Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...media may be carping about Osama bin Laden still looming at large and politicians may be nervous that he may have slipped the noose. But behind closed doors in the Pentagon, senior military officers are jubilant, even to the point of sounding cocky, about how their first battle in the war against terrorism has gone, referring to the attack on Afghanistan to take down the Taliban and to uproot the al-Qaeda terrorist base there. Sure, U.S. commandos have been hunting day and night (without success) for bin Laden himself, but from the beginning Pentagon strategists were never optimistic that...
...Victory without bin Laden...
...Unless bin Laden turns up in the next couple of days in the Tora Bora area, the likelihood is that the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan will begin winding down without having delivered a number of the most prized leaders in the enemy camp. Pursuit of the world's most-wanted terrorists will become, once more, an intelligence-and-police operation. President Bush insists they'll be brought to justice, but many Americans had expected to see the moment come before Christmas. Despite America's dramatic successes - destroying the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda's infrastructure, killing hundreds...
...America's disappointment, of course, is bin Laden's delight. If he manages to survive the massive U.S. military effort in Afghanistan, he wins an important propaganda victory no matter how much of his movement been destroyed - precisely because of the extent to which America's war against him has become personalized. Bin Laden was a relative nobody in the Islamic world in the summer of 1998 when his men bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa. And it wasn't necessarily the attacks themselves that made him the international center of gravity for Islamist anti-American rage...
...Bin Laden is all too aware of the power of perception, even among his natural ideological bedfellows. On last week's video he emphasizes that even in his core constituency, people back the stronger horse. The ability of al-Qaeda to survive may now depend substantially on perceptions among the Islamists of the relative strengths of bin Laden and his enemies. The Afghan campaign has not diminished the anti-American anger on which bin Laden built his movement - Arab media is dominated not by stories of al-Qaeda's defeat, but by reports of Palestinians under attack by Israel...