Bin Laden 'No Longer Top Target'
By Christina Lamb
The Sunday Times U.K.
Sunday 10 October 2004
Coalition commanders in Afghanistan have begun playing down the
im****tance of Osama Bin Laden - in sharp contrast to the statements
made earlier this year that he would be caught by the end of 2004.
"From the Afghan point of view we don't want to focus too much on
Bin Laden," said Major-General John Cooper, deputy commander of the
American-led coalition forces.
"He is not necessarily the major player. He will be caught one day
but his whereabouts today won't have a huge effect."
Cooper, the most senior British officer in Afghanistan, admitted
that after three years of searching the hills and valleys of
Afghanistan, the coalition forces had no idea where their other main
target, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, is hiding. "We don't even know
which country he's in," he said.
Cooper refused to reveal whether the coalition had any idea where
Bin Laden was. "Saddam (Hussein) was caught as a result of
cir***stances and good intelligence and I'm sure one day the same will
happen with Bin Laden," he said.
The attempt to ****ft attention away from Bin Laden may be a
reflection of frustration at being unable to find him.
President George W Bush was so eager to capture the Al-Qaeda
leader before next month's election that the strength of the US forces
in Afghanistan was almost doubled to 19,000 men.
However, deteriorating security in Iraq has forced the Pentagon to
move Taskforce 121, the commando team behind the capture of Saddam,
away from Afghanistan. It has returned to Iraq to search for Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the terrorist believed to be responsible for the murder of
Kenneth Bigley.
Psychological operations teams in Afghanistan have stopped
distributing wanted posters for Omar and Bin Laden and have
concentrated instead on encouraging people to register and vote in
this weekend's presidential election.
There had been a determined effort to engage the Taliban in an
attempt to try to divert them from disrupting the election, Cooper
said. Although more than 950 people have died in political violence
this year, he believes that the Taliban's strength has been
overestimated. He said their failure to stop the elections was partly
due to improved co-operation from Pakistan.
"President Pervez Musharraf had been the target of several
assassination attempts - and that tends to focus the mind," he said.
"The efforts of the Pakistan government and security forces over
the past few months have been remarkably good. There is now a high
degree of co-operation between Pakistan, Afghanistan and us."
Britain is planning to send as many as 5,000 men to Afghanistan by
2006. The opening of a Burger King restaurant at Kandahar airbase last
week led to suggestions that the Americans were planning to stay for a
long time, but Cooper refused to give a timescale.
"The situation in Afghanistan is all about the Afghans taking
control of their own government and their own destiny," he said.
"We're helping them to build their own national army, their own
police, border police and customs, which will take several years. Most
Afghan people welcome the coalition, but their tolerance of outsiders
isn't endless and there will come a time when they will say 'Thank you
very much, now go'."
Cooper denied that Wa****ngton had been slow to realise the
im****tance of rebuilding the country after the Taliban were ousted.
"It's easy to criticise, but two years ago Afghanistan had no electric
light and roads hadn't been built," he said.
"It's not perfect and there is a long and difficult route ahead,
dealing with inner frictions such as warlords and the opium trade. But
it's on the way to being a success story and the elections are a
significant part of that."
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