Dan RatherTHIS PAST week, a popular on-line political journal ended a piece about what it called President Bush's 'bad news month' with the observation that, for the president's political prospects, "it might be time to find Osama." Trivialisation of a still-serious subject? Perhaps. But speculation along these lines, like it or not, has become a near staple of handicapping the upcoming presidential election. And it's not just the pundits who are at it.
The Washington, D.C., publication The Hill recently quoted Iowa's Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley as saying, of bin Laden, "Obviously, he'll be caught between now and the election ... I think they're on his trail now in a way they haven't been all year."
Presidential election year or no, the essential facts remain: Almost two and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden is still at large; and his capture or confirmed death would be, for reasons real and symbolic, a watershed event.
Much the same was once said about Saddam Hussein, but the former Iraqi dictator is a different animal entirely. Iraq and its fallen leader were intellectual targets in the larger war on terrorism; al Qaida and its leader at large are visceral ones. Americans see Saddam captured and feel the relief of the everyday Iraqis whom he victimised for years. To see Osama captured, however, would be to feel justice firsthand.
And far away from New York's Ground Zero, far from the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania field where Flight 93 met its end, there are strong indications that U.S. forces and their allies are mounting a new effort to accomplish just that.
The most obvious sign comes from the U.S. military's top commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Barno, who spoke this week from Kabul, Afghanistan, of a "very strong focus towards military operations in the spring and the summer and the fall and the winter here to close out the terrorist organisations" and expressed optimism about the prospects of catching bin Laden. "I think this is going to be a very, very critical year for us here," Gen. Barno said.
The general's words seem to be backed up by a number of recent developments, including the reason he was in Kabul in the first place: the shift of U.S. headquarters from Bagram Air Base to the Afghan capital, a move undertaken in part to help with intelligence-sharing between U.S. forces and the Afghan government. This comes after an announcement last weekend that Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States would all take steps to co-ordinate and share intelligence.
MOVING TO THE BORDER
Pakistani troops are moving to the border with Afghanistan, and for the first time in Pakistan's history, its military is operating within the tribal regions of Afghanistan's North-West Frontier Province. There are also reports that President Hamid Karzai's Afghan government is offering new monetary incentives to turn over members of al Qaida.
Taken along with recent, nearly identical statements by Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf along the lines that they believe bin Laden is hiding in the mountainous border region between their respective countries (in 2002, you might recall, Musharraf said he thought bin Laden was dead), all this activity seems to show that a big push is under way to finally get the 9/11 mastermind.
Would capturing bin Laden end the al Qaida threat? There's a good chance that it might have no more effect on global terrorism than nabbing Saddam had on the Iraqi insurgency. But it would, make no mistake, be a big and important development, with repercussions. Repercussions that might include the coming presidential election, but that would also, for most Americans, go well beyond it.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor.
