Word: bins
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...officials know that simply "decapitating" al-Qaeda by taking out bin Laden won't solve their terror problem. The very nature of the web he has built, and part of what makes it so confounding to U.S. officials, is that there is no clear chain of command. Bin Laden, U.S. intelligence believes, has several deputies who are perfectly capable of running terror operations without him. There is even a chance that bin Laden may not even be in Afghanistan anymore--speculation has put him everywhere from the hills of Uzbekistan to the deserts of Sudan. And if the White House...
There are of course other--easier--ways to clean out the "roaches," and for these the U.S. grasped last week. The simplest scenario would be if the Taliban agreed to hand over bin Laden. U.S. diplomats have been careful to leave the Kabul government some ways to save face, insisting carefully, for example, that bin Laden be turned in to "appropriate authorities," which gives the Taliban a chance to surrender bin Laden to an Islamic state instead of to the U.S. Nearly every "last chance" offered to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, though, has been met with a denunciation...
...Bin Laden remains target No. 1 in that war. Though U.S. intelligence has tracked him since 1995, it was not until 1998, following the al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa that year, that President Clinton authorized an all-out hunt. Since then, U.S. special-ops forces have been working Afghanistan's hilly terrain, traveling in small bands. The U.S. commando presence inside Afghanistan, a Pentagon official said, is "sporadic" and "very small"--they generally move in groups of less than half a dozen--and even big raids won't involve more than "several dozen" troops...
Should the U.S. be targeting bin Laden so aggressively? Taking out your enemies is a time-honored practice, notably used by Israel in recent times. A key element in Israel's antiterrorist strategy for years has been to eliminate them. Israelis not only killed Palestinians to avenge attacks like the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre but went after operational brains as well. In 1973 an Israeli commando team, which included then-future Prime Minister Ehud Barak--disguised as a woman--wiped out several top Palestine Liberation Organization leaders in a raid in Beirut. The Israelis are still at it. A missile...
...that the Israelis have to keep doing it suggests that wiping out the leaders does not actually solve the problem, a principle that at least one "coalition" member is already highlighting. "My advice," Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the BBC last week, "is not to attack Afghanistan or kill bin Laden. This will result in the rise of a new generation of terrorists." But for the Bush Administration, committed to capturing bin Laden "dead or alive," no strike at all is the one option it doesn't seem to have any longer...