Lack of coordination leaves bin Laden at large

Footage from a video obtained by Reuters shows a man identified as Osama bin Laden speaking into a camera. The source who provided the video to Reuters and a British Sunday newspaper said the pictures were filmed in March 2002.

KABUL (Reuters) - Eight years after Osama bin Laden escaped from U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he remains on the run because of a lack of trust and coordination between Washington and Islamabad, experts say.

U.S. President Barack Obama is on the verge of announcing that he will send more troops to Afghanistan. He has said he wants to focus efforts on dismantling bin Laden's al Qaeda, blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks that triggered the war.

A report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released on Sunday drew renewed attention to bin Laden's escape from the Tora Bora caves of Afghanistan in late 2001. The report blamed a lack of concerted effort by President George W. Bush's administration and U.S. military commanders for allowing bin Laden to escape.

"The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism," the report said.

The intelligence community widely believes bin Laden has been in hiding somewhere in Pakistan ever since, evading capture because Washington and Islamabad cannot coordinate well enough.

Kamran Bokhari, a senior analyst at the intelligence company Stratfor, said Pakistan asserts it doesn't have good intelligence on where al Qaeda leaders are, and it is focused on its own counter insurgency effort.

"There is also mutual mistrust between the United States and Pakistan intelligence," he added.

PAKISTAN

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistan-based journalist and author who has written extensively on the Taliban and al Qaeda, said he believed bin Laden was hiding on the Pakistani side of the Afghan frontier in areas outside Islamabad's control. "It will be much more difficult to capture bin Laden now because this entire tribal border belt is in the hands of the Pakistani Taliban," Rashid said.

Bokhari said he thought bin Laden could have moved away from the border area deeper into Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province where he would have more places to hide.

Bin Laden could prefer being away from the border, Bokhari said, because he knows the idea of a deep U.S. incursion into Pakistan is highly unlikely. U.S. drones strike along the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan, but to venture any further would be unacceptable for Islamabad, Bokhari said.

While many al Qaeda leaders and members have been captured or killed by Pakistan's military, Islamabad has never been committed to capturing bin Laden, Rashid said.

"There is still no public statement or commitment that the government or the military is involved in hunting down bin Laden," he said of the Pakistani government.

Given the amorphous and fractured profile of al Qaeda as an organization, capturing bin Laden will not lead to the group's demise. His commanding role is small, Bokhari said.

"Osama bin Laden based on my understanding is not an effective operational leader, day-to-day operations are the work of his other associates," he said.

If the ultimate goal is stabilizing Afghanistan, removing bin Laden may not in the end achieve much.

"Afghanistan is about the Taliban," Bokhari said, adding that Afghan Taliban claim to be distinct from both the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda.

(Reporting by Golnar Motevalli; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)