Bin Laden's existence is cause for concern

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of global terrorism and the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on America's mainland that claimed more than 3,000 lives, is alive, and may even be well. How do we know that? Because President Bush and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said so this week -- perhaps in not so many words.
"Whether Osama bin Laden is [in Pakistan] or across the border [in Afghanistan], your guess, sir, will be as good as mine," Musharraf told reporters Tuesday when he was welcomed by Bush to Camp David. "So I wouldn't like to venture a guess. But the possibility of his maybe shifting sides on the border is very much there."
Someone who is able to shift from one side of a border to the other must be in good enough shape to travel. That means the invasion of Afghanistan by coalition forces, led by the United States, is unfinished business.
Urgent unfinished business, at that.
"It could take a day, or it could take a month; it could take years," Bush said of the hunt for bin Laden. "It doesn't matter how long it takes. We will stay on the hunt."
Pardon our skepticism, but shortly after the Taliban government was ousted from Afghanistan, administration officials were declaring that global terrorism had suffered a fatal blow because bin Laden was either dead or seriously injured. Bin Laden had established training camps in Afghanistan and had been provided a safe haven by the Taliban government.
Sunny forecast
However, he disappeared shortly after the invasion and speculation was rampant that if he had not been killed, he had at least been crippled to the point of being unable to direct his terrorist organization. We never bought into that sunny forecast and have consistently warned that bin Laden remained a greater danger to the United States than even Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator who was ousted in March during the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces.
Bush maintained that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, which could be used against the U.S., and that his government had ties to bin Laden's Al-Qaida terrorist network. Neither of those contentions have been borne out. Weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq, and former Iraqi government officials now in custody say there was never a formal relationship between Saddam and Al-Qaida.
Thus, while the president says the world is safer from acts of terror as a result of regime change in Iraq, bin Laden's existence does give pause.
The fact that the world's leading terrorist has been able to elude death or capture makes him larger than life in the eyes of his followers, and that's a dangerous thing.
We have long maintained that Pakistan and its president, Musharraf, bear some responsibility for bin Laden's running free, seeing as how he took refuge in border provinces once the attack on Afghanistan began. There were credible reports of his being seen in the mountain region of Pakistan, but the Musharraf government was slow to react.
Now, the Pakistani and U.S. presidents insist that it's only a matter of time before the world's most wanted man is captured. But time is the enemy because there should be no doubt that bin Laden is orchestrating future terrorist acts. And the United States is undoubtedly his main target.
The war on global terrorism is far from over, and Al-Qaida has not suffered a major setback, despite what President Bush may say.