After weeks of uncertainty over the fate of Osama bin Laden, senior administration officials said last week they had fresh indications that he had survived the bombing assault on Tora Bora and is probably still moving around in the mountains that straddle the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The administration is not claiming to have bin Laden cornered. Rather, some senior administration officials say the evidence suggests that the search has “bounded his whereabouts,” as one senior official put it.
But capturing or killing bin Laden looks like a “long-term proposition,” one official said, and defense officials noted that none of the information has been specific enough to mount attacks on suspected hide-outs.
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The administration officials said their assessment is based on information obtained within the past month but they declined to describe it further. Some defense and intelligence officials said the information was far from definitive.
Nonetheless, the administration has claimed some success in weakening Al Qaeda. Senior officials say a comprehensive review of the U.S. military action in Afghanistan has concluded, in the words of one of them, that in the pursuit of Al Qaeda members, “we’ve probably gotten about a third of the core leadership,” a group the White House now defines as 20 to 25 key terrorists. The administration released the names of six leaders believed to be dead, many of whom have previously been reported killed.
The search for bin Laden has been frustrated from the start by intelligence and tips that officials say are flawed and, in some cases, intentionally misleading, and they caution that the latest hints about bin Laden could also prove fruitless. The senior administration official who described the new evidence said it was “very fragile information” that could be jeopardized if further details were disclosed.
“We are quite certain he is alive and we think he is somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the senior administration official said. “It may be that he moves back and forth between the two.”
Other officials said the area was in southeastern Afghanistan and adjacent tribal areas of Pakistan that are traditionally Islamic strongholds suspicious of outside interference.
If the intelligence is reliable, it suggests that bin Laden still may be in the same rugged and inaccessible mountainous regions where U.S. troops have focused their search since late November. As recently as last month officials said they had not had a fix on bin Laden’s location since early December, when intelligence agents believed they heard him directing troops over a shortwave radio in the Tora Bora region.
The administration’s contention that it is making progress in searching for bin Laden and dismantling Al Qaeda’s hierarchy is politically important to President Bush and his military team. The elusiveness of Al Qaeda’s leader and his lieutenants has gnawed at officials and has cast doubt on their claims of having disrupted the group.