Author: Jason Burke
Publication: India Today
Date: September 16, 2002
Introduction: These days no one
asks where the Al-Qaida chief is. They ask if he still is. If alive, the
consensus is the Saudi-born dissident is hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas.
From there he makes brief forays across the border into Afghanistan.
Through 250 nights and 250 dawns
it has been the same. The Apaches and the Blackhawks, the Chinooks with
their 30 ft rotorblades, have rolled slowly down the strip at Bagram airport
and slipped, lights out, into the night. Ever since the American forces
began arriving at the former Soviet airbase 30 miles north of Kabul last
January an identical routine has been played out almost every evening.
During the day the Special Forces soldiers carried out of the "sweep and
clean" zones try to catch up on sleep and change their MREs (meals ready
to eat) for T-rats (tray rations from the mess hall).
But now nobody notices. Last month,
in Operation Mountain Sweep, 2,000 American soldiers were deployed in Paktia
province along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border east of the city of Khost.
For a week the heavily armed troops moved through the hills, backed by
hundreds of local Afghan auxiliaries. They arrested 10 men and seized some
weaponry. Predictably, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al' Zawahiri and the rest
of the fugitive Al-Qaida leadership were not located.
As Mountain Sweep was under way
in the east, other operations were in progress in the south. Run from Camp
Rhino, the dusty airstrip in the desert south of Kandahar, the US, British
and other allies' special forces go out night after night looking for "former
Taliban" and Mullah Omar, the reclusive one-eyed cleric who led the movement.
They don't find any very often. Or rather they find lots all the time.
But then they can't detain half the Pashtoon population.
These days no one asks where bin
Laden is, they ask if he still is. If alive, the consensus is the Saudi-born
dissident, who still hasn't explicitly admitted responsibility for the
9/11 attacks (largely because he isn't directly culpable as usually understood
in a court of law), is hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas. He makes brief
forays across the border into Afghanistan but spends most of his time in
Waziristan, the wildest and most rugged of Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal
agencies. Short of searching every qala (the traditional Pashtoon fortified
homestead where extended families numbering hundreds often live), there
is little that can be done.
Abdul Bari Atwan, the London-based
editor of al'Quds al Arabi, the Arabic language newspaper, has excellent
contacts with the Al-Qaida and has received communiques in the past. He
believes bin Laden, having had his left shoulder operated on by Zawahiri
(a trained doctor) for injuries sustained at Tora Bora, is now in good
health. "I'm told Al-Qaida is regrouping and that bin Laden is back in
charge," Atwan said a week ago.
But intelligence experts in Britain
and the US query Atwan's confidence in bin Laden's health. They point to
the lack of communication from bin Laden in the past year. Only two videos
have surfaced. One had been secretly recorded and showed an interview with
a Saudi cleric sometime in the autumn. The other appeared to have been
recorded shortly after bin Laden fled from Tora Bora. He appeared gaunt
and fatigued. Since then there has been nothing other than a handful of
appearances by Al-Qaida's new spokesman, the Kuwaiti Abu Gaith. Says an
American intelligence source: "If he was out there you can bet he'd tell
us about it." Others say that, in fact, the very lack of "noise" shows
he's still alive. "If he was dead we would know about it. Half the Islamic
world would be jumping up and down shouting 'the sheikh is dead, the sheikh
is dead'," a senior British Foreign Office official said.
Sources at MI5, Britain's security
service, confirmed they had been picking up signs of renewed activity in
August pointing to an attack timed for the anniversary of 9/11. Such strikes
will not be coordinated as previously. In 1998, the twin bombings of the
US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were run with a close degree of control
by bin Laden's military chief, Mohammed Atef, in Afghanistan. Now that
will be impossible.
The failure of the massive surveillance
effort concentrated on Afghanistan indicates that bin Laden, if, as most
believe, he is still alive, is avoiding satellite phones, e-mails and radios
and, if he is risking any communication at all, is sending orders by mouth
or handwritten messages.
That means that individuals outside
the immediate circle of the leaders have enormous autonomy. In March, the
Palestinian-born Abu Zubaydah was trapped by the FBI in a house in Faisalabad
in eastern Pakistan. He was the most senior operative Al-Qaida figure and
believed to have been charged with reconstructing the group's battered
infrastructure by forging alliances with other Islamic extremists who can
act as proxies.
In a sense there is nothing new
in this. Bin Laden's strategy, honed in 1991-96 in Sudan and later in Afghanistan,
has always been to "plug in" to existing groups with their own particular
grievances and use them to further his own broader aims. Thus, in Pakistan,
this year there has been attacks on western and Christian targets by the
Jaish-e-Mohammed, which has developed a close relationship with the Al-Qaida.
Zubaydah was staying in a Lashkar-e-Toiba safehouse when he was arrested.
The hunt is now on for other senior
figures who, from bases in the Middle East, are trying to keep up the momentum
of the campaign bin Laden and his aides launched. One of them is Khalid
Sheik Mohammed, a Pakistani born in Kuwait who is also known as "The Brain".
He has been described as the logistics expert behind the 9/11 attacks,
and linked by a phone intercept with the incendiary attack on a historic
synagogue in Tunisia in April that killed 14 German tourists, six Tunisians
and a Frenchman, according to German officials. Khalid is thought to be
in Pakistan.
Bilal bin Marwan, a Saudi accused
of helping plan the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, may well be
another key figure also in Pakistan. He is believed to be behind a plan
to attack the US and British ships in the Strait of Gibraltar this year,
according to Moroccan officials. The Moroccans themselves picked up three
Al-Qaida men earlier this year in Casablanca. All had fled Afghanistan
after 9/11.
So what is bin Laden thinking now?
The Saudi's worldview has always been an odd mix of the contemporary, the
mythical and the historic. The first thing that can be certain is that
as an egotist he is both enjoying the attention he is now receiving and
ruing the loss of direct authority over his network. Bin laden went to
great lengths in the late 1990s to establish his dominant role both within
Afghanistan and in the broader movement of global political Islam-and will
be sorry to see real power devolved from him.
However, there are precedents that
he will turn to. Prophet Mohammed's flight from the unbelievers in Mecca,
the hijra in 622 is the obvious one. Mohammed, of course, fought his way
back in triumph, defeating heavy odds. Bin Laden believes his God will
ensure he can do the same.
Less obviously, the lessons the
young bin Laden imbibed from the leading thinkers of political Islam, Syed
Qutb and Abdallah Azzam, will also inform his thinking. Both talk of the
solitary but enlightened "vanguard" who will, through their actions, motivate,
agitate and finally force massive change. It was an idea borrowed from
western leftist revolutionary theory (though bin Laden would not acknowledge
it). There is no reason yet for bin Laden to have lost faith. Last week's
hijacking attempt in Sweden by a 29-year-old of Tunisian background, who
has never been in touch with bin Laden or his immediate circle, demonstrates
why.
General Tommy Franks, overall commander
of the US military effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan, visited Bagram in
August-end for a morale-boosting rally for the troops. He had not lost
faith either. "I actually don't know whether he's alive or dead," he said,
standing before a huge American flag. "But if he's still alive, it's only
a matter of time."
(The author is chief reporter of
The Observer, London, and has covered Afghanistan and Al-Qaida for five
years.)
