Time to take out and Jalaluddin Haqqani and Sarajuddin Haqqani
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=126&art_id=vn20041129025411199C740898
US Marines 'itching' to track down Osama
By Nick Meo
The army guy was scattering handfuls of Osama bin Laden leaflets from his Humvee as the heavily-armed convoy bumped through a mudbrick village on the way to the Pakistan border.
He nurtured the unlikely hope that somebody with information would find them lying in the road.
The leaflets, designed by a psychological operations team based at Fire Base Salerno, did not mention the $25-million reward but featured colour pictures of Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, his al-Qaeda deputy, and the one-eyed Mullah Omar looking like evil zombies from a horror film.
The caption in Pushtun mocked them for drawing out a war that they could not win.
"Nobody really thinks Bin Laden is here in Afghanistan," said the soldier, whose job is to make friends with Afghan villagers in the hope of finding useful intelligence. "But a lot of people go to and fro across the border. Just maybe somebody who knows something we want to know will pick up a leaflet."
The soldier has been seconded to a deeply frustrated Marine unit.
After six months in Afghanistan, Lima Company still hasn't been in a skirmish with the enemy, which is just over the Pakistan border - a border that they may not cross.
Their mission is to drive from their base in the city of Khowst to Border Checkpoint (BCP) Three - one of a series of spectacular hilltop forts ringed with blast barriers and razor wire - which controls a key border crossing into Afghanistan. It overlooks the rugged mountains of North Waziristan in Pakistan's north-west Frontier Province, the direction in which BCP 3's machine guns are pointed.
A Marine officer spat a stream of brown saliva from chewing tobacco in the direction of Pakistan.
"We all know al-Qaeda and the Taliban are in there somewhere," he said. "Maybe that's where Bin Laden is hiding.
"We would dearly love to go in there, track them down, and end the war here and now. But for political reasons we can't."
Waziristan, a wild tribal territory almost beyond the control of Islamabad, is one of the most likely hideouts for Bin Laden, who is thought to be somewhere on the border.
This was backed up when he resurfaced in a video message to America's electorate just before the November 2 election.
But after three years of the biggest manhunt in history, the border has been scoured and the possibility of Bin Laden being in a different hiding place looks more likely than it did before.
The Islamist slums of Karachi or mountainous Pakistani Kashmir, the base for a decade-long jihad against India, are other possibilities that the FBI's manhunters are now believed to be looking at more carefully. Some analysts believe he may have escaped from Pakistan to his family homeland in Yemen, or to one of Africa's lawless states.
Away from the hunt for Bin Laden, a bloody guerrilla war that the outside world hardly sees continues on the border.
Cdr Sakhi Rahman's force was attacked at BCP 3 a few weeks ago. One of his officers lost an arm and another was injured in the hand. Several Taliban attackers were killed.
The commander said Pakistani militia men, who man the frontier a few hundred metres away, had helped the Taliban recover their dead and wounded, and his men had once killed a Pakistani militia man who had joined in an attack.
He said he had been instructed not to speak to the press by the people from Chapman, the US base for the CIA, special forces and other publicity-shy secret warriors who recruited, trained, and armed the 1 000-strong mercenary army manning the border forts to which Rahman belongs.
But he was boiling with anger and spoke anyway.
"Our intelligence told us that the attackers were all Pakistanis and they were paid 5 000 rupees each.
"They were Haqqani's men. Everybody knows he lives in Miram Shah. Why don't the Pakistanis arrest him?"
Jalaluddin Haqqani is a veteran warlord in his 70s who once fought the Soviets with US-supplied weapons and is now allied to al-Qaeda. He has become the biggest thorn in the side of American forces in Khowst province.
Putting a $250 000 bounty on his head has not yet eliminated the Haqqani problem, although some believe he may now be living in Saudi Arabia in semi-retirement, leaving the day-to-day running of his war to his son, Sarajuddin.
His Arab friends' money pays for "a chain of madrassas inside Pakistan" and he is regarded as the main instigator of the border guerrilla war in Khowst Province.
US officers say it is Haqqani's network which sends young brainwashed assassins across the border to kill government officials in suicide attacks, ambushes lorries bringing supplies to US bases on the dangerous road from Kabul, and masterminds mass attacks on government positions in which badly-trained teenage guerrillas are often slaughtered.
BCP 2, a few miles away, has the graves of 40 of them outside its perimeter.
Rahman said he believed the border war would end quickly if Pakistan wanted it to.
"Pakistan says it is helping America but it is not. Pakistan is two-faced," the commander said.
Gen Kilbaz Sherzai, an old communist intelligence chief trained at the Frunze Military Academy, the Soviet Sandhurst, shares that view. He now works for the Americans in Khowst and recently survived a suicide-bomb attempt by an inept attacker.
"The boy was sent by Haqqani," the general said. "He believed that he would go to paradise by killing an Afghan who was working with infidels, but instead he is in an American prison."
The general is convinced that Haqqani is a key player whose capture could lead to the biggest prize in the war on terror.
"He is a friend of Bin Laden and has many links with Al-Qaeda," he said. "I'm sure he knows where Osama is. We just don't know why Pakistan doesn't arrest him." - Independent Foreign Service