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Frustrated U.S. May Have To Change Tack In Bin Laden Hunt

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By CRAIG WHITLOCK

The Washington Post

Published: September 10, 2008

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Frustrated by repeated dead ends in the search for Osama bin Laden, U.S. and Pakistani officials said they are questioning long-held assumptions about their strategy and are shifting tactics to intensify the use of the lethal Predator drone spy plane in the mountains of western Pakistan.

The number of Hellfire missile attacks by Predators in Pakistan has more than tripled, with 11 strikes reported by Pakistani officials this year compared with three in 2007.

The attacks are part of a renewed effort to cripple al-Qaida's central command that began early last year and has picked up speed as President Bush's term in office winds down, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

There has been no confirmed trace of bin Laden since he narrowly escaped from the CIA and the U.S. military after the battle near Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001, according to officials. They said they are now concentrating on a shortlist of other al-Qaida leaders who have been sighted more recently, in hopes that their footprints could lead to bin Laden.

Officials Say Military Overused

The officials attributed their failure to find bin Laden to an over reliance on military force, disruptions posed by the war in Iraq and a pattern of underestimating the enemy.

Above all, they said, the search has been handicapped by an inability to develop informants in Pakistan's isolated tribal regions, where bin Laden is thought to be hiding.

With CIA officers and U.S. Special Forces prevented from operating freely in Pakistan, the search for bin Laden and his lieutenants is taking place mostly from the air.

The Predators, equipped with multiple cameras that transmit live video via satellite, have launched their Hellfire missiles against four targets in the past month alone.

Since January, the reconnaissance drones have killed two senior al-Qaida leaders with $5 million bounties on their heads.

Still, debate persists among U.S. and Pakistani officials over the merits of this aggressive approach, which has resulted in higher civilian casualties and strained diplomatic relations.

"Making more effort and flailing are different things," said a senior Pakistani security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Bin Laden, a 51-year-old Saudi, has thwarted the U.S. government's attempts to catch him since 1998, when he signed a fatwa calling for attacks on Americans and ordered the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Today, seven years after he masterminded the attacks of Sept. 11, bin Laden is thought to wear disguises routinely and takes extreme care to avoid electronic communications, relying on human couriers to pass messages, officials said.

Pakistani officials said the CIA and the U.S. military have played into bin Laden's hands by pursuing al-Qaida with bombs and missiles.

Pashtun tribes along the Afghan-Pakistani border, angry at the number of civilian casualties, see the United States as the enemy, the officials said.

Despite a $25 million reward posted by the U.S. government, no one has been willing to turn in the al-Qaida leader.

"Unless you have people who support you, human intelligence will never work," said Ali Muhammad Jan Aurakzai, a retired Pakistani general who oversaw efforts to track bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders after 2001. "You have to have friendly people."

Another major obstacle has been the war in Iraq.

Officials with the CIA and the U.S. military said they began shifting resources out of Afghanistan in early 2002 and still haven't recovered from that mistake.

"Iraq was a fundamental wrong turn. That was the most strategically negative action that was taken," said John Brennan, a former deputy executive director of the CIA and a former chief of the National Counterterrorism Center.

"The collective effort in the government required to go after an individual like bin Laden - the Iraq campaign consumed that."

The Bush administration tried to reinvigorate the flagging hunt for bin Laden early last year by redeploying Predator drones, intelligence officers and Special Forces units to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Iraq War Sidetracked Mission

By then, U.S. counterterrorism officials said, the war in Iraq had already given bin Laden and his core command precious time to regroup and solidify their new base of operations in northwestern Pakistan.

More recently, the search has been hobbled by a tattered relationship between the United States and Pakistan.

CIA and U.S. military officials said cooperation is so bad that they now withhold intelligence about the suspected whereabouts of al-Qaida commanders out of fear that the Pakistanis might tip them off.

Leaders in Pakistan respond that they are committed to fighting al-Qaida. They also persistently deny that bin Laden is in their country.

Although they lack hard evidence, U.S. officials said it is only logical that bin Laden is in Pakistan, where he has roamed the mountains along the Afghan border for two decades and enjoyed the protection of Taliban leaders.

"In many ways, it's a perfect place," said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst for the CIA, "but there's not a scintilla of evidence that we have any idea where he is."

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