WASHINGTON: Exactly 146 days after the US military launched its war on terrorism, Osama bin Laden, the man most called by President Bush as the “evil-doer” remains at large - a fact that the Pentagon is working hard to downplay. Since the US-led siege at the Tora Bora cave complex in Afghanistan in December turned up no trace of the Al Qaeda terrorist leader, top Pentagon officials have increasingly argued that - alive or dead - he is irrelevant.
“Everybody wants to know where Osama bin Laden is. The next question is, who cares?” says one Defence Department official, reflecting an attitude widespread in Pentagon corridors. “Osama bin Laden as a centre of gravity is gone,” he says.
A top US military official this week stated that finding the Saudi-born militant is not even one of the top priorities of the US war on terrorism. “I wouldn’t call it (getting Osama) a prime mission,” said Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen Richard Myers. Al Qaeda can function without him. “He could walk in here tomorrow and Al Qaeda would go on functioning,” says Rumsfeld. If alive, Osama is busy hiding, cut off from his network and unable to recruit, raise money, or run more terrorist operations, he says.
It is likely that any future Al Qaeda attacks will be pre-planned acts carried out by some of Osama’s lieutenants, along with the thousands of trained terrorists at large in cells in dozens of countries around the world. At the same time, the Pentagon wants to persuade Americans that finding Osama is a difficult job. “Osama bin Laden is a poor measure of effectiveness,” says one Defence official.
The US military, Rumsfeld says, is organized, equipped, and trained to fight foreign armies - not to conduct manhunts. While accepting the task of tracking Osama down as something US forces “have to do,” he admits that the military is still grappling for strategies, “trying to figure out different ways of doing it.”
On the status of the search today, all the Pentagon can say with certainty is that it has not received hard intelligence for some time indicating that Osama is alive. Yet the Pentagon has also left open the possibility that Osama was among the three suspected Al Qaeda members killed on Feb 4 in a Hellfire missile strike by a CIA-guided Predator drone in Zhawar Kili, Afghanistan. —Dawn/LATS Service (c) Christian Science Monitor.