Time Magazine
A New Osama Push
The U.S. State Department has begun a media blitz to remind
Afghans of the $25 million bounty for al-Qaeda's chief
By TIM MCGIRK
Staff Writer
With the trail of Osama bin Laden gone cold, the U.S. State Department
is revving up a new publicity blitz to remind Afghans and Pakistanis
of the $25 million bounty for al-Qaeda's chief. Bin Laden is still
thought to be hiding somewhere along the 1,640-mile, mountainous
Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but intelligence officials in Kabul
and Islamabad say there has been no trace of him for the past
20 months. By the end of February, the White House is expected
to double the sum on bin Laden's head, to $50 million, acting
on legislation passed in November by Congress.
State Department ads began appearing this month in Jang, a widely
circulated Pakistani newspaper, offering rewards for bin Laden,
his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad
Omar and 11 other suspected terrorists. The ads have elicited
an average of 12 responses a day, and will be followed by an advertising
barrage on regional radio and TV stations in the borderlands and
cities where al-Qaeda's chief might be hiding, according to the
State Department.
U.S. reward offers were posted soon after 9/11, but officials
concede that little effort was made to circulate the offers widely
in the Afghan and Pakistan countryside. Even if a local knew of
bin Laden's whereabouts, the informer would face daunting obstacles
in contacting U.S. authorities.
The newspaper ads, seen in Pakistani towns, signify a shift in
the theory about where bin Laden might be. Congressman Mark Kirk,
the Illinois Republican who wrote the bill boosting the reward
and who just traveled to Pakistan, says it's possible bin Laden
is not in some snowy mountain cave but has melted away into one
of the teeming Pakistani cities, as had several other al-Qaeda
agents who have been captured. "What we're looking for is
some young Pashtun living in a town who knows the value of $25
million and can figure out how to reach us safely," says
Kirk. He points out that the lure of a $30 million reward led
to the capture and killing in Iraq of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday
and Qusay.
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