The Harder Hunt for Bin Laden

Taliban fighters hiding in plain sight in Pakistan say Saddam's end will never be the fate of bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri or Mullah Mohammed Omar, the ousted Taliban leader who remains their closest political ally. The terror chieftains are well protected by their bodyguards, by the local population and by Afghanistan's forbidding geography. While Saddam faced a 130,000-strong U.S. Army relentlessly tightening the noose, bin Laden is up against a scant 10,000-man U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. And unlike Saddam's henchmen, supporters of bin Laden and Omar are "linked by Islam, not by money," these Taliban sources boast. "We have a small, strongly Islamic population, thousands of high mountains and millions of caves to hide in," says a senior Taliban planner and fund-raiser who goes by the nom de guerre Zabihullah.