Bin Laden capture no Afghan solution

Vladimir Isayev, Deputy Director, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, RIA Novosti, Moscow

The United States has embarked on a fresh attempt to capture Osama bin Laden. According to The Washington Post, a special detachment called Task Force 21, consisting of Delta commandos and a special unit known as Navy Seals, is being dispatched to Afghanistan from Iraq. It was this elite unit that captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

But, although there is information that bin Laden is somewhere in the mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, his exact whereabouts are not known to anybody, and it may well be that he is not where the American commandos and their Pakistani allies are looking for him, but in an Arab country.

In short, the search for bin Laden, which the U.S. has been conducting for more than two years, may go on indefinitely, although, who knows, the Americans may be lucky this time, and they will announce the achievement of the task they set themselves after the Sept. 11, 2001 tragedy.

That would be very opportune for George W. Bush, considering the approaching presidential elections in the U.S. Bin Laden, should he be captured, could be a trump card in Bush's hands, and could decide the outcome of the vote.

Another reason why Washington needs bin Laden is that strictly speaking all the U.S. counter-terrorist operations in Afghanistan, mounted supposedly because the Taliban refused to give up terrorist No.1 to the Americans, have not yet yielded any tangible effect. True, the Taliban government is dispersed, and power has been given over to a puppet government led by Hamid Karzai, but this is all that the Americans have managed to achieve.

Neither bin Laden, nor Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Omar has been caught. Karzai controls only Kabul and the adjacent area. American troops do not even try to penetrate into the hinterland, for fear of getting entangled, like the USSR, in a protracted and futile war.

Afghanistan has in fact disintegrated into ethnic districts where power is wielded by former field commanders. Indeed, the overthrown Taliban have not vanished or been destroyed, they have merely melted into the vast country, having become what they have always been -- ethnic Pashtuns.

However, the Pashtuns make up the majority of the population in Afghanistan, and naturally they entertain no sympathy for the Americans, but, on the contrary, fire at them at every convenient opportunity.

Afghanistan, as before, produces huge amounts of narcotics and dispatches them to dozens, and even hundreds, of countries. So the overthrow of the Taliban also failed to solve this very important problem.

Undoubtedly, the Americans have their hands full with two difficult problems: Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, the latter situation looks more complicated, because the war in Iraq is not in effect over, and the U.S. is suffering heavy losses there every day, well in excess of the daily losses incurred by Soviet troops during the Afghan war.

But the time may come when Afghanistan will become a bigger problem than Iraq. And just as the seizure of Saddam Hussein did not mean the end of the anti-American movement in Iraq, so the possible capture of Osama bin Laden will not symbolize a solution of the Afghan problem. It is not personified, and not connected only with the individuality of one super-terrorist.

History has repeatedly shown that any foreign military presence in Afghanistan, whether British, Soviet or American, has inevitably evoked and will evoke resistance. As for puppet governments, which come to power with foreign assistance, they are all short-lived. What is needed is a government enjoying the support of a considerable majority of the Afghan people. There is no such a government in the country as yet. And this is a far more serious problem than capturing bin Laden.