BIN THERE, DONE THAT

Inside story of the hunt for Bin Laden: The al-Qaida leader is said to be hiding in northern Pakistan guarded by a 120-mile ring of tribesmen whose job it is to warn of the approach of any troops. (Rory McCarthy, August 23, 2003, The Guardian)

Early in March, intelligence agents searching the western deserts of Pakistan thought they had finally tracked down the world's most wanted man. A convoy was spotted racing along one of the remote smugglers' routes which winds down from southern Afghanistan, through the sand dunes of Pakistani Baluchistan and into Iran. American intelligence agents had a tip that Osama bin Laden was in the group.

They seemed to have reason to be optimistic. Five days earlier Pakistani officers had scored the biggest success so far in the hunt for Bin Laden and his al-Qaida deputies. In a midnight raid they had arrested a ragged-looking Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the Pakistani Kuwaiti who was regarded as the third most senior figure in Bin Laden's network, a man described by the jubilant authorities in Islamabad as a "kingpin of al-Qaida."

Mohammad had been pinpointed when he made a satellite telephone call, which US military electronic eavesdropping tracked to Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan. A computer and lists of phone numbers were recovered after his arrest, amounting to what the Pakistani interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, called an "arsenal" of information.

That new information encouraged investigators to focus their attention on the sparsely populated deserts of Baluchistan. Within a few days they had spotted the convoy.

A major operation was mounted by Pakistani soldiers and US troops. There were reports of heavy gun battles around the Afghan border town of Spin Majid, with up to nine of the men in the convoy killed.

Baluchistan's interior minister appeared on television to announce that two of Bin Laden's sons had been captured. Then one Pakistani journalist broke the sensational news that Bin Laden himself had been caught.

Within hours, it became clear that he had not. In fact, several sources now say the intelligence tip was faulty: Bin Laden was never even in the convoy.

Those with knowledge of the operation have told the Guardian that two of the Saudi-born millionaire's sons had been led by Afghan warlords in the previous days down the same route, a well-trodden drug smugglers' path, and across into Iran. By the time the operation took place, there were still convoys of drug smugglers on the trail but the sons were gone.

"In the end it was just another flop," said Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who has met Bin Laden three times and studied al-Qaida in detail.

Hard to believe that the war on terror doesn't sooner or later, either with or without Pakistani permission, lead to these Afghan/Pakistan border regions. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 23, 2003 8:42 AM