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A Guide To the Hunt
What's more, bin Laden seems to have long been preparing for life on the run, adopting a lifestyle of monk-like detachment from material comforts. One Palestinian journalist who interviewed him in Afghanistan in 1996 recalls that dinner for bin Laden and some of his inner circle consisted of salty cheese, a potato, five or six fried eggs and bread caked with sand. Noman Benotman, a Libyan who once fought with al Qaeda, told me that bin Laden used to instruct his followers, "You should learn to sacrifice everything from modern life like electricity, air conditioning, refrigerators, gasoline. If you are living the luxury life, it's very hard to evacuate and go to the mountains to fight."
Where exactly is he?
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There doesn't seem to be much intelligence about bin Laden's exact whereabouts. The conventional wisdom is that he is somewhere in the tribal belt along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but it is clear from the most recent videotapes of bin Laden and Zawahiri that they are not living in caves. Both men's clothes are clean and well-pressed, and the tapes that they have released are well-shot productions suggesting access either to electrical outlets or generators to run lights.
Their statements have also been notably well informed about what is going on around the world. In his most recent videotape bin Laden made a reference to the scene in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" where President Bush continued to read a story about a goat to a kindergarten class after he had been informed that passenger jets had crashed into the World Trade Center. Comments like that suggest that if bin Laden and Zawahiri are indeed in the tribal areas, they are in a compound either in, or near, one of the larger towns with access to modern amenities.
One U.S. military official familiar with the hunt told me he believes bin Laden "has been hunkered down in one place for a long time," making it harder to track him, whereas Zawahiri is "more operational and is moving more." That may explain the U.S. air strike aimed at killing Zawahiri last month in the village of Damadola, on Pakistan's Afghan border. It resulted in the death of five alleged terrorists, but about two weeks later Zawahiri released a videotape thumbing his nose at President Bush.
How to go about it?
Probably not by signals intelligence generated from phone calls. Bin Laden had been careful not to use satellite or cell phones since long before the 9/11 attacks. According to his media adviser, Khalid al-Fawaz, whom I met in London in 1997, bin Laden had already learned to avoid electronic communications. Bin Laden has released only one tape in the past 14 months, possibly because al Qaeda leaders are aware that every time they do so, they open themselves to detection as the chain of custody of these tapes is the one sure way of finding them.
One possible vulnerability is bin Laden's immediate family, with whom he may remain in contact. Three of bin Laden's wives, along with a dozen or so children, chose to remain with him when he adopted the jihadist life. After the fall of the Taliban they all disappeared. My hunch is that they are under the protection of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a formidable Taliban commander who has known bin Laden since the 1980s. Haqqani's forces are spread from Khost in eastern Afghanistan to Waziristan in western Pakistan, sites of some of the most intense recent fighting.
Are we getting
the help we need?
Pakistanis certainly feel that they have done more than their share. Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator, has survived at least two assassination attempts engineered by al Qaeda and its affiliates in the past two years; hundreds of his security and army personnel have been killed, and Pakistani law enforcement has participated in the arrest of half a dozen key al Qaeda operatives. But the continuing presence of its leaders in Pakistan indicates that al Qaeda has found a congenial place to relocate itself, close to its former bases in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden has long enjoyed popularity among Pakistanis. In 2004 a Pew poll found al Qaeda's leader had a 65 percent favorability rating. However, in a poll released in mid-December by ACNeilsen Pakistan the number of Pakistanis expressing a positive view of bin Laden had fallen to 33 percent. This comes at the same time that Pakistanis are expressing more favorable views of the United States -- 46 percent -- as a result of American relief efforts following October's devastating earthquake.
Perhaps these more positive attitudes about the United States provide an opening that President Bush can exploit on his upcoming trip to Pakistan to advocate for some kind of role for U.S. forces on the ground in the tribal areas. Right now the key weakness in the U.S. hunt for bin Laden is that its soldiers are not allowed to operate openly on Pakistani territory. Granting such a request would entail political risks for Musharraf, who is widely seen as a stooge of the Bush administration (and often referred to as Busharraf).
Dead or alive?
Making bin Laden a martyr would not serve our interests. Instead he should be subjected to the same treatment that Saddam Hussein suffered when he was captured -- checked for head lice and publicly humiliated on camera. Bin Laden is now a mythic personality, and the best way to revert him to the status of an ordinary human being is to treat him like one. (One U.S. official told me, though, that if al Qaeda's leader were captured, it would likely produce a significant backlash -- Americans being taken hostage with the aim of freeing him.) It is, however, unlikely that he will be captured. Last year his former bodyguard, Abu Jandal, told the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, "Sheikh Osama gave me a pistol. The pistol had only two bullets, for me to kill Sheikh Osama with in case we were surrounded or he was about to fall into the enemy's hands so that he would not be caught alive."
Of course, bin Laden may make a mistake that reveals his location and makes him vulnerable to American Predator drones. If the United States felt it had intelligence about bin Laden's location, the pressure to launch a missile strike immediately would be intense, despite the risk of his ensuing martyrdom and a rash of anti-American attacks.
As bin Laden himself put it to Jandal, if he were killed, "his blood would become a beacon that arouses the zeal and determination of his followers." The man who once enjoyed a quiet rural life in the mountains of Tora Bora aims in death to ascend into the pantheon of Islamic heroes -- a Saladin for the 21st century "martyred" by those he calls "the Crusaders."
Peter Bergen is a fellow of the New America Foundation and the author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader" (Free Press).
