"In Hot Pursuit"

By JOSHUA COOPER RAMO

If you have ever spent much time in the American Southwest, particularly the mesa-speckled border between New Mexico and Arizona, land which sits at roughly the same latitude as Afghanistan, you will have a sense of the terrain where the U.S. is now furiously searching for Osama bin Laden. The hills around Kabul, an area where bin Laden may be hiding, sit at nearly the same latitude as Phoenix, Ariz., though Kabul's elevation makes it colder, clearer and more exhausting to visit. At night this time of year, temperatures can fall into the 30s. During the day, the clear skies make a perfect canvas on which to watch for the telltale wisps of dust that follow moving soldiers or helicopters or armor. Just as the badlands of the American West were ideal places for the outlaws who haunted the imagination of 19th century America, so the rugged country of Afghanistan is perfect, as if made for the outlaw who haunts the start of the 21st.

Bin Laden has many advantages operating in his favor as he tries to elude an American dragnet now spreading itself on the ground around and the skies above him. Sources tell TIME that U.S. special forces have been moving in and out of Afghanistan for three years now looking for bin Laden. Recently, the activity has been stepped up. But they face the challenge of capturing a man who knows the terrain, has dozens of hideouts and is surrounded by loyal followers. It takes five years of training to make a Delta Force operative, and of all the tactical missions it practices, this is among the most difficult: launching into hostile territory hundreds of miles from any support and hunting out a wary target.

During the past two weeks, military and intelligence sources tell TIME, the U.S. has ratcheted up its commandos' role inside Afghanistan, hunting both for bin Laden and for information that will aid an explosive strike against al-Qaeda, his terror network. Inserted deep into the mountainous terrain, the teams have been working various parts of the country, usually at night. A handful of pilotless drone airplanes backs them up, working the skies over the country, looking for hints--a small convoy kicking up dust, for example--of bin Laden or his allies. And though most of the fighters the U.S. is seeking may now be well out of sight of the drones or commandos, military planners tell TIME they hope to change that by applying some pressure: launching disruptive tactical air strikes. "It's like turning on the light in your first apartment," an Army planner said. "Lots of roaches start running." Explains another: "[Our goal] is getting them running, getting them to change their ways of operating so that they create vulnerabilities."

U.S. officials know that simply "decapitating" al-Qaeda by taking out bin Laden won't solve their terror problem. The very nature of the web he has built, and part of what makes it so confounding to U.S. officials, is that there is no clear chain of command. Bin Laden, U.S. intelligence believes, has several deputies who are perfectly capable of running terror operations without him. There is even a chance that bin Laden may not even be in Afghanistan anymore--speculation has put him everywhere from the hills of Uzbekistan to the deserts of Sudan. And if the White House has little choice but to go after bin Laden, it also knows that the chances of finding him are not great. Says one former U.S. counterintelligence official: "The entire U.S. Army was in Panama, and it was really hard to find Manuel Noriega. The U.S. Army knew Panama really well. Even if you have troops on the ground, you need to have spectacularly good intelligence and know exactly where you are going. You have to be vectored right on to the viper's nest. You go in there and shoot it up and look at all the faces and make sure you got the right guy. It is hard to envision a situation where you would get that perfect tactical intelligence for a ground attack." That hasn't dissuaded Bush. "Make no mistake about it--we're in hot pursuit of terrorists," he told reporters last Friday, although he added that he understood it is "very hard to fight a guerrilla war with conventional forces."

There are of course other--easier--ways to clean out the "roaches," and for these the U.S. grasped last week. The simplest scenario would be if the Taliban agreed to hand over bin Laden. U.S. diplomats have been careful to leave the Kabul government some ways to save face, insisting carefully, for example, that bin Laden be turned in to "appropriate authorities," which gives the Taliban a chance to surrender bin Laden to an Islamic state instead of to the U.S. Nearly every "last chance" offered to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, though, has been met with a denunciation of the U.S. Said a shaken Pakistani diplomat after negotiations broke down on Friday: "Omar is not afraid of war with the U.S."

Bin Laden remains target No. 1 in that war. Though U.S. intelligence has tracked him since 1995, it was not until 1998, following the al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa that year, that President Clinton authorized an all-out hunt. Since then, U.S. special-ops forces have been working Afghanistan's hilly terrain, traveling in small bands. The U.S. commando presence inside Afghanistan, a Pentagon official said, is "sporadic" and "very small"--they generally move in groups of less than half a dozen--and even big raids won't involve more than "several dozen" troops at a time. The soldiers, most likely Army Delta Force and Green Beret commandos, hide in foxholes and caves during the day, emerging at dusk to scour the Afghan moonscape for evidence of their quarry. Some of the commandos are believed to speak the predominant local languages, Pashtu and Dari. Their goal, says a Pentagon official, is to "get bin Laden--not get bogged down."

Once inside Afghanistan, the special-ops forces face a variety of groups loyal to the Taliban, everything from armed farmers to well-organized troops. Some larger units have artillery, armored vehicles and other support elements. Hundreds of former army officers and pilots, mostly members of the dominant Pashtun ethnic group, operate the Taliban's air force--a collection of fewer than 30 planes that a Pentagon official says the U.S. could wipe out in a single strike. The country's rudimentary air-defense systems--a motley collection of antiaircraft guns, shoulder-fired Russian SA-7 missiles and leftover U.S. Stingers from the CIA's campaign to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s--are far less a threat than what U.S. pilots now face every day over Iraq.

The Taliban's key vehicle is the pickup truck. Impressed with the cross-country performance of pickups during the war with the Soviets, the militia chose the pickup as its main combat vehicle. Taliban militiamen--each truck carries about 10--fire from the back while on the move. "The result has been the creation of a unique force of pickup-mounted cavalry," wrote Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan army, in the spring issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army's senior professional journal. "This formation has been extremely effective in exploiting tactical success." And though the Taliban army still looks amateurish in many ways--fighters are often rushed to the front at the last minute, leaving gaping holes in the rear--they are effective enough that a Pentagon survey in recent weeks suggests that it would take more than 100,000 allied soldiers to occupy and control the country.

That makes cleanly getting bin Laden and his network all the more appealing. The key, says the Pentagon, is keeping fresh troops in a position from which they can quickly strike at bin Laden anywhere in the country. Though U.S. intelligence has struggled to track him, officials hope they will get a lucky break--or better information from partners such as Pakistan or Russia. Even the dry missions, however, are useful. If they don't get bin Laden on a particular sortie, the commandos have orders to collect as much intelligence material from his al-Qaeda network as possible, including paper documents and computers. The data are then scoured both in the field and in Washington for clues to bin Laden's whereabouts. "Going after them is relatively the easiest piece of it," says a senior Pentagon official. "There is nothing more important in this war than information, by whatever means we can collect it."

That crucial intelligence will also make it easier, if and when the time comes, for the U.S. to go after the rest of al-Qaeda. Pentagon officials say they are ready to strike if the right intelligence comes along. So far, says an Air Force general, "this isn't like the previous campaigns, where we had a big book of options on what to hit. We had a bunch of bin Laden targets but not much more [in Afghanistan]." Broadening the set of targets to include Taliban encampments--beyond the obvious ministries and airfields--is what is keeping planners at U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., busy right now. Still, there is only so much they can do. "There just aren't a lot of targets for us there," the Air Force officer says. "If they want a lot of targets, they'd better pick another country."

More than ever, that will make this a special-forces war. The stealth with which members of those units operate reduces the political risks that could fracture the U.S. coalition. But that assumes they succeed. Their record has been mixed. And in operations like Desert One, the calamitous U.S. rescue mission to Iran in 1980, they have done far more damage to U.S. prestige than to the enemy.

Should the U.S. be targeting bin Laden so aggressively? Taking out your enemies is a time-honored practice, notably used by Israel in recent times. A key element in Israel's antiterrorist strategy for years has been to eliminate them. Israelis not only killed Palestinians to avenge attacks like the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre but went after operational brains as well. In 1973 an Israeli commando team, which included then-future Prime Minister Ehud Barak--disguised as a woman--wiped out several top Palestine Liberation Organization leaders in a raid in Beirut. The Israelis are still at it. A missile attack last month killed Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as he sat at his desk in Ramallah.

Yet the fact that the Israelis have to keep doing it suggests that wiping out the leaders does not actually solve the problem, a principle that at least one "coalition" member is already highlighting. "My advice," Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the BBC last week, "is not to attack Afghanistan or kill bin Laden. This will result in the rise of a new generation of terrorists." But for the Bush Administration, committed to capturing bin Laden "dead or alive," no strike at all is the one option it doesn't seem to have any longer.

--Reported by Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, Hannah Bloch/Islamabad and Scott MacLeod/Cairo

TIME.com To learn more about the military buildup in the Middle East, go to time.com/battlefield.com

With reporting by Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, Hannah Bloch/Islamabad and Scott MacLeod/Cairo