"New U.S. Effort Steps Up Hunt for bin Laden"

David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 -- President Bush has approved a plan to intensify the effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, senior administration and military officials say, as a combination of better intelligence, improving weather and a refocusing of resources away from Iraq has reinvigorated the hunt along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.The plan will apply both new forces and new tactics to the task, said senior officials in Washington and Afghanistan who were interviewed in recent days. The group at the center of the effort is Task Force 121, the covert commando team of Special Operations forces and Central Intelligence Agency officers. The team was involved in Saddam Hussein's capture and is gradually shifting its forces to Afghanistan to step up the search for Mr. bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former Taliban leader.

After a visit to Pakistan earlier this month by the the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, American officials say, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan appears to be far more seriously committed to tracking down Al Qaeda and Taliban militants along the semiautonomous border region.

"Two assassination attempts close together tends to be life-focusing," said one senior official who is overseeing the new drive, referring to the December attacks on General Musharraf.

Mr. bin Laden and his deputies have painted General Musharraf as a lackey of the United States, and many officials here believe that Al Qaeda had a role in the assassination attempts. General Musharraf has told the United States, the senior official said, that "he is now willing to be even more helpful" in tracking down Qaeda and Taliban militants in the region where Mr. bin Laden is still believed to be hiding.

Under the new plan, officials say, the 11,000 American forces in Afghanistan are changing their tactics. Rather than carrying out raids and returning to their bases, small groups will now remain in Afghan villages for days at a time, handing out various forms of aid and conducting patrols. By becoming a more permanent, familiar presence, American officials say, they hope to be able to receive and act on intelligence within hours. Such a technique helped them to capture Mr. Hussein.

"We're trying to transplant some of the lessons of the Saddam capture," one senior official said. "This is different territory, and our targets are presumed to be moving around. But one lesson we learned in Iraq is that, by analogy, there are only a limited number of places that someone like Saddam or bin Laden feel comfortable."

Similarly, Task Force 121 and the Pakistani forces are focusing on Mr. bin Laden's support network, hoping it will crack as Mr. Hussein's did.

With a great deal at stake strategically, symbolically and politically, Mr. Bush and his national security team have repeatedly met in recent months to refine the new approach, and it appears to have been approved in the last two months. White House officials will not say exactly when, emphasizing that the hunt for Mr. bin Laden never stopped, though clearly the effort lost momentum.

Much of the timing now is driven by the weather: as winter snows melt, troops can navigate in the high mountain passes and trails where many Qaeda and Taliban members are believed to be hiding. When that moment arrived last year, many of the forces and American intelligence operatives now engaged in Afghanistan were tied up in the Iraq.

But presidential politics are also at play. Though the White House denies that Mr. Bush is letting the election influence strategy, some of his aides have privately spoken about the obvious advantages of going into the last months of the election campaign with both Mr. Hussein and Mr. bin Laden in custody.

On Friday, Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and the front-runner in the Democratic race, appeared to try to inoculate his campaign from the possibility of Mr. bin Laden's capture, while at the same time faulting Mr. Bush for failing to put together an effective search strategy far earlier.

"As we speak, night has settled on the mountains of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan," Mr. Kerry said in California. "If Osama bin Laden is sleeping, it is the restless slumber of someone who knows his days are numbered. I don't know if the latest reports ‹ saying that he is surrounded ‹ are true or not. We've heard this news before."

Mr. Kerry said, "We had him in our grasp more than two years ago at Tora Bora, but George Bush held U.S. forces back and instead called on Afghan warlords with no loyalty to our cause to finish the job."

Kerry aides contended that Mr. Bush's new strategy was a tacit admission of past failures and said the White House had criticized Mr. Kerry for questioning its earlier strategy.

White House and military officials insist that despite the rumors to which Mr. Kerry alluded, they do not know Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts. Pentagon officials on Saturday denied a report on Iranian state radio that Mr. bin Laden had been captured in the region long ago.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking to reporters on Thursday, sounded testy when asked about the chances of finding Mr. bin Laden, saying it "will happen when it happens, and I don't believe it's closer or farther at any given moment."

But at the White House and at the Pentagon, there is talk of better intelligence -- some of it supplied by captured Qaeda lieutenants -- and a new sense of optimism.

Much of it centers on Task Force 121, which was created last fall to hunt what the military calls "high-value targets" in Iraq and Afghanistan. A senior military official in Washington with access to classified troop movements said "small numbers" of the commandos had recently moved to Afghanistan to bolster the Special Operations efforts there, a development first reported this week by The Washington Times.

Military officials say there are also increasing intelligence reports on Mr. bin Laden's movements in the border region, where he has a large network of Taliban sympathizers. Many of those new reports are a result of heightened activity by Pakistani security forces along its border with Afghanistan. Pakistani troops have pressured tribal leaders to hand over villagers suspected of harboring Qaeda members.

"The volume of intelligence is increasing as we get more forces out there," said a senior Pentagon official who follows Afghan developments closely. "Right now, it's more a qualitative difference in intelligence than a quantitative difference, but it's improving."

The critical question, however, is how committed General Musharraf is to the task. Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Afghan and American military officials have complained that he has been reluctant to track down Qaeda and Taliban militants along the border.

But in recent weeks, American commanders say that has sharply changed. The assassination attempts, officials say, made it clear to General Musharraf that he had to crush Mr. bin Laden's support group, even if they retained a strong constituency in Pakistan and in the Pakistani intelligence services.

Moreover, Mr. Bush's willingness to look the other way as General Musharraf pardoned A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who shipped his technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, was part of a concerted effort to demonstrate, in the words of one American official, "that we're going to let him do what he needs to do to stay in control."

In the wake of Mr. Tenet's visit, Pakistan is now preparing for a major spring offensive against Al Qaeda in the border region. Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, said earlier this month that American and Pakistani forces would work together in a "hammer and anvil" approach to drive militants in each other's direction and destroy them.

But the White House is trying to tamp down expectations. Officials there cringed when Lt. Col. Brian Hilferty, the senior spokesman for American forces in Afghanistan, said on Jan. 29 that, "We have a variety of intelligence, and we're sure we're going to catch Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar this year."

Three days earlier, General Barno told the BBC: "You can be assured that we're putting a renewed emphasis on closing this out and bringing these two individuals to justice, as well as the other senior leadership of that organization. They represent a threat to the entire world, and they need to be destroyed."

Pentagon officials have sought to play down the remarks, chalking them up to exuberant commanders.

Even so, there is a heightened sense of anticipation that the Qaeda leader may soon be caught.

"With this guy holed up, the more time that goes by, the more likely it is he'll make a mistake," said the senior Pentagon official who follows Afghanistan closely.