The Hunt For Osama

There has been an intensified hunt for Osama bin Laden and other surviving leaders of Al Qaeda on bothsides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

US and Pakistani officials have taken care not to project the hunt as a joint operation lest there beprotests against it in Pakistan, thereby adding to the difficulties of President General Pervez Musharraf. Itis projected more as parallel operations mounted separately  by the Pakistani Army on the one side andthe American and British troops on the other in close co-ordination in the territories under their respectivecontrol without any common command and control. However, the US and the British intelligence have been playingan important role in providing intelligence inputs to both sides. The intelligence inputs are based largely onelectronic intercepts and some information gathered from trans-border travellers.

Taliban spokesmen continue to claim that bin Laden, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, his No.2, Mulla Mohammad Omar,the Amir of the Taliban, and Jalalludin Haqqani, the Taliban's operational chief, are alive and active andhave been operating from  pockets liberated by the Taliban in southern and eastern Afghanistan. In thepast, American and Pakistani spokesmen were saying that bin Laden was most probably in the area adjoining thePakistan-Afghanistan border in the Pashtun belt, without specifying whether he was in Afghan or Pakistaniterritory.

While the Pakistani spokesmen continue to maintain this stand, US spokesmen have been increasingly speakingof bin Laden hiding  in Pakistani territory. They are speaking as if they are quite confident of thecorrectness of their information. Whereas in the past, they were referring to the South Waziristan area ofPakistan's Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) as the most likely place where bin Laden must be hiding,they are now talking of the possibility of his operating from the Pashtun majority villages of Balochistan .President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and his military commanders have been saying since August last thatMulla Omar and other leaders of the Taliban have been operating from hide-outs in Balochistan and not in theFATA or the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

It was because of this that the two French journalists, who were arrested and detained recently  bythe Pakistani authorities for some weeks on a charge of going to Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, withoutpermission, had gone to the bordering areas of Balochistan to investigate the presence of the Taliban leadersthere. The Pakistani authorities seized and destroyed their films after accusing them of paying money to localvillagers for posing as members of the Taliban.

The US intelligence agencies have stepped up their electronic coverage of Balochistan in addition to theiralready heightened coverage of the NWFP and the FATA. It needs to be underlined that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad,the so-called operational chief of Al Qaeda, who was arrested in Rawalpindi in March last year, had fled fromKarachi to Balochistan in September,2002, and from there moved to Rawalpindi.

The Americans have better chance of collecting human intelligence (HUMINT) about bin Laden and hisassociates if they are really in the Pashtun majority villages of Balochistan. While the Pashtuns and theYemeni-Balochis, born of mixed Yemeni-Balochi marriages, are fiercely loyal to bin Laden , neither theBalochis, who resent the illegal migration of Afghan  and Pakistani Pashtuns into their homeland therebyreducing them to a minority in large pockets, nor the Shia Hazaras of Balochistan, who have not forgotten themassacre of their ethnic kin and kith in Afghanistan by the Taliban and Al Qaeda before 9/11, have much lovefor bin Laden and the other dregs of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Under US pressure, President Pervez Musharraf has deployed a brigade of Pakistani security forces,belonging to the Army and the para-military forces, in the South Waziristan area since October last to combfor the dregs of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. These operations have been unsuccessful so far. When bin Laden andhis followers in Al Qaeda and other components of the International Islamic Front (IIF) escaped from the ToraBora area of Afghanistan into Pakistan in the beginning of 2002, the Pakistani and Arab elements spread out toother parts of Pakistan and the elements from South-East Asia escaped to Bangladesh and from there made theirway back to their respective countries, but the Chechens, including those of Arab origin,the Uighurs fromXinjiang and the Uzbecks preferred to take shelter in the FATA. Some of them had married local women evenbefore 9/11 and hence had no difficulty in finding people who would protect them.

In the operations launched by the Pakistan Army since October last, less than a dozen Chechens and Uzbecks and one Uighur were killed. Many of the Chechens crossed over to Iran via Balochistan and have made their wayto Iraq. The Uzbecks, whose number is estimated at less than 50, have stayed put. It is not clear how manyArabs are still there, whether bin Laden is amongst them and where are they taking shelter. Since December,the Pakistan Army has been issuing one ultimatum after another to the local tribal leaders to surrender theforeigners taking shelter in their area as well as their tribesmen who have been supporting them. The triballeaders have repeatedly defied these ultimatums. The latest of these ultimatums expired on February 20 withoutnoticeable results.

Presuming that bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri are in these areas, the success of any American operations to getthem would depend on the co-operation they receive  not only from the Pakistani military-intelligenceestablishment, but also from the Iranian authorities. The dregs could escape into other parts of Pakistan orinto Iran across the Balochistan border. While the Iranian authorities have claimed in the past that they hadbeen rounding up Al Qaeda elements found in their territory and handing them over to the authorities of theircountries of origin, they have not been very co-operative with the US.

Cynics and detractors of President Bush have been attributing the intensified hunt for bin Laden to hisanxiety  for a major operational success before the forthcoming Presidential elections. While one cannotrule out the possibility of electoral calculations playing a role in this, there are other more importantconsiderations which are behind the intensified hunt for bin Laden.

Afghanistan is due to go to the polls in the middle of this year and in Iraq, the US has committed itselfto handing over power and the responsibility for internal security to an indirectly elected/chosen  IraqiGovernment by June 30. The internal security situation in Iraq continues to be as bad as ever and inAfghanistan too, there has been a resurgence in the activities of the Taliban and its associates from Al Qaedaand Gulbuddin Heckmatyar's Hizb-e- Islami (HEI). Suicide terrorism has made its appearance for the first timein Afghanistan. Though the Taliban has been claiming the responsibility for them, it would appear that theArab followers of bin Laden have been behind some of them.

While there is no definitive evidence of a common command and control co-ordinating the anti-US operationsin Afghanistan and Iraq, there are some disturbing common features such as suicide terrorism, targeted attackson locals collaborating with the Americans and operations directed against foreign non-combatants working forhumanitarian relief organisations. The only major difference is that while the foreign terrorists and Iraqiresistance fighters in Iraq have been targeting the US troops too, there have been very few targeted attackson US troops in Afghanistan. Clashes between US troops and the Taliban and Al Qaeda dregs, which have takenplace, have been more accidental than deliberate. The Taliban and its associates continue to avoid frontalconfrontations with the American troops.

The recent unearthing of the rogue operations of Pakistani nuclear scientists, with or without thecomplicity of the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment, has also added to the operational anxietiesof the US, which is faced with two questions. How to ensure effective control over Pakistan's scientificestablishment in order to prevent their proliferating to Al Qaeda and other non-State actors? How toneutralise once and for all the dregs of the various jihadi terrorist groups still operating from Afghanistanand Pakistan? Unless and until they are totally neutralised, there would always be the danger of some of themmanaging to have access to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) through their sympathisers in Pakistan'sscientific community.

These considerations have made it all the more important and urgent for the US to pay renewed attention to bin Laden and his associates and to capture or eliminate them before they can do more harm. One could noticean element of added urgency or even desperation  in the current operations. The US has convinced itselfthat the capture or elimination of bin Laden would facilitate the tasks faced by its forces in Afghanistan andIraq.

Keeping in view the determination and resources which have been brought to bear on this operation, oneshould not be surprised if it succeeds in capturing or killing bin Laden, presuming that he is still alive.However, it is doubtful whether the end of bin Laden would be the end of the security challenges faced by theUS or of the jihad being waged against the international community from the Afghan-Pakistan region. The worldis destined to face and suffer  the irrationality of the jihadi terrorists for many more years to cometill their supporters in Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment and religious clergy are identifiedand weeded out..

B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director,Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF),Chennai Chapter.