The Harder Hunt For Bin Laden

Outwardly, Osama bin Laden's protectors in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan affect a haughty unconcern. Taliban fighters in Pakistan, interviewed last week, laughed at the spectacle of a disheveled and down-and-out Saddam Hussein getting hoisted out of his hole, utterly abandoned by aides and bodyguards who once pledged to die for him.

Taliban fighters hiding in plain sight in Pakistan say this will never be the fate of bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri or Mullah Mohammed Omar, the ousted Taliban leader who remains their closest political ally. The terror chieftains are well protected by their bodyguards, by the local population and by Afghanistan's forbidding geography. While Saddam faced a 130,000-strong U.S. Army relentlessly tightening the noose, bin Laden is up against a scant 10,000-man U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. And unlike Saddam's henchmen, supporters of bin Laden and Omar are "linked by Islam, not by money," these Taliban sources boast. "We have a small, strongly Islamic population, thousands of high mountains and millions of caves to hide in," says a senior Taliban planner and fund-raiser who goes by the nom de guerre Zabihullah.

Taliban operatives also say that wherever bin Laden stops these days, he tells his followers to plant land mines and pockets of high explosives around his clandestine bivouac. These booby traps are meant to protect him--but also to make sure that if "the sheik" can't escape, he is quickly "martyred" and his body destroyed. Bin Laden has told his confidants that he "would welcome death as a martyr," and that he would never allow himself to be captured alive, Zabihullah says.

Some Taliban and Qaeda fighters say that, far from running, bin Laden will likely capitalize on Saddam's humiliating arrest--seeing it as a chance to radicalize and Islamicize the anti-U.S resistance in Iraq. They say Saddam's capture has not changed bin Laden's plans--reported recently in NEWSWEEK--to shift anti-American forces from Afghanistan to Iraq, Turkey and the Mideast. "The arrest of Saddam will have a positive affect on the anti-U.S. jihad and Qaeda operations in Iraq," says Rahman Hotaki, a Taliban official who works with Qaeda fighters in Waziristan on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. "Many Iraqis hated Saddam, so they didn't join the fight. Now that he is gone, more Iraqis will join a holy jihad against the U.S."

Brave words. But in the assessment of former associates, bin Laden is likely worried. A former mujahed companion of bin Laden's named Commander Hamat speculates that the Qaeda leader has added an extra "circle" of security around him in the aftermath of Saddam's capture. And while bin Laden can take solace for now because most U.S. forces are still focused on crushing the Iraqi insurgency, he has reason to fear the public vow of Gen. Richard Myers, the Joint Chiefs chairman who was traveling in Afghanistan last week. Myers declared it was an "absolute certainty" that bin Laden "will be captured someday, just like we captured Saddam Hussein."

U.S. intelligence officials agree that trapping the Qaeda leader, who has eluded pursuers for more than a decade, will be much more difficult than getting Saddam. But U.S. manhunting teams in Afghanistan, recently united with similar teams in Iraq under the umbrella of Task Force 121, have actually come close to nailing their quarries on several occasions, sources say. They are also using, in some cases, similar techniques. NEWSWEEK has learned that software used to track wanted Iraqis is also being used to piece together and identify weaknesses in the ethnic, family and tribal links of bin Laden's network, according to intelligence analysts and company officials. The software, called Analyst's Notebook, was developed by i2 Inc., a Springfield, Va., company. Analyst's Notebook allows investigators to turn huge volumes of data into actionable intelligence, creating charts of complex networks by identifying, for example, frequent phone calls between members. The same program traced the "love bug" computer virus of 2000 to an obscure hacker in the Philippines and has been used to nab serial killers, said Chuck Izzo, an i2 spokesman.