Doomed Decree Bin Laden at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan in 1998 (above). In the days following the 9/11 attacks, pro-Taliban supporters cheer during a rally in Islamabad.

Through 250 nights and 250 dawns it has been the same. The Apaches and the Blackhawks, the Chinooks with their 30 ft rotorblades, have rolled slowly down the strip at Bagram airport and slipped, lights out, into the night. Ever since the American forces began arriving at the former Soviet airbase 30 miles north of Kabul last January an identical routine has been played out almost every evening. During the day the Special Forces soldiers carried out of the "sweep and clean" zones try to catch up on sleep and change their MREs (meals ready to eat) for T-rats (tray rations from the mess hall).

But now nobody notices. Last month, in Operation Mountain Sweep, 2,000 American soldiers were deployed in Paktia province along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border east of the city of Khost. For a week the heavily armed troops moved through the hills, backed by hundreds of local Afghan auxiliaries. They arrested 10 men and seized some weaponry. Predictably, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al' Zawahiri and the rest of the fugitive Al-Qaida leadership were not located.

As Mountain Sweep was under way in the east, other operations were in progress in the south. Run from Camp Rhino, the dusty airstrip in the desert south of Kandahar, the US, British and other allies' special forces go out night after night looking for "former Taliban" and Mullah Omar, the reclusive one-eyed cleric who led the movement. They don't find any very often. Or rather they find lots all the time. But then they can't detain half the Pashtoon population.

These days no one asks where bin Laden is, they ask if he still is. If alive, the consensus is the Saudi-born dissident, who still hasn't explicitly admitted responsibility for the 9/11 attacks (largely because he isn't directly culpable as usually understood in a court of law), is hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas. He makes brief forays across the border into Afghanistan but spends most of his time in Waziristan, the wildest and most rugged of Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal agencies. Short of searching every qala (the traditional Pashtoon fortified homestead where extended families numbering hundreds often live), there is little that can be done.

Sight Seeing A room in Mullah Omar's house in Kandahar. In the inverted logic that is Afghanistan, the house is now a museum.

"If Bin Laden was dead, Half the Islamic world would be shouting 'the sheikh is dead, the sheikh is dead'." A British diplomat

OSAMA'S SAFE HAVENS? Pak-Occupied Kashmir Cited as sanctuary after bombings began. Americans said to have combed the area. Peshawar Bin Laden's second home. Said to have come here for kidney treatment in the winter of 2001. Afghan-Iranian border Some say he's here. But it's unlikely. Bin Laden has friends in Iran but overall it's unsafe. Pak-Afghan border North-west Frontier Province is wild and lawless. This makes it bin Laden's natural habitat.

Abdul Bari Atwan, the London-based editor of al'Quds al Arabi, the Arabic language newspaper, has excellent contacts with the Al-Qaida and has received communiques in the past. He believes bin Laden, having had his left shoulder operated on by Zawahiri (a trained doctor) for injuries sustained at Tora Bora, is now in good health. "I'm told Al-Qaida is regrouping and that bin Laden is back in charge," Atwan said a week ago.

But intelligence experts in Britain and the US query Atwan's confidence in bin Laden's health. They point to the lack of communication from bin Laden in the past year. Only two videos have surfaced. One had been secretly recorded and showed an interview with a Saudi cleric sometime in the autumn. The other appeared to have been recorded shortly after bin Laden fled from Tora Bora. He appeared gaunt and fatigued. Since then there has been nothing other than a handful of appearances by Al-Qaida's new spokesman, the Kuwaiti Abu Gaith. Says an American intelligence source:
"If he was out there you can bet he'd tell us about it." Others say that, in fact, the very lack of "noise" shows he's still alive. "If he was dead we would know about it. Half the Islamic world would be jumping up and down shouting 'the sheikh is dead, the sheikh is dead'," a senior British Foreign Office official said.

Sources at MI5, Britain's security service, confirmed they had been picking up signs of renewed activity in August pointing to an attack timed for the anniversary of 9/11. Such strikes will not be coordinated as previously. In 1998, the twin bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were run with a close degree of control by bin Laden's military chief, Mohammed Atef, in Afghanistan. Now that will be impossible.

The failure of the massive surveillance effort concentrated on Afghanistan indicates that bin Laden, if, as most believe, he is still alive, is avoiding satellite phones, e-mails and radios and, if he is risking any communication at all, is sending orders by mouth or handwritten messages.

That means that individuals outside the immediate circle of the leaders have enormous autonomy. In March, the Palestinian-born Abu Zubaydah was trapped by the FBI in a house in Faisalabad in eastern Pakistan. He was the most senior operative Al-Qaida figure and believed to have been charged with reconstructing the group's battered infrastructure by forging alliances with other Islamic extremists who can act as proxies.

In a sense there is nothing new in this. Bin Laden's strategy, honed in 1991-96 in Sudan and later in Afghanistan, has always been to "plug in" to existing groups with their own particular grievances and use them to further his own broader aims. Thus, in Pakistan, this year there has been attacks on western and Christian targets by the Jaish-e-Mohammed, which has developed a close relationship with the Al-Qaida. Zubaydah was staying in a Lashkar-e-Toiba safehouse when he was arrested.

The hunt is now on for other senior figures who, from bases in the Middle East, are trying to keep up the momentum of the campaign bin Laden and his aides launched. One of them is Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a Pakistani born in Kuwait who is also known as "The Brain". He has been described as the logistics expert behind the 9/11 attacks, and linked by a phone intercept with the incendiary attack on a historic synagogue in Tunisia in April that killed 14 German tourists, six Tunisians and a Frenchman, according to German officials. Khalid is thought to be in Pakistan.

Bilal bin Marwan, a Saudi accused of helping plan the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, may well be another key figure also in Pakistan. He is believed to be behind a plan to attack the US and British ships in the Strait of Gibraltar this year, according to Moroccan officials. The Moroccans themselves picked up three Al-Qaida men earlier this year in Casablanca. All had fled Afghanistan after 9/11.

So what is bin Laden thinking now? The Saudi's worldview has always been an odd mix of the contemporary, the mythical and the historic. The first thing that can be certain is that as an egotist he is both enjoying the attention he is now receiving and ruing the loss of direct authority over his network. Bin laden went to great lengths in the late 1990s to establish his dominant role both within Afghanistan and in the broader movement of global political Islam-and will be sorry to see real power devolved from him.

However, there are precedents that he will turn to. Prophet Mohammed's flight from the unbelievers in Mecca, the hijra in 622 is the obvious one. Mohammed, of course, fought his way back in triumph, defeating heavy odds. Bin Laden believes his God will ensure he can do the same.

Less obviously, the lessons the young bin Laden imbibed from the leading thinkers of political Islam, Syed Qutb and Abdallah Azzam, will also inform his thinking. Both talk of the solitary but enlightened "vanguard" who will, through their actions, motivate, agitate and finally force massive change. It was an idea borrowed from western leftist revolutionary theory (though bin Laden would not acknowledge it). There is no reason yet for bin Laden to have lost faith. Last week's hijacking attempt in Sweden by a 29-year-old of Tunisian background, who has never been in touch with bin Laden or his immediate circle, demonstrates why.

General Tommy Franks, overall commander of the US military effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan, visited Bagram in August-end for a morale-boosting rally for the troops. He had not lost faith either. "I actually don't know whether he's alive or dead," he said, standing before a huge American flag. "But if he's still alive, it's only a matter of time."

(The author is chief reporter of The Observer, London, and has covered Afghanistan and Al-Qaida for five years.)