The Deadly Hunt

By Richard Lacayo

If you were looking to disappear, the Afghan province of Helmand would be the place to do it. Hundreds of miles of desert, hills and mountains are interrupted only by the occasional huddle of mud-brick houses. The remote village of Musa Qal'eh in Helmand is still Taliban country. When Kandahar fell last month, as many as 1,500 Taliban fighters and their leaders are thought to have passed through the village. One of them may have been Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former ruler of Afghanistan and America's second-most-wanted man.

Last week there were other visitors. Five four-wheel-drive vehicles carrying about 20 U.S. special-forces soldiers raced through Musa Qal'eh with U.S. helicopters and fighter-bombers overhead. Accompanying them was a band of Afghan fighters and the governor of Helmand, Haji Shir Mohammed. The convoy was on its way to the nearby town of Baghran to meet an aged, white-bearded tribal leader named Rais, better known as "the Baghran"--the most powerful warlord in the area and a possible link to Omar.

Since last month, the U.S. has been impatiently following the glacial negotiations meant to secure the surrender of Taliban fighters around Baghran. Rais, who fought hard for the Taliban, said last week he was willing to surrender to the new U.S.-backed Afghan government. What got the U.S. especially interested were intelligence reports that it was Rais who had chaperoned Omar on his escape from Kandahar. Rais denies those reports. On Saturday, Governor Shir told TIME that in meetings with U.S. special forces, Rais had "confirmed the absence" from the area of both Omar and Osama bin Laden but agreed to help in the search. The Americans spent three days in Baghran, seized heavy weapons and ammunition, but made no arrests. The protracted surrender talks appeared to have let Omar slip away yet again. People in Baghran were saying he might be next door in Oruzgon province.

After weeks of fast triumphs, the war has drifted into a frustrating endgame, a double manhunt for Omar and Osama. Every day seems to bring a new theory about bin Laden's whereabouts. Is he dead in a Tora Bora cave? Hiding out along one side or the other of the Afghan border with Pakistan? Safe in Chechnya, Iran or even Saudi Arabia? The Pentagon has tabled plans to send additional U.S. troops to hunt in the mountains of Tora Bora. And there was never a chance that Pakistan would want the U.S. to deploy the troops necessary to seal off its 1,510-mile border with Afghanistan. Doing that, says a U.S. intelligence official, "would have taken hundreds of thousands of people holding hands."

The war is in a lower gear. You could hear the new tone last week from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Look at the difficulty the United States of America has tracking down the ten-most-wanted criminals," he said. "There are people who have been on those lists for years and years."

If things weren't already murky enough, they grew darker on Friday, when Green Beret Sergeant Nathan Ross Chapman became the first U.S. serviceman to die from enemy fire during the three-month campaign. (In all, five Americans have died in Afghanistan.) Chapman, a 12-year-veteran communications specialist from San Antonio, Texas, was killed by small-arms fire Friday during an ambush near Khost, a city a few miles from the Pakistani border, near where U.S. warplanes had attacked an al-Qaeda training camp earlier in the week. A CIA officer was wounded in the same ambush.

For many Afghans allied with the U.S., it seems that the fighting should be over. With the Taliban routed, their war aims have been accomplished. But the U.S. has a major goal still unsatisfied--to get Omar and bin Laden. To understand where the war is headed as American and Afghan paths diverge, a few questions are in order:

If Omar is captured, what do we do with him?

The U.S. has made it clear to the interim Afghan government that if Omar is apprehended, he must be turned over to American authorities. But how he would be brought to justice is a question the White House has still not decided. Sources at the Pentagon say that in all likelihood he would be selected by President Bush to face a military tribunal. But where that proceeding would occur and under what ground rules remain to be hammered out. He would probably spend some time in custody at sea aboard a U.S. warship. (American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh is being held aboard the U.S.S. Bataan, an amphibious assault ship in the Arabian Sea.) A shipboard trial for Omar is even possible. Charges would probably involve aiding a terrorist enterprise but not directly engaging in terrorism, which would be harder to prove.

Where is Osama?

We don't know where bin Laden is," says Army General Tommy Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command. "We've been pretty honest about that. We've said he is either dead or alive, and he is either inside Afghanistan or he isn't." While some leaders of the new Afghan government believe bin Laden is hiding with Omar near Baghran, American officials are skeptical. They believe that if he survived the bombing of the Tora Bora caves, he is most likely to be in hiding on one side or the other of the Afghan border with Pakistan.

The White House is convinced that Pakistan's military is dead serious about finding bin Laden and can be counted on to turn him over to U.S. authorities if he is captured. As many as 60,000 Pakistani troops have been deployed at border checkpoints, partly to take the place of border police who might be more susceptible to bribes. Moinuddin Haider, Pakistan's Interior Minister, says the border patrols have so far detained 245 foreigners, mostly Saudis and Yemenis, who are being held in high-security prisons in and near the frontier town of Kohat. "We are well geared up," he says. Last week the Pakistanis handed over Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, al-Qaeda's chief terrorist trainer, to the U.S. military in Kandahar. They also deported back to Afghanistan the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef. He is now in U.S. custody.

What if Osama is already in Pakistan?

Even if it becomes certain that Osama has escaped there, the Bush Administration has no plans to deploy U.S. special-operations forces or CIA paramilitary teams to hunt for him. In the White House view, Pakistan's army and intelligence service are far better suited to the task. "They know their own turf," says a U.S. intelligence official. If bin Laden is in Pakistan, he adds, "it would be much preferable that he be captured or killed by local authorities than by us."

If bin Laden has crossed the border, U.S. intelligence officials don't believe he has moved too far into Pakistan. He would find the safest harbor in the remote tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, where the authority of the central government is spotty and where many of the local tribes are Pashtun, the ethnic group from which most of the Taliban were also drawn. In some of those parts, bin Laden could count on a warm welcome. In Pakistan's Dabori Valley last week, where bin Laden stayed briefly after he was kicked out of Sudan in 1996, villagers say they would give him shelter as a fellow Muslim, even if they would urge him to leave. They say that a wounded al-Qaeda fighter turned up last week and was given food and money. "People did not inform the authorities," says Hasan Mehmood, who lives in the village of Naryab. "This Arab left the same night."

What else are U.S. forces doing over there?

Ground operations by American troops have been kept to a minimum, largely to minimize U.S. casualties. But New Year's Day saw the biggest American ground operation so far. A convoy carried 200 Marines from their base at Kandahar airport to a deserted al-Qaeda training camp in southern Afghanistan. With the Marines providing cover, Afghan fighters rifled through the compound's 14 structures, which were believed to have provided shelter for Mullah Omar some time in the past three weeks. Thirty hours later the Marines returned to base, though not with the treasure trove of documents and computer hard drives they had hoped for.

Last Thursday and Friday the U.S. also launched its first air strikes since Dec. 28, sending warplanes against Zhawar Kili Al-Badr, another bin Laden training camp, three miles from the Pakistani border. Zhawar Kili, near the city of Khost, is the same bin Laden facility that was hit by U.S. cruise missiles in 1998 in an attack ordered by President Clinton after the terrorist bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa. The Pentagon believes the camp was being used as a regrouping site by al-Qaeda fighters, perhaps as many as 1,000, who had fled the December bombing of Tora Bora.

Could Osama be headed for Somalia?

Bin Laden thrives on chaos. In the 1980s his headquarters were in the Sudan while that country was in the throes of civil war. When Sudan threw him out, he relocated to the rubble of Afghanistan. In 1993 bin Laden sent some of his top aides to support the Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. It was Aidid's forces that later killed 18 U.S. servicemen in an extended fire fight, the one described in the book and film Black Hawk Down.

Somalia became a focus of attention again last week when it emerged that the U.S. and NATO allies have stepped up surveillance flights over suspected al-Qaeda camps there. The Navy has deployed ships off the Somali coast to interdict suspicious vessels. State Department envoys are also visiting Mogadishu, urging its year-old transitional government to share intelligence on al-Qaeda and warning that Somalia could become the next target if it harbors the terrorists. But the U.S. doesn't think al-Qaeda fighters have reached there yet. "Obviously, Somalia is a place of concern," says a senior State Department official. "We're going to have to keep it from becoming a haven."

How bad are the civilian casualties?

As the war has wound down, there have been rising questions about the number of casualties suffered by Afghan civilians caught in American bombing raids. The issue became more acute last week with reports that as many as 100 villagers had been killed during U.S. air strikes two weeks ago in the province of Paktia. The Pentagon says the Paktian village of Niazi Qala harbored Taliban ammunition dumps. But visitors to the village after the attacks say leaders from the province had asked Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, to prevail upon the U.S. to stop bombing in Paktia. A convoy of tribal leaders from the area was attacked by American warplanes on Dec. 20 as they set out for Kabul to attend Karzai's swearing-in. As many as 65 people were said to have been killed then.

Pentagon officials insist that before U.S. planes attacked the convoy, it had fired surface-to-air missiles at them. But in both cases, there are suspicions that U.S. military targeters may have been deliberately provided with bad intelligence by supporters of a local warlord, Pacha Khan Zadran, who may have been using U.S. firepower to settle scores with his rivals in Paktia, a province he hopes to control as governor. "One competitor may be trying to use our capability for his own benefit," says Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The issue of Afghan casualties has begun to erupt in the European press, where columnists have been citing figures compiled by Marc Herold, an economics professor at the University of New Hampshire. Drawing mostly on world-press reports of questionable reliability, Herold contends that 3,767 Afghan civilians had died by Dec. 6--more than were killed in the U.S. on Sept. 11. The Pentagon insists that civilian casualties are the lowest in the history of war. The Afghan government has no way to track those casualties. Human-rights groups say they have been unable to make any worthwhile assessment. It is probable that summer will come and go in Afghanistan before anyone has a handle on how many innocents have died there.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Ghulam Hasnain/Dabori Valley, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Michael Ware/Musa Qal'eh

With reporting by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Ghulam Hasnain/Dabori Valley, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Michael Ware/Musa Qal''eh