Time for truth as the terror hunt falters

The birds have flown, a senior member of the Defence Staff said wistfully of the Royal Marines operations in southern Afghanistan a few days back. And so it has turned out. Far from the derring-do operations, risking life and limb against desperate Taliban and al Qaeda fugitives, as slated by Geoff Hoon the Defence Secretary, all our Marines have turned up so far are a lot of empty caves and a few thousand rounds of Kalashnikov ammunition.

Such consignments come almost 10 a rupee just across the border in the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan, which is probably where most of the al Qaeda fighters are now anyway.

The Royal Marines and their allies appear to have drawn a huge blank, though no one in Washington, Whitehall or even Bagram dares admit it. After all the hype, it must be asked where the war against terrorism now stands, where Bin Laden and his troops are, and what kind of threat they pose to the world at large, including the UK.

The news that the troops in southern Afghanistan have now been reduced to searching "for samples of DNA that might prove Osama bin Laden was killed in Tora Bora" merely adds to the muddle. For the general confusion that now exists among the newsconsuming public at large, the spin doctors - on both sides of the Atlantic - have only themselves to blame.

In the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September, the President of the United States told us that the "war against terrorism" was going to be a "long haul". There must now be a strong suspicion that the opposite was intended. Far from a long campaign, the US Commander in Chief was after a quick strike, to nail the villain, in this case Osama bin Laden, and declare a suitably contemporary version of a Roman Triumph.

With the terrorist nest in southern Afghanistan so patently empty, bar a few twigs and scraps of ordnance, it is time for the leaders of the coalition to level with their public - or we are all likely to be in trouble.

The fact is that most of the al Qaeda fighters, and the Taliban militias beside, in southern Afghanistan have got away. The growing activity in internet caf?s from the big cities of Pakistan, Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabadsuggests that the organisation is at work on the net. It also has the deep hinterland of the North-West Frontier and Kashmir in which to start rebuilding its military formations.

Al Qaeda has strong and vociferous support among militant Sunni Muslim communities in Egypt, Syria and the Maghreb as well as Sudan and Nigeria. Its roots and resources are powerful in the Gulf region, where there are ominous signs that Osama bin Laden's plans to rid the region of infidel Western influence may be slowly succeeding. Only a few months after completing the Prince Sultan strategic military base outside Riyadh, the Americans have been asked to leave it and not run offensive military operations from Saudi soil. From Bahrain to Muscat, the British have been asked by local rulers to lower their military presence and profile.

The hunt for those who sponsored the 11 September attacks has revealed al Qaeda to be more durable and extensive in Europe than was thought. One of the prime suspects, Ramzi bin Shibh, who shared a room with the leading hijacker Mohamed Atta in Hamburg for two years, has vanished into thin air, having flown to Pakistan from Germany six days before the attacks. It is likely that he was in on the planning, was principal paymaster, and might have been the 20th hijacker had he not been refused an American visa.

The ease with which he has gone to ground is disturbing and points to the complexity of the next stages of the campaign and the possible threat against our own communities. Already FBI and other undercover agents are searching in the refugee communities, the madrasahs and teeming suburbs of the towns and cities of Pakistan. This puts President Musharraf in an awkward position. But at the flick of a laptop switch from a small operations centre in a Pakistan suburb, a terror attack on the Paris Metro or the sewerage system of Greater Manchester could be triggered.

In all this, the hunt for Bin Laden almost looks like a spin doctor's fantasy. For now he is all but irrelevant: he was certainly not the technical mastermind who planned the 11 September attacks, and from his last video shown via al Jazeera TV, even the propaganda has gone flat and may even be counterproductive. Concentrating on sending the posse after him as a priority seems like signing up to the comicstrip version of the story of Sheriff Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Bin Laden is one in a long line of Sunni Muslim militants including Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, and Sayyid Qutub, hanged by Nasser in 1966 but the inspiration of the assassins of his successor Anwar Sadat.

The threat is there, undoubtedly, but how we need to tackle it has not been helped by the hype about Tora Bora and the spin about the Marines and Allied operations in the Mezai Mountains last week. British commanders now believe we are engaged in a long counterinsurgency operation, which might take us into looking at al Qaeda allies and affiliates from Cairo to the Caucasus, and the Sahara to the Central Asian Republics. This must be coupled with a stabilisation mission in Kabul to ensure Hamid Karzai offers stable government to at least part of Afghanistan.

Least willing to buy this is America. "Peacekeeping is for pussies," the US Marines like to say, and most of Mr Bush's team seem to agree. The US Marines and Airborne "don't do peace" - but, judging by their dismal failure in Operation Anaconda around Khost recently, they don't do modern counterguerrilla war too well, either.

The complex and often unspectacular counterinsurgency, surveillance and intelligence operations our forces and their allies now need to carry out will be hard to sell to a bewildered public and attention-deficient Parliament. As General Rob Fry, the British Commander of Naval Forces in the Gulf, warned with the old Nelsonian phrase, we must prepare for "bloody war and a sickly season". We had all better believe it, Alastair Campbell and the Number 10 spin machine included.