On December 7 Hamid Karzai was sworn in as the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan. The event has been hailed not only as historic in the evolution of the war-ravaged nation's political history but as a harbinger that the nation can transform itself into a peaceful Islamic state.
But writer Tim McGirk strongly cautions against overexpectations.
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As he observed in his December 2004 National Geographic article, "Tracking the Ghost of bin Laden," progress in modern-day Afghanistan takes a long time, is complicated, and is fraught with danger and unintended consequences.
In a recent e-mail interview from his home in Islamabad, Pakistan, McGirk gave an update on the situation in Afghanistan following Karzai's inauguration and discussed the reelection of United States President George Bush and the elusiveness of international terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Is there anything new—even rumor—on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden?
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has said that the trail on bin Laden has gone "completely cold." It's been over 18 months, according to U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources, since there's been any trace of him. Meantime, he and his cohort, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, continue to send out taped sermons, which lately have been finding their way to [the Qatar-based Arabic-language TV news network] Al Jazeera's Islamabad offices.
The latest rumors are that bin Laden is hiding "in an urban area." Or anyway that's the word that the United States has passed on to Pakistani intelligence—maybe to see if they can flush him out if he is indeed hunkered down in a city or town.
The Pakistanis say bin Laden is probably in Afghanistan. The Afghans and Americans say he's probably in Pakistan. But nobody has any real evidence they're sharing.
Has the emergence of other leaders of al Qaeda diminished the influence of bin Laden? Did the resurgence of his videotape before the U.S. election serve to galvanize fundamentalists?
No. Since he's gone into hiding, bin Laden has retained symbolic leadership of the movement, not practical, hands-on leadership. I don't think that the terrorist attacks we're seeing in Iraq or elsewhere are carried out on his orders.
The loose-knit structure of al Qaeda was always such that individual cells were left to carry out their own attacks. Bin Laden was the inspiration, rather than the actual brains, behind most global terrorist attacks by al Qaeda. It's an interesting question: If bin Laden were to call a truce in the war on terror—highly unlikely—would his legions obey? I think his influence is still so powerful that many would.
But at this point I don't think there's anything that Bush could do—short of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and a more balanced approach to the Palestine question—that would make bin Laden call off his terrorists. Their blood is boiling.
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