Doubts arise over latest Osama missive to US

An analysis carried out on the September 11, 2007 video to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in America, suggests that Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden may not have delivered the latest warning to Washington.

Washington, Sept.13 : An analysis carried out on the September 11, 2007 video to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in America, suggests that Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden may not have delivered the latest warning to Washington.

According to an article appearing in the Terrorism Intelligence report, the 47-minute video features a voice-over introduction by Osama bin Laden, but there is nothing in it to indicate it was recorded recently.

The article further goes on to say that the bulk of video features the voice of Abu Musab Waleed al-Shehri, one of the suicide bombers who crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center's north tower. That recording was made prior to al-Shehri's travel to the United States in the spring of 2001.

The production does include a still photograph of him -- one taken from what appears to be a real bin Laden video released Sept. 7 (in which he sports a dyed beard), but bin Laden's comments about the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi suggest they were recorded during al Qaeda's 2006 media blitz.

The release of two successive bin Laden messages (September 7 and 11,2007) again focuses attention on why the United States has failed to find the Qaeda chief-- and to wonder whether it ever will.

Questions that arise include the fact that the United States and Pakistan have not launched a major military operation to envelop and systematically search the entire region where bin Laden is said to be hiding.

Secondly, if such an operation is undertaken, it would require tens of thousands of troops and likely result in heavy combat with the tribes residing in the area.

According to the article, the United States, therefore, will continue intelligence and covert special operations forces efforts, and if the objective is to catch bin Laden, it will have to wait patiently for one of those operations to produce a lucky break -- or for bin Laden to make a fatal operational security blunder.

It is also being assumed that finding a single man in a large area with rugged terrain would be a daunting task.

The terrain in the soaring, craggy Safed Koh range that runs along the Pakistani-Afghan border or in the Hindu Kush to the north could be twice as high, if not more, in comparison to the Smokies, say Fred Burton and Scott Stewart, the authors of the article.

The Hindu Kush contains some of the highest peaks in the world, they add, making the task of capturing bin Laden very difficult.

In the lawless areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border -- the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the presence of Pakistani military forces is resented. The heavily armed tribesmen living there regularly attack troops.

The Pakistani military entered the FATA in force in March 2004 to pursue foreign militants, but the operation resulted in heavy casualties, demonstrating how difficult it is for the Pakistani military to fight people so well integrated in the Pashtun tribal badlands.

Aside from the hostile terrain, the U.S. forces are hampered by the strong, conservative Islamic conviction of the people in the region. This conviction extends beyond the tribes to include some members of the Pakistani military and Pakistan's intelligence agencies.

The relationships formed between bin Laden and the so-called "Afghan Arabs" (foreign jihadists) during the war against the Soviets is another obstacle.

Additionally, and perhaps just as important, many in the Pakistani government and military do not want to kill their own people -- the Pashtuns, for example -- in order to destroy the much smaller subset of Pakistani and foreign militants.

In an operation such as the manhunt for bin Laden, intelligence is critical.

According to U.S. counter-terrorism sources, U.S. intelligence had gathered some very good leads in the early days of the hunt for bin Laden and other high-value al Qaeda targets, and they shared this intelligence with their counterparts in the Pakistani security apparatus to try to organize operations to act on the intelligence.

During this process, people within the intelligence apparatus passed information back to al Qaeda, thus compromising the sources and methods being used to collect the information.

These double agents inside the Pakistani government did grave damage to the U.S. human intelligence network.

The areas where bin Laden likely is hiding are remote and insular. Visitors to the area are quickly recognized and identified -- especially if they happen to be blond guys named Skip.

Although al Qaeda's operational security and the jihadist intelligence network have been able to keep bin Laden alive thus far, they have lost a number of other senior operatives, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mohammed Atef, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Abu Faraj al-Libi and others.

Most of these have been al Qaeda operational managers, people who, by the very nature of their jobs, need to establish and maintain communications with militant cells.

ANI