The following editorial appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Tuesday, Dec. 21:

Disembodied but all-too-menacing, the voice of Osama bin Laden emerges from time to time, not only to remind Americans of his presence but also to mock us for our inability to capture or kill him. In this most essential manhunt, the United States has an only halfhearted ally in President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. The tangled politics of Pakistan make Musharraf’s reluctance understandable, but the American people nevertheless have reason to expect him to do more than he has to track down the mastermind of Sept. 11.

Recently, bin Laden’s voice was heard again, this time on an audiotape that was posted on an Islamic Web site. Bin Laden praised an attack earlier this month on a U.S. diplomatic post in Saudi Arabia and called on militants to stop the flow of oil to the West.

It has been apparent for many months that the fugitive al-Qaida chieftain is holed up somewhere in the mountains along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The United States has 16,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, but Musharraf is unwilling to allow U.S. soldiers in his country to look for bin Laden there.

Granted, Musharraf is under immense political pressure to keep them out. Elements of Pakistan’s armed forces and intelligence services are thought to have ties to the Taliban, which gave refuge to al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Also, bin Laden is likely hiding in a spot where he can’t be easily captured, among the notoriously independent Pashtun tribes that populate the Afghan-Pakistan border.

But unlike many of his predecessors, Musharraf has proved to be a remarkably durable ruler, even though he has taken unpopular stands, notably a willingness to negotiate with Pakistan’s arch-rival, India, over the future of Kashmir.

Earlier this month in Washington, he and President Bush discussed the sale of up to 25 U.S. F-16 fighter jets. Pakistan has little, if any, military need for these aircraft; it is more likely that Musharraf wants them to bolster his standing in the armed forces and thereby strengthen his political rule.

The Bush administration ought to insist that, as part of any deal to get the military aid package he wants, Musharraf agree to put greater pressure on his armed forces to find bin Laden. Capturing or killing the al-Qaida leader may not cripple his terror network any more than the capture of Saddam Hussein crippled the resistance in Iraq. But as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 operation, bin Laden has the blood of more than 3,000 innocent people on his hands, and the United States should be doing all it can to get its hands on him.

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