After months of frustration, US commanders appear to have concluded that Osama bin Laden is probably still alive and moving between mountain hideouts somewhere on a 402km stretch of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The hunt for bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has proved to be as murky as the silted rivers flowing through these inhospitable mountains.
Nearly a year after Sept. 11, and nearly nine months after bin Laden's associates delivered their last videotape of him discussing the attacks, hard facts about the quest are elusive.
But some American officers, speaking privately, say the assumption driving the manhunt is that the men are alive. They cite Afghan and Pakistani intelligence reports, mostly sketchy, that have spoken of bin Laden and an entourage of several dozen moving more than once since the US bombing of the Tora Bora mountains last year.
Some of those reports, the officers say, have suggested that the fugitives may have moved through the mountains on horseback, probably on cloudy nights to elude aerial surveillance. The region being searched covers four provinces, Kunar, Nangahar, Paktika and Paktia, and the adjoining Pakistani tribal areas.
At the time of the biggest US ground battle of the war at the Shah-i-Kot Valley, 160km southwest of Kabul, in March, US commanders said al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who resisted American troops for 11 days, might be protecting bin Laden and Zawahiri.
But after the battle, no trace of the al-Qaeda leaders was found. US military spokesmen said some al-Qaeda men appeared to have slipped through mountain passes toward Pakistan.
A spokesman for the US command, Lieutenant Colonel Roger King, said Special Forces units deployed to bases like the one at Asadabad were working on the assumption that applying pressure on any possible hideout was the best means of exposing their quarry.
"I'd say it's a reasonable conclusion that we feel that if bin Laden is alive, we're providing enough pressure to make sure he keeps moving," King said. "It's easier to spot a moving target."
Who is on whose side, whom to trust, whom to regard as a potential enemy has been a conundrum for the Americans from the moment they arrived. Mostly the Americans have relied on local tribal leaders, but relations with them can be fickle.
Last Wednesday evening, surrounded by some of the most powerful men in Asadabad, Hajji Rohullah Wakil, a tribal leader, said it was "possible" that al-Qaeda was regrouping in the mountain fastnesses. But Wakil said he had his doubts and had passed them on to the Special Forces, who set up a base here several months ago.
"I told them, `If there are al-Qaeda, tell us and we'll take care of them,'" Wakil, 42, said as he sat on a pile of mats in his compound, in the satisfied afterglow of a dinner for a new regional governor. As if to prove the futility of the American quest, he added, "It's been three months, and they haven't caught any al-Qaeda."
A few hours after that conversation, US soldiers made a surprise swoop in Asadabad and their target could hardly have been a bigger surprise: Wakil and 11 of his associates, all of whom were tied up with plastic handcuffs, were loaded aboard a helicopter and whisked off to the US military headquarters at the Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul.
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