Is Bin Ladin a Has Been?



(Photo: CBS)

Before the season's premiere of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and "The West Wing," and before "Rome," there's CBS' "60 Minutes" (Ed Bradley, incidentally, is now the "First Face"; yay him), where Steve Kroft does a story called, "Is Bin Ladin a Has Been?"

Charmed, we're sure, at the deficit of wit involved the titlemaking process; still, we're sure the gang at "Black Rock" has put together a real thought-provoker on the subject, so long as they show, we will argue, a stiff counterargument against the implausible line of the Pakistani military.

Pseudo-President Musharraf is, to be sure, on borrowed time (The Corsair checks his Piaget Fingerprint Watch), and a cornered dictator and his free-falling regime -- This: The Coirsair knows all too well -- is dangerously untrustworthy. Dangerously. This is especially so when "The Dark Lady," Benazir Bhutto is busy "casing out" the fucking joint, looking -- with a Netanyahuesque sense of timing -- to a brisk return to the seat of Power. Even an accomplished and pathological tyrant such as Musharraf cannot juggle the United States, Muslim Fundamentalism and the Womankind at the same time (Do you see the pathology at work?); something had to give. The CBSNews website says:

"The Pakistani military officers battling al Qaeda along the border with Afghanistan who have the latest first-hand information about Osama bin Laden believe he is hiding with a small cadre in Afghanistan and is no longer an effective leader for the terrorist group."

Okay, though we haven't seen the piece (But when has that stopped a blogger on a roll), we are automoatically skeptical about claims made by Pakistani military officers to a major US media outlet. Do we expect outright honesty from the military unit of a military dictatorship (No matter how "allied" they are in the War on Terror)? Is there an agenda at work in the information that we are being given? These are some questions that should go through your mind as you watch on Sunday.

In the words of Arnaud de Borchgrave, "(Escaped Taliban) have been living in tribal villages, protected by former members of Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence (ISI) agency who were once assigned to Bin Laden and his Afghan training camps. Between 1996, when the Taliban completed its conquest of Afghanistan, and 2001, when it was routed, several hundred ISI officers served in Afghanistan. They never agreed with President Pervez Musharraf's post-9/11 decision to ditch Taliban. Nine top Taliban leaders had been trained in a Pakistani madrassa - Islamic religious schools -- in Khattak, NWFP, under ISI supervision. Today, Waziristan, north and south, is a wilderness of mirrors where former Pakistani intelligence officers are encouraging foreign guerrillas back into Afghanistan to join a resurgent Taliban."

But back to the CBSNews website, which says:

"... 'I think now [bin Laden] is being protected or assisted by a very short number, which keeps his profile very low,' says the counter-terrorism head of Pakistan�s Intelligence Service, a brigadier who goes by the name 'Ali' and whose true identity is known by only a few government officials. Ali believes that bin Laden is still someplace along the border, probably in Afghanistan.

" ... ''The mere fact that there has not been a replication of 9/11 speaks volumes of what we shared with the world,' boasts Ali (to Kroft). Finding bin Laden doesn�t matter at this point, according to Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, who is in charge of Pakistan�s anti-terrorism operations along the Afghanistan border. 'If [bin Laden] is hiding in a hole, neither the electronic nor the human intelligence can find him,' he tells Kroft. 'Is it all that important to find him? If he�s taken out tomorrow, his ideology is not going to come to an end. I don�t think that it�s important�if he is captured� This is my personal view,' says Hussain. Kroft also spoke to Pakistan�s leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. �These troops are not certainly on the trail of one man, and that�s all they are doing,� notes Musharraf. 'We are fighting terrorism wherever it is. If Osama happens to be there incidentally, he will be killed or captured.'"

But what if the dictator Musharraf doesn't want Bin Laden dead? What if that isn't in his "national interest"? What if Musharraf is fucking with the United States of America, as tyrants are wont to do, presenting himself as in the process of achieving some nebulous (sotto voce) "progress," and, similtaneously, presenting himself as the only alternative to chaos ("apres moi, le deluge") and -- worse -- al-Quaeda? Why, The Corsair asks, are we "working with" Musharraf, a man so clearly -- if you have the eyes to see -- in "political entropy," instead of siding squarely with the anti-Musharraf and pro-democratic forces of -- say -- women's liberation? According to de Borchgrave:

" ... Over the past three years, Musharraf has stated flatly Osama Bin Laden is dead, later amended to say Bin Laden is definitely not anywhere in Pakistan, and more recently that he is hiding in the border regions between the two countries and that the trail has gone cold ... Musharraf loyalists do not believe in the durability of a close alliance with the U.S. past the capture or killing of Bin Laden. Hence, the reluctance to conduct a manhunt in the jagged mountain range that forms the unmarked frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan."

Does Steve Kroft arrive at a similar -- or dissimilar -- conclusion?

deBorchgrave
CBSNews