To bin Laden’s captors go the spoils

Isambard Wilkinson, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: May 28. 2008 11:58PM UAE / May 28. 2008 7:58PM GMT

ISLAMABAD // Osama bin Laden turned up in the Pakistani city of Peshawar several days ago: this time on the back of a box of matches.

The match box also contained a message offering US$5 million (Dh18m) for information leading to the arrest of bin Laden, who it said was responsible for the deaths of “220 innocent citizens in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7 1998”.

But like all sightings of bin Laden, this one too was “out of date”, according to a spokesman at the US Embassy in Islamabad.

“We sent those out years ago, perhaps in 2001 or 2002,” he said. “They must have been hiding in someone’s desk drawer.”

The bounty on the head of the al Qa’eda chief, accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks in the United States, has grown to US$25m, but he has remained elusive.

A flurry of media reports over the past week, however, has led to another round of speculation that he has been, or is about to be, captured.

The reports suggest an announcement about bin Laden is imminent because the Republican Party needs something big to pull off this year’s presidential election in the United States, or because Pakistan’s embattled president, Pervez Musharraf, needs to pluck a trump card from his sleeve to save his political skin.

At one time or another, the emir, as bin Laden is known to his followers, or OBL, as he is called by his pursuers, has been reported cornered in eastern Afghanistan’s mountains and Pakistan’s tribal areas, or believed to be hiding in places as diverse as western China or the White House in Washington.

It is not clear even whether he is dead or alive.

It has been reported that he suffers from kidney failure – one rumour envisaged him surviving with the use of a bicycle-powered kidney dialysis machine — or as one French regional newspaper reported, that he has died of typhoid.

This year, his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, said: “Sheikh Osama bin Laden is in good health. The ill-intentioned always try to circulate false reports about him being sick.”

A poll in February by a Washington-based non-profit group, Terror Free Tomorrow, found that bin Laden’s popularity in Pakistan had nearly halved in just six months to about 24 per cent. In the Northwest Frontier Province, along the Afghan border, it fell to below 10 per cent.

The modern Muslim Bogeyman has fuelled millions of pages of think-tank analysis and a docu-travelogue titled Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, by Morgan Spurlock, an independent filmmaker who made the surprise hit Super Size Me.

The latest bin Laden whirr was generated by a meeting in Qatar last week of senior US officials and commanders who discussed operations on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

An Arabic TV network report then claimed that bin Laden was hiding somewhere in the Karakoram segment of the Himalayan mountain range around the K2 peak and that the United States was planning a manhunt to capture him.

Fresh on the heels of that claim, a news agency reported a top Afghan intelligence official as saying bin Laden was in a mountainous region in Chitral, a Pakistani region facing Afghanistan’s eastern province of Kunar.

Both US officials and Mr Musharraf have said at different times that bin Laden’s capture is no longer a priority.

But US intelligence reports in 2006, claiming al Qa’eda had regrouped in Pakistan’s tribal areas prompted a change of tune.

This year, a senior US official claimed that bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, were operating from Pakistan’s tribal areas.

“There is no question that the iconic leaders of al Qa’eda – [Ayman al] Zawahiri, bin Laden are in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” said the official, in what was the most categorical claim of its kind made in recent years by America.

“Just as Mullah Omar is giving strategic direction for the Taliban from Quetta, the al Qa’eda senior leadership is in the FATA doing its planning,” he said, referring to the capital of Balochistan province and the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas that border Afghanistan.

Pakistan dismissed the claim as “baseless”, adding that Islamabad would take action if the United States provided it with intelligence to support the statement.

This week, the CIA said the United States is making “a big and continual push” to capture or kill bin Laden.

The CIA director, Michael Hayden, said bin Laden’s demise will not end the threat of al Qa’eda but predicted it would spark a “succession crisis”.

“It will be really interesting to see how that plays out. The organisation is a lot more networked than it is ruthlessly hierarchical,” he said.

Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan who was assassinated in December, said before her death that if her party won elections she would hand over AQ Khan, a nuclear scientist who is under house arrest for selling nuclear secrets, to the United Nations and help Washington hunt down bin Laden.

Bhutto’s party is now the senior coalition partner in the government.

Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has just published a book titled The Bin Ladens, wrote: “Pakistan’s new democratic government should now be motivated to prove its case. Delivering Bin Laden – which Musharraf’s government so conspicuously failed to do – would be a coup of global proportions for Pakistan’s new civilian leaders, and it would bring considerable political and other rewards to Islamabad.”

He pointed out that most senior al Qa’eda targets arrested or killed in Pakistan have been in urban areas, not the border tribal belt.

“It would demonstrate, in the most dramatic way possible, that a democratic government can be as effective a partner in counter-terrorism as the army, if not more so, and by doing this, it would change debate in Washington and Europe about the costs and benefits of investing in democracy in Pakistan,” he wrote.

iwilkinson@thenational.ae