New Delhi, Nov 28: The United States has been desperately hunting for Osama bin Laden ever since he reportedly escaped from the Tora Bora caves of Afghanistan more than 18 months ago, injured and slightly incapacitated by a sharpnel, 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 (WMD). 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 Mr Afrasiab Khattak, a well-known Pashtun leader of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), in the Dawn, "Osama is nowhere in the tribal belt."
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." General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator, has sent the Americans on a wild goose chase in the forbidding tribal land.
Is bin Laden still alive or dead? If alive, where is he? There are only three people who know the answers to these questions: Allah, General Pervez Musharraf and Lt-General Ehsanul Haq, his hand-picked Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence. It is the Pakistan Army and the ISI, which fathered not only the Taliban, but also the Al Qaeda. Who says it? The Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the Pentagon in its recently declassified post-9/11 documents. If General 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 General Musharraf arrest and hand him over to the US and get a few more billions of dollars? Because of 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 General Musharraf may lose his importance in the eyes of the US, if bin Laden and the Al Qaeda were no longer there.
General Musharraf knows the 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 Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the Iraqi people would welcome the US troops as liberators? And since November last an oracle has been getting disseminated one tape after another purportedly of bin Laden and his deputy 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. Pictures without voice and voice without pictures. Without dates. When were they taken? Nobody knows anything except what Al Jazeera claims.
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. It is surprising that the US's National Security Agency, which taps all telephone communications in Pakistan, did not tap these.
It is intriguing that these personal attacks on General Musharraf started appearing only after an increasing number of opinion-makers in the US began expressing their misgivings about his 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 General 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?