WASHINGTON -- A year after U.S. missiles slammed into Osama bin Laden's purported Afghan mountain stronghold, the terrorist kingpin remains alive but cornered, a stalemate that many specialists say suits America's interests better than its stated aim of arresting and trying him.
Roving from camp to camp in fear of American missiles, reduced to communicating with minions through hand-carried computer disks, strictly watched even by his Afghan "hosts," bin Laden is one of the world's most sought-after fugitives for his suspected role in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania last year.
Bin Laden, the messianic heir to a Saudi Arabian construction fortune, wants to eliminate the U.S. presence in Islamic lands. He is on the FBI's most wanted list and has a $5 million bounty on his head.
He is under federal indictment in New York, and Afghanistan's Islamic fundamentalist Taliban government is the target of U.S. economic sanctions for harboring him.
The United States remains publicly committed to his capture. In secret meetings this year in Washington, New York and Pakistan, U.S. representatives have continued to press Taliban officials to turn over bin Laden, government sources say.
"They have a clear message from us that he must be returned to justice," said Michael Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator.
Yet at the same time, many specialists on terrorism suggest that a bin Laden confined to an Asian backwater is better for the world than a bin Laden sitting in the dock in federal court in Manhattan. For one thing, the continued operation of his organization can provide valuable intelligence, they said. For another, he might not be easy to convict.
"I don't believe at this point in time that we should in any way negotiate with the Taliban to take him out," said Harvey Kushner, a consultant on terrorism and professor of criminal justice at Long Island University in New York. "If you ask anybody who's involved in the security business, they will tell you it's better to have him in the field and monitor him."
U.S. pressure
On Aug. 20, 1998, the United States hit bin Laden's bunker-reinforced camp in Afghanistan's Khost province with about 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles, killing 24 people but missing bin Laden. The same day, U.S. missiles destroyed a factory in Sudan that the United States said had produced components of deadly nerve gas and had received financing from bin Laden.
The Clinton administration blamed the Islamic militant for the bombings two weeks earlier of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed more than 220 people.
Since then, continuing U.S. pressure has diminished bin Laden's power and freedom even as it increased his stature and respect in the terrorist underworld.
Those are two good reasons to leave him alone, said authorities on counterterrorism.
"Let's say we could grab bin Laden tomorrow. Do you make him a martyr?" said Ben Venzke, a senior consultant and bin Laden specialist for Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services in Arlington, Va. "That's 100 times worse. What kind of reprisals are you opening yourself up to?"
Venzke believes that pursuing bin Laden is "the right approach," but he and other analysts emphasize that, in many ways, a free bin Laden is more valuable to U.S. intelligence agencies than a jailed bin Laden.
"As long as he's in Afghanistan and we're eliminating his ability to operate, we're in a pretty solid position to contain him," said Larry Johnson, a partner in BERG Associates, a security consultancy in Washington.
The lack of major terrorist strikes in the past year is strong evidence, analysts say, that bin Laden and his associates have been stymied. And his status as the spider at the hub of a terrorist web, they added, makes him an unwitting funnel of information for Western intelligence.
"We've been able to make some headway in developing some ground resources, some assets in the field" near bin Laden, said Kushner. "Isn't it better that we build significant assets around him so that we can collect intelligence from people who tend to gravitate toward him?"
Frequently on the move since the missile attacks last year, bin Laden has built a new, three-room mountain redoubt in a cave near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, according to Yossef Bodansky, author of "Bin Laden, The Man Who Declared War on America."
Bin Laden's satellite phones and other communications are presumably monitored by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, analysts said, and his entourage and family are targets for infiltration and betrayal. For his most sensitive communications, he must rely on agents carrying coded computer disks across the border, Kushner said.
The United States says it has foiled several attacks linked to bin Laden in the past year, although officials won't reveal particulars.
"It is extremely satisfying when we are able to do this and very frustrating that we are almost never able to describe publicly what we have done," CIA Director George J. Tenet said in November.
Private-sector security consultants said that bin Laden-affiliated groups had plotted against U.S. embassies in Uganda and Albania, among other places.
A difficult target
Capturing or killing bin Laden would eliminate a valuable source of intelligence, analysts said. At the same time, bringing him to bay in the United States or some third country would stir new hatred of the United States among Islamic fundamentalists, and it would present the difficult task of prosecuting and convicting him.
"It's not going to be that easy," said Stephanie Lanz, a terrorism specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "His fingerprints are not directly on the bomb."
According to the indictment, evidence against bin Laden includes financial paper trails linking him with the bombers; signs that the bombers used training camps and safe houses set up by bin Laden; messages on computers seized in Kenya; a videotape the bombers made of themselves before the blast; and bin Laden's exhortation last year for Muslims to kill Americans wherever they can be found.
Yet much of the evidence is circumstantial.
"Unless they've got some real powerful smoking guns, it's going to be very difficult to try him in the United States," Johnson said.
The Justice Department has charged bin Laden and 16 others in the bombings. Five people are in U.S. custody, including Wadih El Hage, a U.S. citizen whom prosecutors say was once bin Laden's assistant. Three others are under arrest in Britain.
U.S. government officials argue that nabbing bin Laden is feasible and morally necessary. They point to Libya's surrender last April, after years of political and economic pressure, of two suspects in the bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The suspects are on trial in a special Scottish court in the Netherlands.
And U.S. officials emphasize that bin Laden is still dangerous.
"The murder of people in those embassies is not something we will forget," said a State Department official. "We know where he is. We continue pressing the Taliban to turn him over."
Others aren't confident that is going to happen.
Bin Laden, who is in his mid-40s, recently took as his fourth wife the daughter of an important tribal leader, reports Bodansky, giving him stronger ties with the locals.
In addition, he's a "cash cow" for the Taliban, the fanatical fundamentalist group that controls 90 percent of Afghanistan, said Lanz. "I don't see them turning against their own hero. I think they're playing with the U.S."
What dismays independent security analysts is a tendency by the U.S. government and world news media to pay him too much mind and perhaps minimize other perils.
"It's like he's the General Motors of terrorism," Johnson said. "There's no denying that he wants to kill Americans, that he has killed Americans, or at least inspired others to do so."
But, added Pinkerton's Venzke, "Bin Laden's not as much the issue as the fact that his kind of terrorism exists, and it's here to stay. It's not just as simple as bin Laden."
And capturing him, he said, won't remove all the danger.