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... And how will the United States find him?
©New York Times, ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Now the manhunt begins, on an epic scale, in a vast and forbidding landscape, and for a man whose cunning is internationally renowned. The United States has demanded the handover of Osama bin Laden under threat of American military might, and the Muslim clerics who rule Afghanistan, after days of vacillation and obfuscation, have finally refused. More than that, the Taliban, heedless of the risk to themselves and their government, continue to disavow any knowledge of bin Laden's whereabouts and have challenged America to a fight. "Our guest has gone," was their message last week. Bin Laden is where he has so often been since he proclaimed his holy war in the mid 1990s and set out to kill as many Americans as he could -- everywhere, and nowhere, the subject of countless rumors and speculations. The only thing certain is that each passing day gives the world's most wanted fugitive more opportunity to move and to hide. As of Saturday, 24 hours after the Taliban announced their "final decision" to refuse his handover, this much was known publicly about bin Laden's whereabouts: virtually nothing. All week, a raft of stories trickled out of Afghanistan, where no Western reporter remains after an expulsion order from the Taliban on Wednesday. These accounts, some said to be from Taliban sources, some from newspapers in Pakistan that have a strong record of reporting on bin Laden, vary widely. But all seem to agree that the Saudi-born terrorist leader disappeared from his most common hideouts around Kandahar and Kabul, the capital, sometime after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Beyond that, nothing is even remotely sure. One report, in the Dawn, an Islamabad newspaper that is among the most respected in Pakistan, reported last week that bin Laden had last been seen at one of his training camps outside Kabul, at a village called Chahar-i-Ansari, last Sunday. There, this report said, he took an oath of allegiance from 500 fedayeen fighters -- Arabs sworn to die for their cause -- then rode out of the camp on horseback. Another report in the Dawn Saturday gave a different account. It said that bin Laden had left a heavily protected house in the "air force colony" on the outskirts of Kandahar, near the airport, and taken his three wives and many children to the province of Uruzgan, in a mountainous region north of Kandahar that lies on the southern side of the Hindu Kush mountains that are the home region of the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. In the same account, the paper listed what it said were some of bin Laden's habitual hideouts in nine Afghan provinces, stretching nearly 700 miles from Nimruz, in the southwest, Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar, Nangahar, Ghazni, Logar, Khost and Kabul in the east, and at points as far as 200 miles north and west of the Pakistan border -- a region about half the size of Texas. Describing bin Laden as "a security-conscious man who does not stay at one place for more than two nights," the paper said that since the Sept. 11 bombings bin Laden had been moving around Helmand and Uruzgan, in the southwest. Beyond these accounts, reports of where America's quarry might be have assumed a speculative and almost fantastic quality. Bin Laden, according to an array of pro-Taliban newspapers and other accounts, could have fled Afghanistan altogether -- to Pakistan, most credibly, since the two countries share a 1,400-mile border of mountains and deserts that has long been porous to fugitives, smugglers and refugees. But he might possibly also try to make his way to any one of a dozen Muslim countries and regions, including, among others, Chechnya or Dagestan in southern Russia, western China, Lebanon or even Paraguay. Experts who have studied international terrorism say that Lebanon, for one, is an unlikely destination. Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist group that has been a scourge of Israel, has provided refuge in the past for other wanted terrorists, including members of Japan's Red Army Faction. But Magnus Ransdorp, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, said that ideological and religious differences -- the Hezbollah adhere to the Shiite sect of Islam, while bin Laden and his followers are mostly Sunni Muslims -- would complicate matters for bin Laden. "Any connections would be at arm's length," he said, because of Iran's loathing for the Taliban. The most likely hideouts for bin Laden, in the view of the Bush administration and Pakistan military intelligence, remain in the remoter regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States had "reason to believe" that bin Laden was still in Afghanistan, but refused to discuss specifics.
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