Where Is Bin Laden? Secretary Gates Says No Intel In "Years"

Where is bin Laden? Secretary Gates Says No Intel in 'Years'

http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009...-in-years.html

December 05, 2009 6:04 PM

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told me that the U.S. has not had any good intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden in "years."

He also couldn’t confirm reports that a detainee in Pakistan had claimed that he had information on where bin Laden was earlier this year. He made the startling admission during my interview with him for "This Week" airing Sunday.

Here's the exchange:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: "The Pakistani Prime Minister shrugged off any concerns about that this week, about whether or not he’d done enough to go after Osama bin Laden. He said he doesn’t believe Osama is in Pakistan. Is he right and do you think the Pakistanis have done enough to get him?"

DEFENSE SECRETARY ROBERT GATES: "Well, we don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is. If we did, we’d go get him"

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: "What was the last time we had any good intelligence on where he was?

DEFENSE SECRETARY ROBERT GATES: "I think it’s been years."

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: "Years?!"

DEFENSE SECRETARY ROBERT GATES: "I think so."

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: "So these reports that came out just this week about a detainee saying he might have seen him in Afghanistan earlier this year, we can’t confirm that?
Gates: No."

You can watch the complete interview with Gates and Secretary Clinton Sunday on "This Week."

White House still lacks solid intel on bin Laden

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...op0tgD9CE2DQO0

By ROBERT BURNS (AP) – 15 hours ago

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden may be slipping back and forth from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Or the U.S. might not have a clue, more than eight years after the al-Qaida leader masterminded the terrorist attacks on America.

Given a chance Sunday to clear away some of the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the world's most wanted terrorist, Obama administration officials seemed to add to it with what appeared to be conflicting assessments.

President Barack Obama's national security adviser, James Jones, said bin Laden, believed hiding mainly in a rugged area of western Pakistan, may be periodically slipping back into Afghanistan. But Obama's Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, said the U.S. has lacked good intelligence on bin Laden for a long time — "I think it has been years" — and did not confirm that he'd slipped into Afghanistan.

The failed hunt for bin Laden has been one of the signature frustrations of the global war on terrorism that former President George W. Bush launched after the Sept. 11 attacks. The main explanation given by both the Bush and Obama administrations for not getting bin Laden is that they simply don't know where he is.

"If we did, we'd go get him," Gates said.

Jones, a retired Marine general, stressed the urgency of targeting bin Laden, and spoke of a renewed campaign to capture or kill him. Bin Laden had been sheltered in Afghanistan by Taliban allies while plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. When U.S. forces ousted the Taliban in late 2001, bin Laden fled into Pakistan from his mountain redoubt.

Asked on CNN's "State of the Union" whether the administration has reliable intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts, Jones replied, "The best estimate is that he is somewhere in North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border." He did not comment on the intelligence behind that estimate, nor did he cite a time period or describe more specifically bin Laden's apparent border crossings.

Gates told ABC's "This Week" that "we don't know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is," although he agreed that his likely location is North Waziristan.

That's part of the loosely governed Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan where the border with Afghanistan is largely unrecognized and unmarked. There is little Pakistani government or military control in this remote region, and militants affiliated with al-Qaida can move freely across the frontier into Afghanistan.

The U.S. has targeted North Waziristan and other areas on the Pakistan side of the border with drone-launched missile strikes, killing substantial numbers of militants as well as Pakistani civilians. The Pakistani army has undertaken an offensive against Taliban militants in South Waziristan but it has not expanded the effort into North Waziristan.

Obama administration officials have often asserted, as did the Bush administration, that they believe bin Laden is being sheltered on the Pakistani side of the border, along with other senior al-Qaida leaders. But Jones broke new ground by saying publicly that the al-Qaida chief may have slipped back into Afghanistan.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., made a somewhat similar, if less specific, remark Sunday about bin Laden's movements. He told NBC's "Meet the Press" that knowledgeable people have told him that bin Laden "moves back and forth."

McCain did not elaborate, except to say that although bin Laden is not currently able to establish bases for training and equipping terrorists who would attack the United States, "I think it's important to get him."

Two Afghan provinces in the country's northeast held particular attraction for bin Laden in the 1990s: Kunar and Nuristan. The towering mountains there hid bin Laden training camps that date back to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. A longtime bin Laden ally, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, holds sway in the area. U.S. troops have targeted Hekmatyar's security chief, Kashmir Khan, in Kunar.

During his years in Afghanistan as a guest of the Taliban, bin Laden operated mainly in the southern region around Kandahar.

Gates said he does not blame a lack of Pakistani cooperation for the absence of intelligence on bin Laden.

"No, I think it's because if, as we suspect, he is in North Waziristan, it is an area that the Pakistani government has not had a presence in, in quite some time," Gates said, adding that although the Pakistani government has its own priorities, any pressure it brings on the Taliban is helpful because it is in league with al-Qaida.

During a visit to Pakistan in late October, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton caused a stir by chiding Pakistani officials for failing to press the hunt for al-Qaida inside their borders. She said she found it "hard to believe" that no one in Islamabad knows where the al-Qaida leaders are hiding and couldn't get them "if they really wanted to."

Gates said he could not confirm recent news reports that bin Laden had been seen in Afghanistan earlier this year. BBC News reported last week that a Taliban detainee in Pakistan claimed to have met in January or February with an unidentified associate who said he had seen bin Laden just days earlier in Afghanistan, possibly in Ghazni province.

A recent Senate report said bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan only three months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when American military leaders made the crucial decision not to pursue him with massive force.

The report asserted that bin Laden's escape at his most vulnerable in December 2001 laid the foundation for today's reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan. Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority prepared the report at the request of the chairman, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Tommy Franks, the retired Army general who ran the initial war effort in Afghanistan and chief of U.S. Central Command, wrote in his book, "American Soldier," in 2004 that he was confident in late 2001 that al-Qaida could not escape the Afghan forces leading the battle around Tora Bora, supported by heavy air strikes from American warplanes.

Adviser: Obama plans to launch Bin Laden hunt anew

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/adviser-...den-hunt-anew/

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, December 6th, 2009 -- 6:18 pm

The United States will launch a new effort to track down Osama bin Laden who is believed to be hiding in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan border, a senior US official said on Sunday.

Intelligence reports suggest the Al-Qaeda chief "is somewhere inside north Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border," said national security adviser James Jones.

Asked if President Barack Obama's administration planned a fresh attempt to go after Al-Qaeda's leader, Jones said: "I think so."

Bin Laden was a "very important symbol of what Al-Qaeda stands for" and it was crucial to make sure he was on the run or captured, Jones, a retired Marine general, told CNN's "State of the Union" program.

His comment that Bin Laden sometimes crossed to the Afghan side of the mountainous border contrasted with previous accounts from US officials that suggested the Al-Qaeda chief was hiding in Pakistan.

Despite the vow to track down Bin Laden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Sunday that intelligence agencies did not know where the Al-Qaeda leader was and had lacked reliable information on his whereabouts for years.

"We don't know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is. If we did, we'd go get him," Gates, a former CIA director, told ABC News' "This Week."

The Al-Qaeda network leader is seen as the chief mastermind of the attacks of September 11, 2001 on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.

US government officials have named Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network as the prime suspects in the attacks and offered a 50 million dollar reward, but for more than eight years Bin Laden has avoided capture.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday it was "important" to capture or kill Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda figures but told NBC that "certainly you can make enormous progress absent (without) that."

A Senate report released last week said Bin Laden was "within the grasp" of American forces in late 2001 in Afghanistan but escaped because then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls for reinforcements.

In making the case last week for surging 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, Obama and his deputies have argued the Taliban are colluding with Bin Laden's network and therefore containing the Afghan insurgents is vital to defeating Al-Qaeda.

The administration has also warned that a victory for the Taliban in Afghanistan could destabilize its nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan.

Washington has pressed Islamabad to crack down on Taliban and Al-Qaeda strongholds inside its territory and top US officials on Sunday praised Pakistan for launching a military campaign against militants.

But the US special representative to the region, Richard Holbrooke, said Islamabad so far had only targeted insurgents launching attacks inside Pakistan and not the distinct Afghan Taliban leadership using its territory to fight the Kabul government and NATO-led troops across the border.

"It is an unfortunate but unavoidable fact that those military offensives ... were directed against the Taliban that were are focused on Pakistan, not the Taliban who are focused on Afghanistan," Holbrooke told CNN.

"That's one of the main issues that we have been talking to our friends in Pakistan about."

Washington has stepped up a bombing campaign against Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan using unmanned aircraft, an operation that US officials decline to discuss publicly.

The New York Times reported last week that the White House had granted authority to the Central Intelligence Agency to expand the air strikes in Pakistan to coincide with Obama's Afghan war strategy.

US officials were also talking with Islamabad about using the drones to strike in Baluchistan -- a vast region outside of the tribal areas that borders Afghanistan and Iran -- where Afghan Taliban leaders are reportedly hiding, the Times reported.

Gates said Sunday that US forces would not pursue Taliban leaders in Pakistan and that it was up to the Pakistani military to tackle the militants.