“We have no compelling evidence that he’s alive and we don’t have compelling evidence that he’s dead,” said Col. Roger King, spokesman for the 8,000-member U.S. force that is hunting for bin Laden and his associates in Afghanistan.
Afghan officials say he is alive and likely is in Pakistan. Pakistani officials say that he is probably dead but that if he is alive, he is in Afghanistan.
But the best guess of most military and intelligence officials and analysts is that, if he is alive, he is most likely spending the anniversary of the devastation he wrought upon America deep in hiding in the harsh, remote mountainous region of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Overheard on radio?
That was where U.S. forces believed they had him pinned down in December, high in the Afghan mountain stronghold of Tora Bora where he had taken refuge with more than 1,000 of his fighters. U.S. intelligence officials later said they had overheard him talking on radio transmissions during the battle.
Nothing has been heard from him since. In June, the Qatari TV station Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape made by a bin Laden spokesman saying the Saudi exile was alive and well. U.S. officials later said they had authenticated the voice of spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith, but his claim only deepened the mystery of why, if bin Laden is still alive, he has not appeared
It remains plausible that bin Laden died at Tora Bora. DNA tests conducted on the remains of dead Al Qaeda fighters found in the vicinity turned up no evidence that bin Laden was among them. But the bombs dropped from the B-52 bombers that blasted the remote mountainous area were so forceful, it is possible that bin Laden was vaporized by a direct hit.
“My judgment is that he is dead, but I could be wrong,” Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said Tuesday in Chicago in an interview with Tribune editors.
“If he is alive, I am reasonably sure that he could not be in Pakistan,” Musharraf said. “He is not operating with a small group of five people or a dozen people who could be in a small hideout. If he is alive, he is certainly surrounded by 100 or 200 people, and all these 100 or 200 people are Al Qaeda foreigners or Taliban.
“If there were such a large body in Pakistan they would be visible, because they do not have a free sanctuary in which to move around,” the general said.
Musharraf said Pakistan’s tribal areas would not provide bin Laden sanctuary either. For one thing, the tribal leaders are cooperating with Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in the hunt for Al Qaeda remnants, Musharraf said. For another, the multimillion-dollar reward for bin Laden would provide an attractive incentive in those poor areas.
“They could be on the Afghan side, hiding in the mountains,” he said.
Musharraf said he believes that bin Laden was killed in the relentless bombing of the cave network at Tora Bora. His remains have not been found, Musharraf surmised, because it’s likely that not all of the hundreds of caves have been searched.
Musharraf also said that bin Laden’s health problems would make it hard for him to stay alive without proper medical care. Pakistani intelligence says bin Laden brought two dialysis machines to Afghanistan, one for his personal use.
More Top Picks Best Electric Standing Desks Under 500
On Sunday, an Arab television reporter said he was blindfolded and taken to a secret location in Pakistan in June to meet Al Qaeda terrorism plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh.
Yosri Fouda, a correspondent for Al Jazeera, said that during the two-day interview, Mohammed once referred to bin Laden in the past tense.
Fighters fled
In the absence of proof that bin Laden is dead, however, U.S. forces are “acting on the assumption that he may be alive,” said King, the U.S. colonel. The majority of the Al Qaeda fighters who battled at Tora Bora managed to flee, most into Pakistan and many back to their home countries.
Although bin Laden has been silent, the rumor mill is not. Various reports have put him in the Pakistani-occupied section of Kashmir, in the far northern corner of Pakistan along the Chinese border and deep inside Pakistani territory in the Northwest Frontier Province capital of Peshawar.
But the most persistent alleged sightings have come from the border region with Pakistan where U.S. forces are focusing their military effort. Hundreds of U.S. forces launched a new operation this week, Operation Champion Strike, targeting the Bermel Valley region of southeastern Afghanistan bordering Pakistan.
Mohammed Arif, head of intelligence in the Afghan government, said he is convinced bin Laden is alive and in the border area. His intelligence directorate has received scattered but sometimes convincing reports that bin Laden remains near the Waziristan tribal region in Pakistan, not far from where the current operation is under way.
“Sometimes he is on the Afghan side of the border, sometimes on the Pakistan side,” he said.
According to the reports, bin Laden is moving constantly with a small group of about 15 supporters, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, along twisting mountain passes inaccessible to vehicles.
He is using no communications, no satellite phones, no radios, nothing that might give his whereabouts away to the sophisticated listening devices of the American military, Arif said.
Many friends in area
It is a region with which bin Laden would be intimately familiar from the days he spent helping the Afghan mujahedeen in their war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
He would also have many friends in the wild Pashtun tribal area spanning the border where neither the Afghan government nor the Pakistanis wield authority and where customs of hospitality require locals to accommodate a fugitive guest.
U.S. forces have received similar reports, but “thus far nothing has checked out,” King said.
While some reports put bin Laden on the Afghan side of the border, most put him just inside Pakistan, in the autonomous tribal areas where the Pakistani authorities do not exert full control and U.S. forces do not have free rein to operate as they do in Afghanistan.
“When it’s not in Afghanistan, we have to trust the Pakistani authorities to check it out,” King said.
U.S. forces do know that there are many, perhaps hundreds, of Al Qaeda fighters still hiding out in the same border region, and they are as much a focus of the military effort as bin Laden, King said.
President Bush echoed that in an interview on “60 Minutes II,” saying, “I don’t know whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive. . . . He’s not leading a lot of parades.”
But even if bin Laden is dead, Bush said, “there’s somebody else to replace him. And we would find that person.”
Tribune senior correspondent R.C. Longworth contributed from Chicago to this report.