Time | By Robert Baer | 7 December 2009
Time to Give Up the Ghost on Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden appears in a video aired on the eve of the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Salah Malkawi/Getty

This week the Obama Administration made an unusual admission: It doesn’t have a clue where Osama bin Laden is. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that there hasn’t been good intelligence on bin Laden for years. The National Security Adviser James Jones said the best guess is that bin Laden may be moving back and forth across the Pak-Afghan, a rugged mountain range never governed in history. (See pictures of Osama Bin Laden.)

I asked an ex-CIA colleague who’s been on the bin Laden hunt since 9/11. “He’s dead of course,” he said. “No wonder there’s no intelligence on him.” But what about the audio and video tapes? I asked. He said they easily could have been digitally mastered from old tapes and audio recordings. He quickly admitted the CIA has absolutely no evidence bin Laden died. It’s only a hunch — and years of experience chasing fugitive terrorists.

The theory that bin Laden is dead doesn’t get much currency in Washington because it veers off into the realm of conspiracies. And people that believe it are scared that the moment they air it bin Laden will re-appear the next day. Anyhow, it’s a real possibility bin Laden was killed at Tora Bora in late 2001, and is now buried under tons of rock and never to be found. Or he died of ill health in the intervening years.

But let’s accept for the sake of argument that bin Laden is alive and well. Other than the obvious — he’s living in an ungovernable part of the world — bin Laden maintains an extraordinarily exacting standard of security. It is beyond anything we’ve ever seen. He’s never been on a cell or a satellite phone. He doesn’t use the Internet. And little doubt the people around him adhere to the same strict standards.

But, in the absence of intelligence, that is pretty much all we can say. And by this logic bin Laden may not in fact be living in the mountains along the Pak-Afghan border. For all we know, he could just as easily be in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, another piece of Pakistan outside the writ of Pakistan’s government and NATO forces. Or for that matter bin Laden could be in Somalia or, who knows, some remote island off Indonesia.

The Administration’s frankness is refreshing, but it suggests that we should really start considering the possibility that bin Laden will never be found. Sending 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan is not going to put us any closer to finding Osama bin Laden. If his security is as good as it appears to be, even a door to door search of every house in Pakistan’s tribal regions would produce nothing.

Unless our luck changes, the best we should hope from the Afghan surge — and hope is about all we can be certain of — is that we manage to drain the swamp and keep bin Laden holed up in the mountains or wherever he is. But the question is, assuming we never find him, how will we know when the Afghan swamp is drained?

Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer, is TIME.com’s intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.

Source: Time Magazine