Washington has ordered the hunt for Osama bin Laden to be intensified along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the hope of capturing him before the US presidential election in November.
George Bush has approved a new plan to step up the hunt for the al-Qaeda leader and for Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban.
According to the New York Times, the mission has been given to Task Force 121, a commando team of special operations forces and CIA officers created in the autumn to hunt for Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden. They are to operate as the spearhead of the 11 000 US forces already in Afghanistan.
US officials said better intelligence, the melting of the mountain snow and a refocusing of resources from Iraq would all help.
Bin Laden’s capture would virtually ensure the re-election of Bush.
The US forces in Afghanistan will be working in tandem with Pakistan’s government, which has ordered its army to step up action in its tribal areas along the border.
The push by Pakistani troops has exacerbated tensions with the local population, who are mainly Pashtun, as are most of the Taliban. Two missiles were fired yesterday at a Pakistani checkpost near Wana, capital of South Waziristan region.
The incident came 24 hours after 13 people were killed in what Pakistan’s military initially claimed was a shoot-out between troops and a minibus carrying suspected Islamist militants. Local people insist they were innocent civilians. President Pervez Musharraf ordered an inquiry and offered to pay compensation to the families.
The government last week told its forces in tribal areas to issue ultimatums to tribal leaders to hand over or inform on any al-Qaeda or Taliban operatives in their areas.
Islamabad’s rule over the tribal regions has traditionally been weak, but the US has put pressure on Musharraf to engage in more aggressive policing of the area. The new US push comes after a visit by the CIA director, George Tenet, to Pakistan last month.
Musharraf has been reluctant to confront Islamist fundamentalists, but US officials were reported on Sunday as saying that his resolve had been stiffened by two recent assassination attempts on him by Islamist militants.
The New York Times quoted a US official overseeing the new drive against Bin Laden as saying of Musharraf: ”Two assassination attempts close together tend to be life-focusing. He is now willing to be even more helpful.”
Washington is to tell its special forces to switch tactics, staying in villages for days at a time to try to win ”hearts and minds”, rather than making raids from secure bases.
Optimism that Bin Laden will be captured this year has been expressed publicly in the past few weeks by senior military personnel, including Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hilferty, the senior spokesperson for US forces in Afghanistan.
But this optimism contrasts sharply with evidence on the ground that the Taliban, far from being on the defensive, is making a strong comeback. It has been mounting attacks in the south of Afghanistan, and is especially powerful around the second biggest city, Kandahar, making travel on roads outside the city very risky.
Such is the level of insecurity that the Afghan government is considering whether to delay planned elections.
A US diplomat with detailed knowledge of Afghanistan said recently in private that he suspected that many al-Qaeda operatives had left the border area, leaving only the Taliban behind. He suspected they had moved to Iraq.
US general Charles Wald, deputy commander of the US European command, said in a Reuters interview in Accra, Ghana, at the weekend, that some al-Qaeda operatives were active in northern Africa. – Guardian Unlimited Â