Osama bin Laden and other senior al-Qaeda leaders are most likely hiding in Pakistan, the US commander of 18,000 foreign troops hunting militants in Afghanistan said today.
Lieutenant-General David Barno also said that al-Qaeda operatives were helping remnants of Afghanistan's ousted Taliban to disrupt preparations for the country's first direct presidential vote on October 9th.
Osama Bin Laden in a photograph from 1999
"We see relatively little evidence of senior al-Qaeda personality figures being here (in Afghanistan) because they can feel more protected by their foreign fighters in remote areas inside Pakistan," he said in a heavily fortified US military compound in Kabul.
In the Hague, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told reporters he had no idea where bin Laden was, although interrogations of recent al-Qaeda captives and technological intelligence suggested the world's most wanted man was alive.
"I don't know where he is. I wish I knew," said Mr Musharraf, a key ally in the US-led war on terror.
Dozens of al Qaeda-linked militants have been captured or killed in Pakistan in recent months. Amjad Hussain Farooqi, wanted for failed assassination attempts on Musharraf, was killed by security forces yesterday.
US-led forces in Afghanistan, by contrast, had probably not captured or killed a top al-Qaeda personality inside Afghanistan since 2002, Lt Gen Barno conceded.
Lt Gen Barno said it would take time to assess whether Pakistan's intelligence breakthroughs against al-Qaeda this year would lead to bin Laden, believed to be hiding near the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.
"It's going to be a longer term assessment as to how close any particular set of take-downs or arrests or seizures of computers brings us to some of the senior targets."