Author: Nick Meoon
Publication: The Independent
Date: November 1, 2004
URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=578106
The army guy was scattering handfuls
of Osama bin Laden leaflets from his Humvee as the heavily-armed convoy
bumped through a mudbrick village on the way to the Pakistan border, in
the unlikely hope that somebody with information would find them.
The leaflets, designed by a psy-ops
team in Fire Base Salerno, did not mention the $25m (£13.6m) reward
but bore sinister pictures of Bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri,
and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, looking like evil zombies from a horror
film. The caption in Pashtun mocked them for drawing out a war they could
not win.
"Nobody thinks Bin Laden is in Afghanistan,"
said the soldier, whose job was to make friends with Afghan villagers in
the hope of useful intelligence. "But a lot of people go to and fro across
the border. Maybe somebody who knows something we want to know will pick
up a leaflet."
He works with a deeply frustrated
US Marines unit. After six months in Afghanistan, Lima Company had still
to engage in a firefight with the enemy, based tantalisingly in Pakistan
just across the border they cannot cross. Their mission was to drive from
their base in the city of Khost to border checkpoint No 3, a series of
hilltop forts ringed with barriers and razor-wire commanding a main border
crossing to Afghanistan.
A Marines officer spat chewing tobacco
in the direction of Pakistan. "We all know al-Qa'ida and the Taliban are
in there," he said. "Maybe that's where Bin Laden is hiding. We would love
to go in there, track them down, and end the war here and now. But for
political reasons we can't."
Waziristan, a wild tribal territory
where Islamabad barely has control, is among the most likely hideouts for
Bin Laden, who is still along the border, the US military in Kabul maintains,
after he resurfaced in a video message to America's electorate last week.
But after three years of the biggest manhunt in history, the border has
been extensively searched and the possibility of Bin Laden being in a different
place looks more likely.
The Islamist slums of Karachi or
mountainous Pakistani Kashmir, the base for a decade-long jihad against
India, are other possibilities that the FBI's manhunters are now believed
to be looking at. Some analysts believe he may be in Yemen or another African
state. But a bloody guerrilla war the outside world hardly sees ripples
along the border. Weeks ago, Commander Sakhi Rahman's militia force was
attacked at border checkpoint No 3. One officer lost an arm and another
was wounded. Several Taliban attackers were killed. Pakistani militia who
guard the frontier a few hundred yards away helped the Taliban recover
their dead and wounded, the commander said, and his men once killed a Pakistani
militiaman who had joined in an attack.
Commander Rahman had been instructed
not to speak to the press by shadowy forces from Chapman, the US base for
the CIA, special forces and other publicity-shy warriors who recruited,
trained and armed the 1,000-strong mercenary army manning the border forts.
But he spoke anyway. "Our intelligence told us the attackers were Pakistanis
paid 5,000 rupees (£44) each. They were Haqqani's men. Everybody
knows he lives in Miram Shah. Why don't the Pakistanis arrest him?"
Jalaluddin Haqqani, who has a $250,000
bounty on his head, is a veteran warlord who fought the Soviets with US-supplied
weapons and is now allied with al-Qa'ida. He has become the biggest thorn
in the side of Khost, but some believe he may be semi-retired in Saudi
Arabia.
US officers say Haqqani's network
of madrassas (Islamist schools) in Pakistan send young, brainwashed assassins
across to kill government officials, ambush US supply lorries, and mount
mass attacks on government positions that often end in the deaths of badly
trained guerrillas. Commander Rahman said: "Pakistan says it is helping
America but it is not. Pakistan is two- faced."
General Kilbaz Sherzai, an old communist
intelligence chief trained in Frunze Military Academy, the Soviet Sandhurst,
shares that view. He now works for the Americans in Khost and has just
survived a suicide attack by an inept attacker. "The boy was sent by Haqqani,"
the general said. He is convinced the capture of Haqqani could lead to
the terror mastermind. "He is a friend of Bin Laden and has many links
with al-Qa'ida," he said. "I'm sure he knows where Osama is. We don't know
why Pakistan doesn't arrest him."
