After weeks of uncertainty over the fate of Osama bin Laden, senior US administration officials said this week that they had fresh indications that he had survived the bombing assault on Tora Bora and is probably still moving around in the mountains that straddle the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The administration of US President George W. Bush is not claiming to have bin Laden cornered. Rather, some senior administration officials say the evidence suggests that the search has "bounded his whereabouts," as one senior official put it. But capturing or killing bin Laden looks like "a long-term proposition," the official said, and defense officials noted that none of the information has been specific enough to mount attacks on any suspected hideouts.
The administration officials said their assessment is based on information obtained within the last month, but they declined to describe it further. Some defense and intelligence officials said the information was far from definitive.
Nonetheless, the administration has claimed some success in weakening al-Qaeda. Senior officials say that a comprehensive review of the US military action in Afghanistan has concluded, in the words of one of them, that in the pursuit of al-Qaeda members, "we've probably gotten about a third of the core leadership," a group the White House now defines as totaling between 20 and 25 key terrorists.
The administration released the names of six leaders they believe are dead, some of whom have previously been reported killed.
The search for bin Laden has been frustrated from the start by intelligence and tips that officials say are flawed, and in some cases, intentionally misleading, and they caution that the latest hints about bin Laden could also prove fruitless.
The senior administration official who described the new evidence said it was "very fragile information" that could be jeopardized if further details were disclosed.
"We are quite certain he is alive and we think he is somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan," the senior administration official said.
"It may be that he moves back and forth between the two."
Other officials said that the area was in southeastern Afghanistan and adjacent tribal areas of Pakistan that are traditionally Islamic strongholds suspicious of outside interference.
If the intelligence is reliable, it suggests that bin Laden may still be in the same rugged and inaccessible mountainous regions where US troops have focused their search since late November, when officials seemed confident they would find him. That confidence then evaporated, and as recently as last month officials said they had not had a fix on bin Laden's location since early December, when intelligence agents believed they heard him directing troops over a shortwave radio in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan.
The US administration's contention that it is making progress in searching for bin Laden and dismantling the al-Qaeda hierarchy is politically important to President Bush and his military team. The elusiveness of the al-Qaeda leader and his lieutenants has gnawed at officials and has cast doubt on their claims of having disrupted the group. Pressure to demonstrate success has grown with new reports from Afghanistan suggesting that the military actions in areas bin Laden may have been living in have caused scores of deaths and injuries among innocent civilians.
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