One intelligence official characterized the new evidence as "inconclusive." A senior defense official had a similar assessment, but noted that General Tommy Franks, who commands the US mission in Afghanistan, is "operating under the assumption" that bin Laden is still in Afghanistan.
As the administration shapes its latest notion of bin Laden's possible whereabouts, Afghan commanders offer a variety of explanations for his disappearance.
"Osama left Tora Bora before the bombing even started," said Muhammad Mussa, an Afghan warlord in Jalalabad who was part of the American-led operation in Tora Bora. Mussa said that "reliable sources" had told him that bin Laden had trimmed his beard and headed for Torgar, a mountainous region in Nangarhar province, not far from Tora Bora, that has long been rumored to contain an al-Qaeda redoubt.
Many Afghan warlords said that Americans allowed dozens of al-Qaeda fighters, and possibly bin Laden, to escape by failing to seal off the border with Pakistan in November as the Tora Bora bombing began. They said the job was initially entrusted to the Pakistani frontier corps, made up of poorly trained, overstretched and easily bribed militiamen drawn from tribes that span the border.
Yet another account, this one from a local Afghan leader, said forces loyal to Yunis Khalis, a warlord who had given sanctuary to bin Laden in the mid-1990s, helped smuggle a large group of al-Qaeda forces across the Tora Bora front lines and into a remote tribal area in Pakistan that has long been a stronghold of Islamic militants.
The growing consensus in Washington that bin Laden is probably still alive directly contradicts statements made last week here by Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf. During his visit to Washington, Musharraf said he believed that bin Laden was "probably dead," saying he could not have received kidney dialysis as he hid in the mountains and villages along the border.
Musharraf also said he believed that Daniel Pearl, the kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter, was still alive. On Thursday the US said that videotape evidence now proves that Pearl was killed by his captors, apparently before the Pakistani leader's visit.
"Musharraf's public statements about bin Laden and Pearl make one question the quality of the intelligence he's acting on," one senior US diplomat said. "The Pakistanis want the Osama problem to go away so they can concentrate their energies on their other border with India."
The administration's new assessment casts doubt on numerous theories about bin Laden's location that have sprouted in recent weeks, including one that he had slipped into Iran, which is now being discounted. Another suggested he had fled to Yemen.
Meanwhile, in the Tora Bora area, the searches for clues to bin Laden's whereabouts and for his body, in case he had been killed by US air attacks, appears to have stopped. During a recent visit, many caves sealed by bomb explosions appear to have been left unprobed. Mussa, the Afghan warlord interviewed in Jalalabad, said his men found valuable booty in the caves they searched, including satellite telephones and Stinger missiles.
But he said that fewer than 200 of the 500 caves in the area were searched before the operation was called off.
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