Al Qaeda quietly slipping into Iran, Pakistan
A web of regional players could foil the search for bin Laden and his associates.
With the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his associates bogging down in regional and tribal politics, American officials say they are facing the unsettling prospect that Al Qaeda members are slipping away into Iran.
Senior Afghan intelligence and security officials believe that about 1,000 Al Qaeda members are on the run and still fighting in Afghanistan, but they say hundreds more, including senior leaders, are crossing the borders into Iran and Pakistan.
These officials say that if the United States wants to successfully complete its war on terror inside Afghanistan, it needs to adjust what they call a failed bombing strategy and put more ground forces into the hunt for fleeing Al Qaeda and Taliban officials.
Senior American officials say Iran, which shares a 600-mile border with Afghanistan, may be abetting the escape of Al Qaeda and Taliban members and also frustrating the US war on terror. There are also reports that Iran is aiding militants, including the Pashtun fundamentalist leader Gulbud din Hekmatyar, who are not at all supportive of Afghanistan's interim administration.
"We are concerned that some Al Qaeda people have skipped westward, and the interim authority [in Kabul] is concerned about those people because they played a great role in the destruction of Afghanistan," says a senior US diplomat. "I think Iran needs to consider the consequences of going that route."
From forces near Herat receiving support from Iran in the east, to tribal chieftains on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border in the west and south, some of whom side with Al Qaeda, the US faces a complex web of regional players who could foil the search for the world's most wanted man and his associates.
In the southeast provinces of Khost and Paktia, where the US has focused its aerial and limited ground assaults for the past 10 days, senior Afghan intelligence and security officials warn that hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters are dispersing before and after each bombing raid. American forces, they say, are unlikely to net the people they are most anxious to catch unless far more ground troops - thousands, not hundreds as are now being used - are sent in to grab them.
"With the current strategy of bombing from the air, the Al Qaeda fighters merely disperse in any direction they choose - often with the cooperation of locals," says Engineer Ali, Afghanistan's chief of intelligence for border and tribal areas.
When bin Laden and several top associates escaped US bombing raids and an Afghan-led ground assault on the Al Qaeda mountain complex at Tora Bora this past December, between 1,000 and 2,000 Al Qaeda members fled south into Pakistan and southwest through remote mountain passes, many of them ending up in Paktia and Khost provinces.
The Yemeni military chief of the Tora Bora base is now operating out of Khost and Paktia, while Afghan officials believe Maulvi Jalaludin Haqqani, the Taliban's armed forces chief, is operating in the shadows in the same area, or just across the border in Pakistan.
