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Why can't the US find bin
Laden?
By Andrew Tully
WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush
says he has no illusion about the difficulties his
government faces in trying to catch Osama bin
Laden. According to Bush, finding bin Laden and
thwarting his plans are "the greatest challenge of
our day".
He highlighted the urgency,
saying: "Recently we learned that Osama bin Laden
has urged the [Iraq-based suspected] terrorist
[Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi to form a group to conduct
attacks outside Iraq, including here in the United
States. We're on a constant hunt for bin Laden.
We're keeping the pressure on him, keeping him in
hiding. And today Zarqawi understands that
coalition and Iraqi troops are on a constant hunt
for him as well."
But the hunt for bin
Laden so far has been fruitless. Two months ago,
General Pervez Musharraf, the president of
Pakistan, said his trail had "gone cold". And on
March 1, General John Abizaid, the man in charge
of the US part of the search, cautioned Congress
that success is not guaranteed.
Kenneth
Allard says he wholeheartedly agrees with
Abizaid's assessment. Allard, a retired US Army
colonel who served as an intelligence officer,
tells RFE/RL that a manhunt is not the right job
for an army.
"Military forces typically do
not engage in the apprehension of individuals,"
Allard says. "Our stock in trade is taking down a
regime. It's like looking for individual grains of
sand, when your objective is to shovel out a
foundation. We do a great job of foundation
digging. We don't do a very good job of finding
individual grains with names on them."
But
Allard says it is likely that US special forces
and paramilitary personnel of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), are part of the search.
He says they are trained not to fight pitched
battles but to undertake missions such as the hunt
for bin Laden and are prepared to fight only in
emergencies.
The next question, Allard
says, is what happens if bin Laden is eventually
captured? He says if bin Laden is killed, many
Muslims probably would revere him as a martyr. If
he is captured alive, he could speak at his trial
to rally his fellow militants.
Either way,
according to Allard, Americans can expect bin
Laden's followers to mount vengeance strikes in
the US.
But Allard says this probably
would leave Americans no more vulnerable to attack
than they are now. And he adds that failing to
capture bin Laden is not an option, and that the
US is better off if bin Laden is dead.
"I
would much rather have the dead Osama as a
potential martyr than a live Osama running around
right now," Allard says. "Because the most
powerful symbol that he exerts to his followers is
that he has been able to defy the United States.
He's been able to pull off [the attacks of
September 11, 2001] and effectively get away with
it. Symbols really matter."
But symbols
have limited value, according to Nathan Brown, who
specializes in Middle Eastern affairs at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a
private policy-research center in Washington.
Brown points out that the US is not just
fighting al-Qaeda but many additional groups with
at best only a loose affiliation with bin Laden's
organization. Now that bin Laden has inspired
them, he says, they can act autonomously.
"Capturing or killing [bin Laden] wouldn't
end the problem that he's come to symbolize,"
Brown says. "What he managed to do was to get
disparate groups together and get them to focus on
attacking Western targets rather than their own
governments. But it's unclear that he's really
knitted those disparate groups into one single
movement. And so cutting it off at the top is not
going to completely end what those various groups
do."
Brown says he prefers to sidestep the
question of whether the US would benefit more from
a dead bin Laden than a living one. Instead, he
says: "Putting [bin Laden] on trial raises all
kinds of difficult issues, because you are giving
him a platform by which he can address his various
constituencies. And he can speak fairly
effectively to those constituencies. So in a
sense, a trial would be a very mixed blessing for
the United States."
Brown says that while
he expects capturing bin Laden would have no
immediate effect, it might pay off in the long
term. It could discourage some young Muslim men
from joining militant groups.
Copyright
(c) 2005, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the
permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW,
Washington DC 20036 |
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