Can Bin Laden Be Caught?

The voice was muffled, labored, weak--as you might expect from a man who has spent the past four years on the run. If it didn't belong to one of the world's most feared men, it would hardly scare a child. Having disappeared from view, sheltering in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Osama bin Laden may have lost the ability to send a chill down the world's spine. Governments don't shut down airports or send security forces into red alert. Even when he makes the direst threats, we no longer feel compelled to slow down, much less stop, the course of our daily lives.

But bin Laden's re-emergence last Thursday was still a jolt, coming after a 13-month silence that raised questions about whether the al-Qaeda boss was incapacitated or even dead. The U.S. believes the 10-minute taped message, which aired on the Arab TV channel al-Jazeera, was probably recorded sometime since November, partly because of a reference to British newspaper reports from that time about a purported proposal by President Bush to bomb al-Jazeera. The tape suggested that bin Laden is alive, if not quite well. A longtime bin Laden watcher, French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard, speculates that the decision not to release a videotape may reflect a desire to conceal the deterioration of his physical condition. And if bin Laden's voice sounded more muted than in his last message, in December 2004, so did his rhetoric. He warned of forthcoming attacks on U.S. soil but didn't convey a sense of immediacy. "They are in the planning stages, and you will see them in the heart of your land as soon as the planning is complete," he said. He floated the idea of a cessation of hostilities with America if the U.S. withdraws troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. "We do not mind offering a long-term truce based on just conditions that we will stick to," bin Laden said. The White House didn't bite. "We do not negotiate with terrorists," spokesman Scott McClellan said. "We put them out of business."

That claim, of course, is undermined every day that bin Laden and his deputy and chief tactician, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain on the loose. But bin Laden's resurfacing has come at a time when the leadership of al-Qaeda appears to be under as much strain as at any time since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Antiterrorism experts say the Saudi-born terrorist is no longer in active contact with field commanders, and his ability to plan and direct specific operations is hampered by his isolation. In Iraq, scene of al-Qaeda's deadliest strikes since 9/11, the group's leader, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, is fighting battles with some Iraqi insurgent groups who want him dead almost as badly as the U.S. military does (see box). Meanwhile, an intensified U.S. push to hunt down al-Qaeda leaders has scored a series of apparent successes; just last week Pakistani intelligence officials claimed that a Jan. 13 U.S. air strike on the village of Damadola had killed as many as four senior operatives--although it may have missed its chief target, al-Zawahiri, whose voice was heard on an undated audiotape last Friday. Among some U.S. counterterrorism experts, there was speculation that the release of the bin Laden tape was al-Qaeda's attempt to boost the morale of its foot soldiers amid the run of bad p.r. Says an intelligence official: "The question is, Is this someone's way of changing the topic?"