Bush Doesn't Care. Do We?
It has been one thousand three hundred fifty-two days since George W. Bush promised to find Osama bin Laden, "dead or alive." So where is he? Unless someone has operated on him and given him a new Kidney, we are looking for a 6'5" Arab who needs a dialysis treatment on a regular basis. (From 1 to 3 times a week)
Most Americans believe that our first military response to the attacks in New York and Washington--invading Afghanistan--was part of an attempt to capture Osama "dead or alive." Actually the war had nothing to do with bin Laden, who wasn't even in Afghanistan on 9/11. On January 28, 2002, CBS reported: "The night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment...Pakistan intelligence sources told CBS News that bin Laden was spirited into this military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment."
White House officials have never denied this report.
If 150,000 American troops haven't been enough to subdue Iraq, the 800 sent to Afghanistan--a mountainous country of similar size and population--were a sad joke of a posse hunting for someone who wasn't there to be found. And George W. Bush knew that.
Pakistan closed its border with Afghanistan on September 17. It's unlikely that bin Laden would have tried to return to Afghanistan, which everyone knew was about to be bombed and probably invaded, during that five-day window of opportunity. The main border crossing via the Khyber Pass would have been indiscreet and distant from the Taliban's safe haven around Kandahar. It's even more of a stretch to believe that Osama, still afflicted with a bum kidney, would have trekked by horseback over the rugged mountains of the Northwest Frontier Province after that date. Odds are that, at least for the time being, bin Laden remained in Pakistan.
Indeed, Pakistani-controlled Kashmir is topographically and politically more hospitable to bin Laden than the Pakistani-Afghan frontier regions targeted by joint U.S.-Pakistani military operations since 2002. Massive, craggy mountains separate bandit-ridden canyons where road signs mark routine ambush points. Tribal authorities allied with exiled Talibs fighting a proxy border war against India operate with so much impunity that recruiting centers for Al Qaeda and other "banned" Islamist parties operate openly out of storefronts. Pakistani troops rarely venture into the "Northern Areas"--not that their pro-Taliban officer corps would order them to do so. For these reasons Islamist militants fleeing eastern Afghanistan traditionally leave via Kashmir.
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