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.
PHOTO: AP
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.
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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