Target Osama

It's a $25-million question Washington desperately wants someone to answer: just where is Osama bin Laden? Is he dead or alive? Is he hiding in those inaccessible caves, say, in Urozgan province, or in the tribal areas bordering Pakistan? Does he wear disguises? Anyone who answers these questions, and leads the US to bin Laden, pockets a whopping $25 million, permanent residence in America and security for life.

The Northern Alliance's (NA) sweep through northern Afghanistan, and the change of power from the Taliban to former mujahideen commanders in the broad swathe of territory in the south and east, has triggered a massive hunt for bin Laden. The lavish cash reward hopes to lure the Afghans, infamous for switching sides for money, into betraying bin Laden and enabling Washington to realise its war objective of nabbing the Saudi fugitive.

But the monetary bait is only one aspect in the hunt for Osama. Already, some 1,000 US Special Forces have initiated a cave-to-cave search for the elusive Al Qaeda boss. Pakistani intelligence sources say guiding these commandos are Russian scouts and the areas already searched have been mined to ensure that bin Laden and his men have fewer places to hide in. Sources say the US forces, backed with high-resolution satellite cameras, the best of thermal imagers, drones and other gadgetry, have had a look in the highlands of Bamiyan province, the caves of Paktia and bunkers near Kandahar.

Information from Pakistani intelligence operatives, currently assisting the US in Afghanistan, indicates that another 1,000 US troops are expected to bolster the search efforts soon. Their focus will be the band of mountains along the border with Pakistan.

It's indeed a cat-and-mouse game and no one can be sure about bin Laden's hiding place. Younis Qanooni, the acting interior minister of the victorious NA coalition, believes bin Laden is in Maruf, 130 km east of Kandahar city. But some in NA circles suggest that the Saudi and his followers could have dug into the former Soviet bases in the Wakhran Corridor, a thin slice of Afghanistan that juts out like a frying pan and shares the border with China, Tajikistan and Pakistan. This sparsely-populated area is home to several groups of ethnic Kyrghyz nomads and small Ismaili Muslim communities.

NA sources also feel that the Taliban has thrown decoys in southern Afghanistan to create the illusion that bin Laden is hiding near Kandahar or in Urozgan. Intelligence sources say the US Special Forces tracking bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar are questioning Taliban defectors and prisoners for leads. The US believes the two are still hemmed in in the south but are not moving together.

Sources in the Pakistani military establishment say the US has started searching all ships leaving Pakistani territorial waters to cut off marine escape routes for Osama. The search has been undertaken following reports that he could slip into Pakistan before attempting to get away from the region. Early last week, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had publicly said the Saudi fugitive might have access to a helicopter that could take him to a possible rendezvous with a private jet in Pakistan.

Intelligence sources in Islamabad, however, insist that bin Laden would prefer to remain in Afghanistan, instead of risking his life by attempting to flee. Islamabad's U-turn on Afghanistan no longer renders Pakistan a safe haven for the Arab militant.As one Inter-Services Intelligence official put it: "In the changed circumstance, our government will be more than willing to hand over bin Laden to Washington."

Washington, however, doesn't buy the argument and believes that bin Laden could still escape to Pakistan. This is attributed to two important factors. For one, there's a network of madrassas from where the Taliban emerged, and there's a veritable army of incorrigible Islamists who consider the Saudi a hero. US intelligence officials further suspect that bin Laden could emulate a group of fanatic Arabs who in 1999 sought refuge with the Afridi tribes in the remote Tirah valley in Pakistan's Khyber Agency (in the tribal area).

Pakistani intelligence sources disagree, pointing out that the Afridis even then had objected to the presence of the Arabs and their religious practices and threw them out instantly. "Under the present circumstances, the Afridis would be averse to sheltering a more notorious Arab than his predecessors," says one official. He and others scoff at Indian media reports about the possibility of Kashmir being his hideout.

Linked to the Osama hunt is the crucial question of where his band of Arab and Chechen fighters could be. Sources say the Taliban command, though ordering its own forces to retreat, instructed Al Qaeda fighters to hold the line and provide cover for the pullback. A large number of Al Qaeda men were consequently killed, explaining why the dead bodies of Arab and Pakistani fighters have been found in areas the NA captured last week. But bin Laden's primary fighting force, Brigade 55, retreated with the Taliban and escaped virtually unscathed, though some remain trapped in the besieged Kunduz town.

Sources say the international coalition too has suffered casualties. The Russian Spetznaz special forces and Uzbek commandos who spearheaded the NA offensive reportedly took the greatest number of casualties: an estimated 125. The US fatalities stand between 30 and 35. With Special Forces planning to scour the mountains and caves for Osama, these figures could well rise, depending on the kind of strength the Taliban still retains.