WASHINGTON, Oct 22: The United States sent a special team to the Pak-Afghan border in late August to search for Osama bin Laden, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

Soldiers from a highly classified special operations squadron, who had served in Afghanistan before and were relocated to the mountains of South-eastern Afghanistan, along the Pakistani border, were deputed to resume the search, the report said.

Many of them were returning after a two-year gap during which the network they had built to catch the Al Qaeda leader had become ineffective, the newspaper said. The five-page report reviews the performance of the Bush administration in the war against terror and shows how the change of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq prevented the United States from catching key Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

At the peak of the hunt for Osama and his lieutenants, in early 2002, about 150 US commandos operated along Afghanistan's borders with Pakistan and Iran in a top-secret team known as Task Force 5, the report said.

The task force included a few CIA paramilitaries, but most of its personnel came from military special mission units whose existence is not officially acknowledged. One is the Army squadron once known as Delta Force.

The other- specializing in human and technical intelligence operations- has not been described before in public. Its capabilities include close-in electronic surveillance and the conduct of "low-level source operations" recruiting and managing spies.

These elite forces, along with the battlefield intelligence technology of Predator and Global Hawk drone aircraft, were the scarcest tools of the hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

But when President George W. Bush shifted focus to Iraq, the special mission units withdrew most of their troops from Afghanistan to prepare for a new set of high-value targets in Baghdad.

In 2002, the CIA transferred its station chief in Islamabad to lead the new Iraq Issue Group. At least 30 case officers, the report said, joined the parallel Iraq Operations Task Force by mid-2002.

By the time war in Iraq began, nearly 150 case officers filled the task force and issue group on the "A Corridor" of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The Baghdad station became the largest since the Vietnam War, with more than 300 CIA case officers.

In the second half of March 2002, as the Bush administration mapped its next steps against Al Qaeda, Deputy CIA Director John E. McLaughlin brought an unexpected message to the White House Situation Room. He informed senior members of the president's national security team that the CIA was scaling back operations in Afghanistan.

That announcement marked a year long draw down of specialized military and intelligence resources from the geographic centre of combat with Osama. As the jihadis reorganized, slipping back and forth from Pakistan and Iran, the CIA closed forward bases in the cities of Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar.

According to the paper, the CIA also put off an $80 million plan to train and equip a friendly intelligence service for the new US-installed Afghan government. Replacements did not keep pace with departures as case officers finished six-week tours. And Task Force 5- a covert commando team that led the hunt for Osama and his lieutenants in the border region- lost more than two-thirds of its fighting strength.

The commandos, their high-tech surveillance equipment and other assets would instead surge toward Iraq through 2002 and early 2003, as President Bush prepared for the March invasion that would extend the field of battle in America's response to the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, the newspaper reported.

Retired Army Gen Wayne A. Downing, who was summoned to lead the White House Office for Combating Terrorism a few weeks after the Sept 11 attacks, told the Washington Postthat the war against terror had been least successful where it had the highest stakes: slowing the growth of jihadi sympathies in populations that can provide Al Qaeda and the Taliban with money, concealment and recruits. Osama had worked effectively to "convince the Islamic world the US is the common enemy," Mr Downing said. He added: "We have done little or nothing. That is the big failure."

The paper report cites a long list of proposals that the Bush administration failed to address terrorism. Among them was a plan by Wendy Chamberlin, the then ambassador to Pakistan, to offer President Pervez Musharraf a substitute for Saudi funding of a radical network of madressahs. Mr Downing backed Ms Chamberlin in the interagency debate, describing education as "the root of many of the recruits for the Islamist movement".

Mr Bush promised such support to President Musharraf in a meeting soon after Sept 11, said a US official who accompanied him, but the war in Iraq diverted the Bush administration's attention and the $300 million fund for reforming the madressahs was not included in the White House budget request.