Smoking Out bin Laden

Since my previous writing, there have been the following positivedevelopments from the point of view of the US-led "war" againstinternational terrorism:

• The death of Mohammed Atef, a close associate of Osama bin Laden and his reported No. 2 in the Al Qaeda as well as in the International Islamic Front for Jehad Against the US and Israel, along with seven other members of the Al Qaeda during an US air strike at an unidentified place south of Kabul on the night of November 15/16, 2001.
  
  
• The US determination not to succumb to the pressure mounted by Gen.Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's self-reinstated Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), self-styled Chief Executive and self-promoted President, and the leaders of other Islamic countries to suspend the military operations during the holy fasting period of Ramzan, which started on November 17, 2001.
  
  
• The sustained US carpet bombing of Konduz, where a large number of Arab terrorists of the Al Qaeda, the Uzbek extremist elements fighting for an Islamic State in Uzbekistan, Chechen terrorists and Pakistani jehadi members of the Taliban have taken shelter.
  
  
• The intensification of the joint ground operations of the US, the UK and the Northern Alliance to smoke out bin Laden.
  
  

• While making the announcement, Mr.Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said  that reports of Atef's death "seem  authoritative". Generally, when a piece of information comes from one's own intelligence agencies, one uses the adjective authentic and one says authoritative only when the information comes from the intelligence agency of another country.
  
  
• In reporting the announcement, the CNN said that it was based on intercepted communications.  Generally, the US and other Western countries do not specify whether their information came from their human sources (HUMINT) or from technical means (TECHINT).

 Keeping these two aspects in view, it would be in order to infer that theinformation about the death of Atef was conveyed to the US either by theInter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan or by the agencies of the NorthernAlliance, most probably the latter.

From this and other reports emanating from Afghanistan, there are strongreasons to believe that there is much greater clandestine operationalco-operation on the ground between the US-British special forces on the one handand those of the Northern Alliance on the other than openly admitted so far. The rescue of the eight humanitarian workers of the Shelter Now Internationalwas also due to the excellent co-operation between the US forces and theNorthern Alliance.  If this co-operation is sustained, the US-led allianceshould be able to eliminate the Al Qaeda set-up in Afghanistan earlier than andmuch more effectively than previously  anticipated.

The deaths of Atef and seven of his associates have since been confirmed by aTaliban spokesman in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan. It is not clear whether the US air strike, which led to their death, was basedon precise information or whether it was one of those random attacks whichkilled them without knowing beforehand that they were there.

What the US has been doing since the beginning of the air strikes on October7,2001, is to make out a collation of all pre-October 7 information regardingthe various houses, caves, tunnels and other hide-outs where, in the past, binLaden was known to have taken shelter while changing his place of residencefrequently for security reasons and keep attacking them repeatedly in the hopeof catching him napping one day in one of those places.

Muhammad Atef, also called Abdulaziz abu Sitta or Abu Hoffs al-Masri, was binLaden's top military commander and was reportedly his designated successor.According to the US authorities, he was a key military strategist and trainingdirector for bin Laden and was believed to have orchestrated the explosions inKenya and Tanzania in August, 1998, and the terrorist strikes in the US onSeptember 11,2001.  He was a member of the Al Qaeda's executive shuracouncil and the head of the organization's military committee.  Last year,Atef's 14 year-old daughter was married to one of the sons of bin Laden.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, Atef was generally known as  Sheikh TaseerAbdullah and was referred to as bin Laden's chief security officer, responsiblefor his personal security. According to Pakistani and Afghan sources, he was thehead of an elite force of less than 200 Arabs---mostly Saudis and Yemenis, manyof them from bin Laden's tribe -- who constituted his personal bodyguards.

Sheikh Taseer was always at bin Laden's side -- whether it was in Peshawarand Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the Sudan subsequently and again in Afghanistanafter bin Laden's return from Sudan in May, 1996.  Sheikh Taseer, who usedto dress in the Afghan salwar-kameez like bin Laden and was bearded andturbaned, was a former Egyptian police officer.  He came to Peshawar in1983 and started participating in the Afghan jehad.  He was amongst thefirst Arabs to have responded to the call of the Afghan Mujahideen for foreignvolunteers and was instrumental in persuading many other Arabs to join the jehad. He joined the jehad even before bin Laden, the late Sheikh Abdullah Azzam andSheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Egyptian cleric now in jail in the US. Sheikh Taseer was also credited with persuading Sheikh Abdullah Azzam to resignhis job as a lecturer in the Islamabad Islamic University and join the jehad. Azzam shifted to Peshawar and built up a vast network to help the Afghanrefugees and arrange for the training of the Arab mercenaries and theirsubsequent induction into the jehad.

Since Atef was, inter alia, responsible for the personal security of binLaden and was always with him, there was a strong possibility that bin Laden tooand possibly other members of the Al Qaeda's brains trust too were in thevicinity of the place where Atef was killed.  If this was so, bin Ladenseemed to have escaped.  According to the Taliban spokesman, seven othersdied along with Atef, but he did not give their identities.

The US has wisely kept up its air strikes in the Kandahar and Konduz areaseven after the start of the Ramzan.  While the air strikes in the Kandahararea are meant to cause demoralisation in the ranks and leadership of theTaliban, which has not yet happened despite the Taliban's losing control of thePashtun areas of Eastern Afghanistan, its air strikes in Konduz, which have beenof ferocious intensity, are meant to wipe out, in conjunction with an expectedground attack by the Northern Alliance, a large number of Arabs,Chechens, Uzbeksand Pakistanis, who have taken shelter there along with the Pashtun members ofthe Taliban, who are themselves in a small minority in the entire group.

Russia and Uzbekistan are also keen that this force of foreigners should notbe allowed to escape and should be captured alive or killed.  In theircalculation, the wiping out of this force could provide them relief from thedepredations of these terrorists in their own territory.

There are wildly varying estimates of the number of Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechensand Pakistanis taking shelter in Konduz -- between 3,000 and 20,000.  Whilethe presence of a large number of Arabs and Pakistanis in Taliban-controlledAfghan territory was previously known, the presence of a large number ofChechens was a surprise.  It was known that some Chechens were beingtrained by the Al Qaeda, but the present reports from Konduz put the number ofChechens at 1,000 plus, which is a surprisingly large number.

It is important that some of the hard-core Arab members of the Al Qaeda atKonduz are captured alive for interrogation since they may have knowledge ofthose involved in the terrorist strikes in the US on September 11 and about theclaims of bin Laden regarding his having a capability for the use of weapons ofmass destruction.

The special forces of the US, the UK and the Northern Alliance haveintensified their joint hunt for bin Laden.  Much more reliable informationon his likely whereabouts has been forthcoming from the Northern Alliance thanhad ever come from Musharraf.  The Northern Alliance is as determined asthe US, if not more, to get him alive or dead before the winter renders theground operations difficult.

The US approach has been two-pronged -- to keep some of its special forceshugging the Afghan-Pakistan border to prevent bin Laden from crossing over intothe tribal areas of Pakistan and, at the same time, to have other forces huntfor him in southern and eastern Afghanistan.  They seem to be following thesame technique as followed in India during shikar (hunts for wildanimals) -- form a large, unbreakable circle in the outer perimeter of the areawhere he is suspected to be and then move towards the centre, searching everybit of a potential hiding place for him and destroying it.

bin Laden is literally like a wild animal being hunted from all sides. Will the US, the UK and the Northern Alliance succeed? 

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. ofIndia, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai.)