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Osama, oracles and
opportunities
By B Raman
"Watch out if you are over six feet tall. The
CIA's Predator aircraft have been programmed to kill all
those above six feet, hoping one of them would turn out
to be bin Laden."
So said the graffiti in
villages in the Pashtun tribal belt of Pakistan some
months ago, reflecting the extent to which the US hunt
for bin Laden has become a butt of ridicule among the
tribals.
Osama, Osama everywhere, yet nowhere to
be found. The US has been desperately hunting for him
ever since he reportedly escaped from the
exotic-sounding Tora Bora caves of Afghanistan more than
18 months ago, injured and slightly incapacitated by
shrapnel, but alive and kicking.
And leading. So
claimed his followers. His hand was felt, but not seen
from Bali to Mombasa, from Riyadh to Casablanca. He has
become like Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction. Feared, but not seen. Hunted relentlessly,
but not found.
Offers of rewards of millions of
dollars have not helped. Naturally, said an American
intelligence analyst. The tribals are so poor and
illiterate that they don't know what is a million dollar
reward. If one offered them instead a plot of land or a
few dozen goats they would join the hunt with gusto. So
it was said.
And so it was done. But without
results. Neither dollars nor plots nor goats would
interest the tribals. Why? The answer is simple, my dear
Americans, wrote Afrasiab Khattak, a well-known Pashtun
leader of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), in
Dawn newspaper of May 10. Osama is nowhere in the tribal
belt, according to him.
He wrote, "The myth of
no-man's land and the wild north-west comes quite handy
as a spin and as a diversion when the government fails
to muster the required political will for taking the
bull of terrorism right by the horns."
President
General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator,
has sent the Americans on a wild goose chase in the
forbidding tribal land. "Osama can't be alive," he said
last year. He always moved around with a large entourage
to protect him. Even if one failed to notice him, one
cannot fail to notice his retinue.
Now, tricky
Mush, as his retired seniors in the army used to call
him, has a different spin. A spin a day is Musharraf's
forte. Bin Laden is alive, he admits, but in the no-go
land of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA),
where no British soldier had ever gone and come back
alive.
"We Pakistanis are of a different
mettle," said the legendary commando. "We will go where
no British dared. And we will find him dead or alive."
The Americans were duly impressed. Gave him another $3
billion at Camp David.
Lollipops keep pouring
into Pakistan in the expectation that Musharraf would
help them rid the world of bin Laden and his terrorist
hordes. Hasn't he already delivered nearly 500 al-Qaeda
types?
What he did was to round up many poor
Arabs living in Pakistan who had become a social pest
and make them a charge on the US tax-payers' money. Only
four - repeat four - al-Qaeda leaders of real
consequence have been caught and handed over to the US.
And that, too, only after the US intelligence came to
know of their sanctuaries in Pakistan and Musharraf had
no other option but to arrest them.
Where were
they found? asks the Pashtun leader. Abu Zubaidah in
Faislabad in Pakistani Punjab; Ramzi Binalshibh and
Waleed bin Attash in Karachi, Musharraf's home town
after he migrated to Pakistan from India, and Khalid
Sheikh Mohammad, the so-called master-mind of September
11, in Rawalpindi, literally right under the bed of the
army and Musharraf. Nowhere in the tribal belt.
And in Karachi was harbored the injured bin
Laden until August last year. In the Binori
madrassa, (religious school) which has produced
more terrorists than all the other madrassas of
Pakistan put together. That was the one place where
Musharraf should have searched for him, if he was really
sincere about wanting to help the US.
And that
was one place where he did not search for him. Why?
Because he knew bin Laden was there. And the Americans
did not. After bin Laden knew that the US intelligence
traced his presence in Tora Bora through his
communications with his followers, he has totally
stopped using modern means of communications.
After Binalshibh was caught in a different
hideout in Karachi in September last year, because he
had indiscreetly used the telephone, bin Laden was
whisked out of Binori and possibly Karachi.
Is
bin Laden still alive? If alive, where is he? There are
only three who know the answers to these questions
definitively. Allah, Musharraf and Lieutenant- General
Ehsanul Haq, his hand-picked director-general of the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). It is the Pakistan
army and the ISI who fathered not only the Taliban, but
also al-Qaeda.
Who says it? The Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the Pentagon in its
recently-declassified post-September 11 documents. If
Musharraf was really serious about helping the US, bin
Laden would have been dead as a dodo by now, or in
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Why doesn't tricky Mush
arrest and hand him over to the US and get a few more
billion dollars? Because of a fear that he might spill
the beans about his links with the ISI.
Why
doesn't he get him killed and be rid of this nuisance?
Because of a fear that bin Laden's terrorist hordes may
no longer help him in India and Afghanistan. And an
equally strong fear that Musharraf may lose his
importance in the eyes of the US, if bin Laden and
al-Qaeda were no longer there.
And Musharraf
knows his Americans. How naive and trusting, they can
be. Didn't Ahmed Chalabi and other anti-Saddam
money-makers make millions from the CIA and the DIA by
feeding imaginary reports about Saddam's WMD and by
telling US Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the Iraqi people would
welcome US troops as liberators.
And since last
November, an oracle has been disseminating one tape
after another purportedly of bin Laden and his No 2,
Ayman al-Zawahiri. These tapes started coming out of
Pakistan and reaching al-Jazeera and other Arab channels
like rabbits out of a magician's hat.
Pics
without voice and voices without pics. Pics without
dates. When were they taken? Nobody knows anything
except what al-Jazeera claims. The voices at least refer
to contemporaneous events, thereby indicating their
recent origin.
Are the voices authentic? Most
probably, says the US intelligence. But other voice
experts in countries such as Switzerland doubt it.
Al-Jazeera itself has admitted that at least some of the
tapes were handed over to its representative in Pakistan
by unknown persons or transmitted from Pakistan through
telephone. Surprising that US intelligence, which taps
all telephone communications in Pakistan, did not tap
these.
Until February, the voice in these tapes,
whether of Osama or his No 2, directed its anger only at
Israel, the US and other Western countries. A tape of
February attacked Pakistan for the first time, but not
Musharraf, though a printed version of it denounced
Musharraf, too, as Pakistan's Hamid Karzai (the Afghan
leader). Two more tapes in September have not only
lambasted him personally, but also called for his
overthrow.
It is intriguing that these personal
attacks on Musharraf started appearing only after an
increasing number of opinion-makers in the US began
expressing their misgivings about Musharraf's sincerity
as an ally in the war against the al-Qaeda and the
Taliban.
Are these tapes - at least some of them
- being fabricated and disseminated by the ISI at
Musharraf's instance to warn the US that if it exercised
too much pressure on him to act against the terrorists,
he might be overthrown?
This is a suspicion,
which is getting stronger and stronger.
B
Raman is Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet
Secretariat, Government of India, and presently
director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former
member of the National Security Advisory Board of the
Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also
head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research
& Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence
agency, from 1988 to August, 1994.
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