Payback Time

By NANCY GIBBS

It's one thing to expect someone to die; it's another to look forward to that day, not secretly, guiltily, but openly, eagerly, a morbid jubilee. Osama bin Laden's casually pitiless confession, released by the Pentagon just as U.S. forces seemed to have him cornered, meant that at the moment that his death appeared more certain it also seemed all the more just. People who reject the death penalty, who teach their children not to use the word hate, who believe in balancing justice with mercy, who prize due process--people, in other words, unaccustomed to bloodlust--now watch the daisy cutters shave the White Mountains bald and see the smoke curl and await the news that the monster in the cave has claimed his last human sacrifice.

It's one thing to prepare to die in glory, another to face death in total defeat. As he prepared to make his last stand, did bin Laden still rejoice in his victory, confident that God would smile on his achievement? Back in November when he sat in front of the camera with the servile Saudi sheik to giggle and gloat over triumphs beyond his fondest hopes, he confessed to only one miscalculation: he had thought that only the tops of the skyscrapers would collapse, killing hundreds. What a lovely surprise--the answer to a prayer, his disciples suggested--that the buildings actually crumpled, killing thousands. He had succeeded even beyond his dreams.

And since then, so has America. "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse," he observed, "by nature they will like the strong horse." Here he was indeed prophetic: the mistake was in not knowing which mount was which. In the month since he savored his triumph, the army of Taliban faithful has collapsed. If the scouts are right, he has had to flee to the deepest recess of a Tora Bora cave. His prediction of inflamed and inspired Muslims flocking to his cause was refuted by the quiet of the Arab streets and the murmur of clerics who denounced his acts. The superpower that was supposed to cringe and flail instead sent its best warriors to search and destroy.

The quarry cornered, the pack came in for the kill. Predator drones hovered like great mechanical vultures over the border, hunting for anyone trying to escape. Orange fireballs bounced through the valleys of the White Mountains. Navy SEALS and Green Berets massed on the ground, shawls wrapped around their heads, lasers in hand, guiding the B-1s and B-52s overhead. Snipers capable of putting a slug into a dime from more than a mile away waited for the call. Afghan Alliance commanders may have been willing to negotiate a surrender, but the U.S. special forces were there to get a job done.

If he was wrong about us and wrong about the fortitude of his own allies, was bin Laden wrong as well about his own prospects? It seemed hard to imagine that a man so rich and cunning, however confident that when he died others would take his place, would not have made arrangements to put that day off as long as possible. Martyrdom may have its appeal in the abstract, but as the eagerly surrendering Taliban revealed, the reality is less appealing. "We're chasing a person," President Bush said Friday, "who encourages young people to go kill themselves, and he, himself, refuses to stand and fight." The rumors of bin Laden's escape into Pakistan persisted last week, in part on pure assumption that he must have had a contingency plan. Unless he never believed it would come to this.

It was cold satisfaction to think of him entombed in a crushed mountain, just as his victims were three months ago. But Tora Bora is not likely to become a sacred shrine of Islam, and his caves will not be the holiest place in Afghanistan. It is the World Trade Center site that has become hallowed ground and the secular values of a free nation that inspired the unity, charity and victory he imagined. It was not just his army that was routed, but his dreams. He made his tape; now we are making ours.