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The hunt for bin Laden is intensifying at a time when the Administration is struggling to pull off its other major goal in Afghanistan: the holding of the country's first free elections, scheduled for June. So far, the U.N. has managed to register just 9% of the country's 10.5 million eligible voters. Taliban rebels have threatened to kill U.N.-sponsored election teams and burn down schools and mosques where Afghans are signing up to vote. Karzai said last week that the elections may be postponed because of lagging voter registration. Despite the Bush Administration's desire to trumpet the birth of Afghan democracy, a delay is almost inevitable. "We should have five years to pull off these elections, not four months," says a U.N. official. Lieut. Colonel Christopher Bentley, U.S. commander for security in Kandahar, concurs: "The country is not ready. [The election] will probably have to be pushed back. We've still got a long road to go."
Does the U.S., consumed by another conflict 1,400 miles to the west, have the will to see it through? In general terms, the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan has been less costly than the war in Iraq. The military spends $900 million a month on Afghan operations, in contrast to $4 billion a month in Iraq. While U.S. soldiers in Iraq are dying at a rate of about one a day, in Afghanistan the U.S. suffers an average of one casualty a week. But in both countries, the U.S. has attempted to nation-build on the cheap, limiting the numbers of troops committed to postwar tasks, and in both places, the military has been undermined by the challenges of trying to keep peace where it doesn't yet exist. Only now are U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan starting to make up for lost time. The U.S. recently moved 40-soldier platoons into villages along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they live among the locals and glad-hand tribal leaders in exchange for intelligence on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
As long as bin Laden and his lieutenants remain on the loose, the fate of Afghanistan and its 28 million people will remain inseparable from the security of the U.S. Both American and Afghan officials say that if the U.S. fails to stabilize Afghanistan and establish conditions for democracy, the country could quickly slide into the kind of chaos that bin Laden and his ilk would no doubt love to exploit. "If the U.S. military pulls out," Karzai tells TIME, "al-Qaeda would be back within six months, plotting attacks against America."
Where Is bin Laden?
U.S. military and intelligence officials are cautiously optimistic that their prey is within reach. The U.S.'s military spokesman in Afghanistan, Lieut. Colonel Brian Hilferty, said in January he was "sure" bin Laden and Omar would be captured this year. The deployment of special-forces teams to border villages has produced a spike in intelligence from locals about possible al-Qaeda hideouts. A U.S. officer in Afghanistan says American forces are employing techniques similar to those used to capture Saddam, combing bin Laden's network of contacts and interrogating anyone with information about the people who might be giving him shelter. The drive to snare bin Laden has been bolstered by improved cooperation with Pakistan, which has dispatched a 70,000-man force to the tribal region.