Word: osama
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...dirty" teams work faster, less concerned with legal finery and more intent on making a quick, persuasive case to the world that the attacks are the handiwork of Osama bin Laden. On this track, the CIA and other nations' intelligence agents use informants who aren't necessarily thuggish or unreliable but who could never appear in court; to do so would risk revealing their sources. That's why, as one CIA veteran puts it, "we only do dirty...
...take out Osama bin Laden with a search-and-destroy mission, you have just a few minutes to find, identify and attack. How do you locate one man--one wary, mobile guerrilla--amid the trackless peaks and chasms of Afghanistan? He's protected by caves and safe houses and ultraloyal bodyguards. He travels with a few aides he has known for life, in vehicles that change daily, perhaps with a decoy double nearby. You've got eyes in the sky scanning every rocky quadrant, and those satellites can see trucks and buildings and moving people--but they can't pick...
...corresponding one of betrayal, with loyalties that shift like the desert sands. That shift is beginning against the Taliban's leadership. Fissures are appearing in the Taliban ranks between hard-liners and so-called moderates, who privately believe that Mohammed Omar's refusal to hand over terrorist Osama bin Laden is akin to mass suicide. Says Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani author and expert on the Taliban movement: "The U.S. threat is helping to divide the Taliban." Rashid says the Taliban's "fellow travelers," the tribal leaders who don't share the Taliban's extremism, will be the first to shear...
...major U.S.-led assault could have disastrous effects inside Afghanistan--and in neighboring Pakistan too. "We have a saying: 'To kill a louse, you needn't set fire to your jacket,'" explains Mohammed Sarwar Khan Kakar, an influential tribal leader and politician in Quetta. "In other words, to catch Osama bin Laden, you don't have to burn all Afghanistan." Despite their grievances against the Taliban's brutish rule, Pashtuns would close ranks and rally to their fellow tribesmen against the U.S. In all likelihood, their forces would swell with zealots crossing over from Pakistan's madrasahs, or Koranic schools...
...along the Kabul front, Taliban fighters repeat the same line with apparent conviction: they are fighting for two great champions of Islam--Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. During a radio exchange on a front west of Kabul, a local Taliban commander told Khademudin, his childhood playmate and now the enemy commander in the area, that "bin Laden is a guest of Afghanistan who has sacrificed much for the country." Khan Jan recalls a recent radio address by Mullah Omar. "If we die, that is fine," the mullah said, "but we will never give him up." A Northern Alliance security...