The good, bad, and unfinished

The US bombers still leave their double-barrel smoke trails above the mule paths wending along the Afghan border with Pakistan. Occasionally, a pair of B-52s hover for a minute or so over a village and then unleash a mighty payload, whose blast rolls out in a thundering echo across the rocky valleys.

In the village of Zhawar, which was first hit by US cruise missiles in 1998, after the bombings of two US embassies in Africa, impoverished villagers shout into the skies in anger. Moments later, they scramble to gather scrap metal and unspent ammunition to sell to border traders.

Even though top US generals say they are not concerned by their often fruitless hunt for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the war in Afghanistan can appear, on some days, like a Greek tragedy. The US military plays the role of a frustrated Zeus - its bombers hurling down bolts of lightning while the Afghan villagers, the embittered chorus line, shout back with angry diatribes.

Meanwhile, the real targets in the war on terror have become ever more elusive. And after three months of war in Afghanistan, there have been great successes, but also great failures.

In mid-December, Mr. bin Laden apparently slipped the noose at Tora Bora. At that time, the Pentagon, mimicking confident-sounding Afghan commanders, said that their chief suspect was "surrounded" in a cave complex there.

But a senior Al Qaeda operative told the Monitor on Dec. 12 how bin Laden had earlier traveled out of his favorite mountain redoubt with his right-hand man, Ayman Al Zawahiri, to Kandahar, before returning without him and leaving for the last time - riding out on horseback.

In a strikingly similar scenario with new actors, Afghan proxy fighters claimed in the first days of the new year that they had the Taliban's spiritual leader, Mullah Omar, hemmed in with a thousand fighters in his own mountain enclave. US Marines, in a mission that was first concealed and later made public, raced into the fray.

Then came reports this past weekend that the one-eyed cleric had somehow outwitted his would-be captors by fleeing over the dirt roads on a motorcycle.

Kandahar intelligence chief Haji Gullalai says that Omar was known to be travelling with "three companions."

But while the chief suspects seem to have slipped away - for now at least - the US has had some great success with unseating the Taliban regime.

While losing only a single soldier in combat, the US military has unseated the rogue regime that - until late last year - casually hosted the terror network likely responsible for the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

A new "pro-Western" regime of mostly educated Afghans has given hope to the population of one of the world's most desperate nations. In Kabul, Afghan officials now speak respectfully of the world's most powerful nation, which has helped them unseat the once-popular Taliban militia.

Despite mounting criticism back home of US military strategy, some leading Western military analysts abroad credit the Americans with being appropriately sensitive to Muslim world concerns by not using more US forces - still only 1,500 - in Afghanistan to kill Al Qaeda members.

"To have used these proxies from the anti-Taliban alliance was and is the right thing to be doing," says Paul Beaver, a British military analyst. "If the US, particularly a Christian soldier, were to shoot bin Laden, this could well lead to a backlash from within the Muslim world where he still has support. If, on the other hand, an Afghan kills 'the invader,' this is going to have a much better ring to it. The ideal solution is for bin Laden to be found dead and to have been shot by an Afghan."

Still, the British defense specialist doesn't believe that bin Laden is in Afghanistan anymore. "He has demonstrated his craftiness with the attack on the World Trade Center," he adds. "I can't believe he would now just sit and wait in Afghanistan. I think he would have flown the coop - even to Saudi Arabia, where he still has friends and sympathizers."

The trail leading to bin Laden may have grown cold of late, yet, even in the heart of an Afghan winter, it has not entirely frozen over.

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