which to watch for the telltale wisps of dust that follow moving soldiers or helicopters or armor. Just as the badlands of the American West were ideal places for the outlaws who haunted the imagination of 19th century America, so the rugged country of Afghanistan is perfect, as if made for the outlaw who haunts the start of the 21st.

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Bin Laden has many advantages operating in his favor as he tries to elude an American dragnet now spreading itself on the ground around and the skies above him. Sources tell TIME that U.S. special forces have been moving in and out of Afghanistan for three years now looking for bin Laden. Recently, the activity has been stepped up. But they face the challenge of capturing a man who knows the terrain, has dozens of hideouts and is surrounded by loyal followers. It takes five years of training to make a Delta Force operative, and of all the tactical missions it practices, this is among the most difficult: launching into hostile territory hundreds of miles from any support and hunting out a wary target.

During the past two weeks, military and intelligence sources tell TIME, the U.S. has ratcheted up its commandos' role inside Afghanistan, hunting both for bin Laden and for information that will aid an explosive strike against al-Qaeda, his terror network. Inserted deep into the mountainous terrain, the teams have been working various parts of the country, usually at night. A handful of pilotless drone airplanes backs them up, working the skies over the country, looking for hints--a small convoy kicking up dust, for example--of bin Laden or his allies. And though most of the fighters the U.S. is seeking may now be well out of sight of the drones or commandos, military planners tell TIME they hope to change that by applying some pressure: launching disruptive tactical air strikes. "It's like turning on the light in your first apartment," an Army planner said. "Lots of roaches start running." Explains another: "[Our goal] is getting them running, getting them to change their ways of operating so that they create vulnerabilities."

U.S. officials know that simply "decapitating" al-Qaeda by taking out bin Laden won't solve their terror problem. The very nature of the web he has built, and part of what makes it so confounding to U.S. officials, is that there is no clear chain of command. Bin Laden, U.S. intelligence believes, has several deputies who are perfectly capable of running terror operations without him. There is even a chance that bin Laden may not even be in Afghanistan anymore--speculation has put him everywhere from the hills of Uzbekistan to the deserts of Sudan. And if the White House has little choice but to go after bin Laden, it also knows that the chances of finding him are not great. Says one former U.S. counterintelligence official: "The entire U.S. Army was in Panama, and it was really hard to find Manuel Noriega. The U.S. Army knew Panama really well. Even if you have troops on the ground, you need to have spectacularly good intelligence and know exactly where you are going. You have to be vectored right on to the viper's nest. You go in there and shoot it up and look at all the faces and make sure you got the right guy. It is hard to envision a situation where you would get that perfect tactical intelligence for a ground attack." That hasn't dissuaded Bush. "Make no mistake about it--we're in hot pursuit of terrorists," he told reporters last Friday, although he added that he understood it is "very hard to fight a guerrilla war with conventional forces."

There are of course other--easier--ways to clean out the "roaches," and for these the U.S. grasped last week. The simplest scenario would be if the Taliban agreed to hand over bin Laden. U.S. diplomats have been careful to leave the Kabul government some ways to save face, insisting carefully, for example, that bin Laden be turned in to "appropriate authorities," which gives the Taliban a chance to surrender bin Laden to an Islamic state instead of to the U.S. Nearly every "last chance" offered to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, though, has been met with a denunciation of the U.S. Said a shaken Pakistani diplomat after negotiations broke down on Friday: "Omar is not afraid of war with the U.S."

Bin Laden remains target No. 1 in that war. Though U.S. intelligence has tracked him since 1995, it was not until 1998, following the al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa that year, that President Clinton authorized an all-out hunt. Since then, U.S. special-ops forces have been working Afghanistan's hilly terrain, traveling in small bands. The U.S. commando presence inside Afghanistan, a Pentagon official said, is "sporadic" and "very small"--they generally move in groups of less than half a dozen--and even big raids won't involve more than "several dozen" troops at a time. The soldiers, most likely Army Delta Force and Green Beret commandos, hide in foxholes and caves during the day, emerging at dusk to scour the Afghan moonscape for evidence of their quarry. Some of the commandos are believed to speak the predominant local languages, Pashtu and Dari. Their goal, says a Pentagon official, is to "get bin Laden--not get bogged down."

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