"The litany of ruin is hard to fathom: 73 schools and many government buildings have been destroyed, and Baquba's health center was bombed. About 65 villages have been completely emptied, Mr. Bachilan said."

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Iraq City Has Brittle Calm and War Scars

BAQUBA, Iraq — Less than an hour east and north of Baghdad sprawls Diyala Province, once the garden of Iraq, known for its date and orange orchards, its rice and its barley farms. More recently it has been known as one of Iraq's worst killing fields.

The religious and ethnic diversity that made it a microcosm of the country also meant that every lethal division played out within its borders. Sunnis and Shiites, Kurds and Arabs live in close quarters here. By 2006, whole villages were burning. There were months last year when kidnappings were daily occurrences and headless bodies routinely showed up in the fields and floated down the rivers. Intermarriage, once a way of life in the province, was forbidden by many families.

The province became the headquarters of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the extremist Sunni insurgent group most associated with suicide bombings and beheadings. The danger was great enough that Western reporters could visit Diyala only while embedded with American troops.

But in late June, a New York Times reporter and photographer traveled to the provincial capital, driving in old Iraqi cars with an interpreter to see how much had changed.

Military operations here over the past 12 months have curbed the worst of the province's violence, but the situation defines the word "fragile" — a description often pressed into service by American generals and diplomats to describe all of Iraq.

Not many people come to Baquba from Baghdad these days unless they have to. Before the war, many Baghdad families had small farms in Diyala; the sales from the annual fruit crop helped them to make ends meet, and they used it as an escape from the unrelenting heat and dirt of summer in the city. Now, to the north, the road is mostly empty, and miles of drought-parched farmland stretch on each side.

A few cargo trucks could be seen carrying supplies. And a handful of cars, packed with the occupants' earthly possessions, appeared to be returning home, tables and chairs strapped to the roofs.

"At least 25,000 families left," said the provincial council chairman, Ibrahim Bachilan, a Kurd. "Some are beginning to come back. But whole villages are empty."

Families are generally counted as six people, so that means at least 150,000 people left Diyala. But foreign diplomats in the province say the number is probably two to three times that.

The litany of ruin is hard to fathom: 73 schools and many government buildings have been destroyed, and Baquba's health center was bombed. About 65 villages have been completely emptied, Mr. Bachilan said.

He spoke in the government center, a heavily fortified building in the middle of the city. Three cordons of police officers search visitors to his office. Inside, a small crowd demanded his attention. An extended family of two widows with their children were asking him for aid; a group of contractors came looking for approval for plans to rebuild a school.

Last year at this time, a major military operation led by the Americans had just got under way to free the city from the grip of insurgents. Before that, people in Baquba had been all but stranded, sometimes unable to get food for days. Shops were closed; residents were unable to leave their homes even to buy food for fear of being caught in a cross-fire. There were fake checkpoints all over the city run by insurgents.

Now the first checkpoint, a few miles south of the city, is run by the Iraqi Army. The soldiers stop every car, inspect the trunk, and question the driver about the destination.

Beyond the checkpoint lies Al Mufraq, a neighborhood where vicious battles between Sunni extremists and American soldiers have taken place over the past two years. On both sides of the road, the houses were so pitted by machine-gun fire that they looked as if someone had taken a giant ice cream scoop and removed gobs of the walls. The windows were shattered, the upper floors vacant. In some cases, bombs or mortar shells had blasted out large chunks, exposing the rooms within.

Yet shops were open again on the ground floors, and children played in the refuse. Shepherds let their flocks graze in the garbage, which smelled as if it had been rotting for months.

Traffic was heavy — a good sign in this city where for months few people had wanted to drive for fear of roadside bombs. The mood was almost heady, as if people were still amazed and excited that they could walk the streets. A little boy smiled broadly as he offered his wares, boxes of tissues, to cars stuck in traffic.

But Baquba's relative calm barely reaches the city's borders. Nearby, outside the town of Jalawla, eight people were killed Sunday when a roadside bomb exploded near a Kurdish official's car, killing him, his family of five and two bodyguards.

Barely 20 miles northeast of Baquba, American troops are still fighting battle-hardened gunmen loyal to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who are hiding in the palm groves.

Other areas are just as troubled. "In northern Diyala near the Hamrin mountains there are gunmen and militia and Al Qaeda," said Mr. Bachilan, the provincial council chairman. "They have planted the road with improvised explosive devices. The road is closed."

"We have asked the government to support military operations and more police for the province," he said.

"There are many smugglers, and they move weapons through the border and their weapons are more effective than our weapons," he said. "We just have Kalashnikovs. They have rockets, mines, rocket-propelled grenades. But the government has not answered our request."

Across the road, behind concentric rings of concrete barriers, stands the provincial police headquarters, where the police chief, Ghanem al-Khoreishi, has his office. An imposing figure in his uniform, Mr. Khoreishi, who is well over six feet tall, conveyed resolve, but also frustration.

A native of the province, he bounced between boasting about the improvements and worrying about the areas where the militants remain strong. He has little patience for politicians in Baghdad whom he sees as oblivious to the sacrifices being made by people on the ground.

"We lost 1,585 policemen and had 1,650 wounded," he said. "Maybe you wonder how I know these numbers: I know because we pay funeral compensation to the families," he said. "You will not find another police force that has lost so many," he said with bitter pride.

For Mr. Khoreishi the fight is personal. His home was bombed. For four months he could not leave the police headquarters to visit his family. Then the militants went after his relatives.

"They killed my brother last year and my brother-in-law. He was a teacher and he taught in the middle school. He hadn't done anything except he was related to me," he said. "Most of the politicians don't deal with reality. They do not appreciate the price we pay."

The Ameen district on the north side of the city had some of the worst fighting last year and still feels tense, though it has been controlled by the Iraqi government for more than five months. About 100 policemen still fan out there around the clock. They want to be sure Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia does not come back, one police officer said.

Even now, more than six months after the last major military operation, the streets are mostly empty. Many shops are shuttered.

At the heart of the neighborhood, a former school now bombed to rubble was most recently the local headquarters for the insurgents. The square in front of the building was where gunmen carried out executions, following their own version of Shariah law.

An elderly man carrying a straw bag with blocks of ice for refrigeration walked along the desolate street with his two young grandsons. Asked how things were, he shook his head. "I am too tired to talk," he said softly.

Further on, three young men lounged outside a storefront machine shop where two of them repaired motors for electrical appliances. "The situation is very good now," said one, Ammar Khalid. "Before, no one could leave their house; all the shops were closed. Now business is good for us because there are not many shops open, but we open at 6 a.m. and stay open until evening. But there's no electricity, no water."

Is it normal yet? The three young men did not respond. When will it be normal? "I don't know how long it will take," said Muath Abbas, 21, a university student who is studying English, although he is not sure where he will use the language. "It will take time."

This year? Next year? Abu Mohamed, a 21-year-old taxi driver, shook his head. "It is in the hands of God," he said.

Ten minutes after the conversation, a bomb exploded less than 100 feet away. It destroyed the building and checkpoint of a Sunni citizen group paid by the Americans to watch the neighborhood. In an illustration of the convoluted world of Iraq, the police said that the citizen group was not the target. Rather, the group itself set the bomb to destroy its building rather than give it back to returning Shiites who had renewed their claim to it, the police said.

As the afternoon wore on, a dust storm descended on the city, the fine sand coating every brick in the piles of rubble. From the bridge crossing the Diyala River, which cars use as they leave town, dust as thick as fog obscured the city skyline of mosques and low-slung buildings.

	Moises Saman for The New York Times Iraqi police officers in Baquba. Military operations here over the past 12 months have curbed the worst of the violence in Diyala Province, but the destruction from the war is extensive.

Suicide Car Blast Kills 41 in Afghan Capital

KABUL, Afghanistan — A huge blast from a suicide car bomb at the gates of the Indian Embassy in Kabul killed 41 people and wounded more than 130 on Monday in the latest sign of a sharp deterioration in Afghanistan, where combat deaths have surpassed Iraq's in the past two months.

It was the deadliest suicide car bombing in Kabul since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan ousted the Taliban in 2001. It comes as Afghan and Western officials have noted with alarm both the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai and the growing strength of Pakistani militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

Among the victims of the attack, the first in seven years on an embassy in Kabul, were at least four Indian citizens: the Indian defense attaché, a political counselor and two other Indian officials. Six Afghan police officers were also killed. Many of the rest appeared to be civilians.

The fact that the Indian Embassy was attacked raised suspicions among Afghan officials that Pakistani operatives allied with the Taliban had used the bombing to pursue Pakistan's long power struggle with India.

India said it would investigate what the Indian Foreign Ministry called "this cowardly terrorist attack."

Afghan and Western officials have said a recent spate of sophisticated, deadly attacks shows the growing influence of Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists over Pakistani militants in the tribal areas, and possibly alliances between them. Part of the insurgent strategy has been to carry out suicide bomb attacks in the cities.

Suicide bombers attacked the five-star Serena Hotel in Kabul in January and mounted an elaborate assassination attempt on Mr. Karzai during a military parade in April, an attack that Afghan intelligence linked directly to Pakistan's premier intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.

Pakistani intelligence has long supported militant groups fighting in Kashmir and Afghanistan as a means to influence regions on its borders and, according to some Western diplomats and military officials, it maintains those links today, including with some elements of the Taliban. While Pakistani militants with links to the Taliban have bolstered their strength in the border areas, the Taliban in Afghanistan have clashed with international troops in the worst summer fighting since the Taliban fell seven years ago. The Taliban have resurfaced strongly in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Karzai said the "enemies of peace in Afghanistan" wanted to hurt Kabul's international relationships, "particularly with India."

"Such attacks will not hamper Afghanistan's relations with other nations," he said.

The Indian Embassy is on a leafy thoroughfare close to the Afghan Interior Ministry, in what is supposed to be one of the best-guarded neighborhoods of the city, protected by police roadblocks. But the bomber managed to get through, and rammed a car laden with explosives into the embassy gates.

Witnesses said the bomber struck as two diplomatic vehicles were approaching the gates. Nearby, people were standing in line for visas and shopping in a market. The explosion left body parts and bloodstained clothing strewn in the rubble. Ambulance sirens wailed as residents peered at the wreckage of a dozen vehicles.

Hajji Khial Muhammad, 45, one of those in line for an Indian visa, said he saw more than a dozen people who appeared to be dead. "I was shocked and could not hear anything after the attack," he said. "But I saw at least 10 men and three women in the queue who were probably killed."

Muhammad Ajmal, 26, a shopkeeper in the market, said the explosion had sent goods from his shelves spilling out. "I could barely stand up," he said.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahed, denied responsibility. "The suicide bomb attack was not carried out by Taliban," he said by telephone. "We strongly reject that accusation. We don't know who carried it out."

The Taliban frequently disavow knowledge of attacks that cause heavy civilian casualties.

Pakistani intelligence, which regards Afghanistan as its backyard, fiercely resents India's growing influence here, Afghan officials said. The Afghan Interior Ministry said it believed that the attack was carried out in collaboration with "an active intelligence service in the region."

The ministry did not elaborate on the identity of that service. But relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have become so strained after a series of attacks that Mr. Karzai has threatened to send troops across the border to attack militants operating from bases in Pakistan.

India, meanwhile, is a close ally of Afghanistan. It is spending $750 million on building roads and power lines here in what has become India's biggest bilateral aid program ever. It has opened consulates in several parts of the country and promoted initiatives to offer scholarships for Afghan students, while Afghan television has shown Indian soap operas.

But there have been some challenges to India's influence. Several Indian workers have been killed in recent months, and Indian television shows have been restricted because of religious objections. Senior Indian Foreign Ministry officials have said for months that they were worried about the safety of Indian personnel in Afghanistan.

Ex-Prosecutor's Book Accuses Bush of Murder

Correction Appended

As a Los Angeles county prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi batted a thousand in murder cases: 21 trials, 21 convictions, including the Charles Manson case in 1971.

As an author, Mr. Bugliosi has written three No. 1 best sellers and won three Edgar Allan Poe awards, the top honor for crime writers. More than 30 years ago he co-wrote the best seller "Helter Skelter," about the Manson case.

So Mr. Bugliosi could be forgiven for perhaps thinking that a new book would generate considerable interest, among reviewers and on the broadcast talk-show circuit.

But if he thought that, he would have been mistaken: his latest, a polemic with the provocative title "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," has risen to best-seller status with nary a peep from the usual outlets that help sell books: cable television and book reviews in major daily newspapers.

Internet advertising has been abundant, but ABC Radio refused to accept an advertisement for the book during the Don Imus show, said Roger Cooper, the publisher of Vanguard Press, which put out the book.

ABC Radio did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Bugliosi, in a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, said he had expected some resistance from the mainstream media because of the subject matter — the book lays a legal case for holding President Bush "criminally responsible" for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq — but not a virtual blackout.

His publisher and publicist said they had expected that Mr. Bugliosi's credentials would ensure coverage — he is, after all, fairly mainstream. His last book, a 1,612-page volume on the Kennedy assassination, "Reclaiming History," which was published last year, sought to debunk the conspiracy theorists. It is being made into a 10-hour miniseries by HBO and the actor Tom Hanks.

Mr. Bugliosi said bookers for cable television, where he has made regular appearances to promote books, have ignored his latest offering. MSNBC and Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" were two outlets Mr. Bugliosi had thought would show interest, but neither did.

"They are not responding at all," he said. "I think it all goes back to fear. If the liberal media would put me on national television, I think they'd fear that they would be savaged by the right wing. The left wing fears the right, but the right does not fear the left."

A spokeswoman for Comedy Central said the staff of "The Daily Show" was on vacation and unavailable for comment. A representative for MSNBC said: "We get many pitches to interview authors and very few end up on our programs."

The editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, said he had not read the manuscript, but he offered a reason why the media might be silent: "I think there's a kind of Bush-bashing fatigue out there."

"If it's selling well," Mr. Meacham said, "it's another sign that the traditional channels of commerce have been blown up. If a dedicated part of the Internet community wants to move something, it doesn't need a benediction from the mainstream media and might benefit from not having one."

The book was published in late May by Vanguard Press, a division of the Perseus Books Group — which also owns PublicAffairs, the publisher of the recent memoir by a former White House spokesman, Scott McClellan — and has sold about 130,000 copies. On Sunday it was No. 14 on the New York Times best-seller list. (The Times published a lengthy review of Mr. Bugliosi's Kennedy book last year by the writer Bryan Burrough of Vanity Fair; his latest book is under consideration for review, said Robert R. Harris, the deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review.)

For the Bush book, the equation for success seems to be this: Mr. Bugliosi's reputation plus talk radio plus the viral nature of the Internet.

Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publisher's Weekly, said, "130,000 copies is an enormous number of copies of anything."

"You should never underestimate the power of a brand name author to circumvent the normal publicity and marketing channels," Ms. Nelson said. "Somebody was very smart to see that something subversive like this is best marketed on the anonymous and youthful medium of the Internet."

Ms. Nelson said that if the book becomes successful, "the same people who didn't want to give him publicity in advance would give him publicity after the fact."

Mr. Cooper of Vanguard Press said, "We publish books on all sides of the political fence and all kinds of political thought." The company's sibling, PublicAffairs, has also published one of President Bush's favorite writers: Natan Sharansky, the onetime Soviet dissident whose book "The Case for Democracy" is said to have influenced Mr. Bush's foreign policy agenda.

On Mr. Bugliosi's book, Mr. Cooper said, "I expected there would be people who would choose not to talk about it. But I thought some would."

Mr. Bugliosi has had more than 100 radio interviews about the book, and Vanguard was behind an aggressive Internet campaign that included ads on liberal blogs. "It's been frustrating on one hand but exhilarating on the other," Mr. Cooper said. "Using the Internet has been an integral fact in the success of this book. I feel terrific about the sales of this book."

While Mr. Bugliosi's Kennedy book got the star treatment from Hollywood in Mr. Hanks, he had to look outside the United States to find money for a film on his Bush polemic. Jim Shaban, a theater owner in Windsor, Ontario, financed a documentary on the book that is almost complete. The movie, directed by David Burke, does not yet have a distributor. But it will not carry the same name as the book. "Mad as Hell" is one name under consideration, according to Peter Miller, of the PMA Literary and Film Agency, who has represented Mr. Bugliosi for about 25 years.

"We may not be able to work with a mainstream company," Mr. Miller said.

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"But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan's tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world."

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Amid U.S. Policy Disputes, Qaeda Grows in Pakistan

WASHINGTON — Late last year, top Bush administration officials decided to take a step they had long resisted. They drafted a secret plan to make it easier for the Pentagon's Special Operations forces to launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda.

Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden's terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.

The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington's risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching Mr. bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.

But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense Department official said there was "mounting frustration" in the Pentagon at the continued delay.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a "war on terrorism" and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden's network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan's tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

A recent American airstrike killing Pakistani troops has only inflamed tensions along the mountain border and added to tensions between Washington and Pakistan's new government.

The story of how Al Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for "the base," has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.

Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.

Publicly, senior American and Pakistani officials have said that the creation of a Qaeda haven in the tribal areas was in many ways inevitable — that the lawless badlands where ethnic Pashtun tribes have resisted government control for centuries were a natural place for a dispirited terrorism network to find refuge. The American and Pakistani officials also blame a disastrous cease-fire brokered between the Pakistani government and militants in 2006.

But more than four dozen interviews in Washington and Pakistan tell another story. American intelligence officials say that the Qaeda hunt in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the C.I.A. in 2006, was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the C.I.A., including about whether American commandos should launch ground raids inside the tribal areas.

Inside the C.I.A., the fights included clashes between the agency's outposts in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad. There were also battles between field officers and the Counterterrorist Center at C.I.A. headquarters, whose preference for carrying out raids remotely, via Predator missile strikes, was derided by officers in the Islamabad station as the work of "boys with toys."

An early arrangement that allowed American commandos to join Pakistani units on raids inside the tribal areas was halted in 2003 after protests in Pakistan. Another combat mission that came within hours of being launched in 2005 was scuttled because some C.I.A. officials in Pakistan questioned the accuracy of the intelligence, and because aides to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld believed that the mission force had become too large.

Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.

Some former officials say Mr. Bush should have done more to confront Mr. Musharraf, by aggressively demanding that he acknowledge the scale of the militant threat.

Western military officials say Mr. Musharraf was instead often distracted by his own political problems, and effectively allowed militants to regroup by brokering peace agreements with them.

Even critics of the White House agree that there was no foolproof solution to gaining control of the tribal areas. But by most accounts the administration failed to develop a comprehensive plan to address the militant problem there, and never resolved the disagreements between warring agencies that undermined efforts to fashion any coherent strategy.

"We're just kind of drifting," said Richard L. Armitage, who as deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005 was the administration's point person for Pakistan.

Fleeing U.S. Air Power

In March 2002, several hundred bedraggled foreign fighters — Uzbeks, Pakistanis and a handful of Arabs — fled the towering mountains of eastern Afghanistan and crossed into Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal area.

Savaged by American air power in the battles of Tora Bora and the Shah-i-Kot valley, some were trying to make their way to the Arab states in the Persian Gulf. Some were simply looking for a haven.

They soon arrived at Shakai, a remote region in South Waziristan of tree-covered mountains and valleys. Venturing into nearby farming villages, they asked local tribesmen if they could rent some of the area's walled family compounds, paying two to three times the impoverished area's normal rates as the militants began to lay new roots.

"They slowly, steadily from the mountainside tried to establish communication," recalled Mahmood Shah, the chief civilian administrator of the tribal areas from 2001 to 2005.

In many ways, the foreigners were returning to their home base. In the 1980s, Mr. bin Laden and hundreds of Arab and foreign fighters backed by the United States and Pakistan used the tribal areas as a staging area for cross-border attacks on Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

The militants' flight did not go unnoticed by American intelligence agencies, which began to report beginning in the spring of 2002 that large numbers of foreigners appeared to be hiding in South Waziristan and neighboring North Waziristan.

But Gen. Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai, the commander of Pakistani forces in northwestern Pakistan, was skeptical. In an interview this year, General Aurakzai recalled that he regarded the warnings as "guesswork," and said that his soldiers "found nothing," even when they pushed into dozens of square miles of territory that neither Pakistani nor British forces had ever entered.

The general, a tall, commanding figure who was born in the tribal areas, was Mr. Musharraf's main adviser on the border areas, according to former Pakistani officials. For years, he would argue that American officials exaggerated the threat in the tribal areas and that the Pakistani Army should avoid causing a tribal rebellion at all costs.

Former American intelligence officials said General Aurakzai's sweeps were slow-moving and easily avoided by militants. Robert L. Grenier, the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad from 1999 to 2002, said that General Aurakzai was dismissive of the reports because he and other Pakistani officials feared the kind of tribal uprising that could have been touched off by more intrusive military operations. "Aurakzai and others didn't want to believe it because it would have been an inconvenient fact," Mr. Grenier recalled.

Signs of Militants Regrouping

Until recent elections pushed Mr. Musharraf off center stage in Pakistan, senior Bush administration officials consistently praised his cooperation in the Qaeda hunt.

Beginning shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Musharraf had allowed American forces to use Pakistani bases to support the American invasion of Afghanistan, while Pakistani intelligence services worked closely with the C.I.A. in tracking down Qaeda operatives. But from their vantage point in Afghanistan, the picture looked different to American Special Operations forces who saw signs that the militants whom the Americans had driven out of Afghanistan were effectively regrouping on the Pakistani side of the border.

When American military officials proposed in 2002 that Special Operations forces be allowed to establish bases in the tribal areas, Pakistan flatly refused. Instead, a small number of "black" Special Operations forces — Army Delta Force and Navy Seal units — were allowed to accompany Pakistani forces on raids in the tribal areas in 2002 and early 2003.

That arrangement only angered both sides. American forces used to operating on their own felt that the Pakistanis were limiting their movements. And while Pakistani officials publicly denied the presence of Americans, local tribesmen spotted the Americans and protested.

Under pressure from Pakistan, the Bush administration decided in 2003 to end the American military presence on the ground. In a recent interview, Mr. Armitage said he had supported the pullback in recognition of the political risks that Mr. Musharraf had already taken. "We were pushing them almost to the breaking point," Mr. Armitage said.

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 added another complicating factor, by cementing a view among Pakistanis that American forces in the tribal areas would be a prelude to an eventual American occupation.

To have insisted that American forces be allowed to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan, Mr. Armitage added, "might have been a bridge too far."

Dealing With Musharraf

Mr. Bush's re-election in 2004 brought with it another problem once the president overhauled his national security team. By early 2005, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Mr. Armitage had resigned, joining George J. Tenet, who had stepped down earlier as director of central intelligence. Their departures left the administration with no senior officials with close personal relationships with Mr. Musharraf.

In order to keep pressure on the Pakistanis about the tribal areas, officials decided to have Mr. Bush raise the issue in personal phone calls with Mr. Musharraf.

The conversations backfired. Two former United States government officials say they were surprised and frustrated when instead of demanding action from Mr. Musharraf, Mr. Bush repeatedly thanked him for his contributions to the war on terrorism. "He never pounded his fist on the table and said, 'Pervez you have to do this,' " said a former senior intelligence official who saw transcripts of the phone conversations. But another senior administration official defended the president, saying Mr. Bush had not gone easy on the Pakistani leader.

"I would say the president pushes quite hard," said the official, who would speak about the confidential conversations only on condition of anonymity. At the same time, the official said Mr. Bush was keenly aware of the "unique burden" that rested on any head of state, and had the ability to determine "what the traffic will bear" when applying pressure to foreign leaders.

Tensions Within the C.I.A.

As attacks into Afghanistan by militants based in the tribal areas continued, tensions escalated between the C.I.A. stations in Kabul and Islamabad, whose lines of responsibility for battling terrorism were blurred by the porous border that divides Afghanistan and Pakistan, and whose disagreements reflected animosities between the countries.

Along with the Afghan government, the C.I.A. officers in Afghanistan expressed alarm at what they saw as a growing threat from the tribal areas. But the C.I.A. officers in Pakistan played down the problem, to the extent that some colleagues in Kabul said their colleagues in Islamabad were "drinking the Kool-Aid," as one former officer put it, by accepting Pakistani assurances that no one could control the tribal areas.

On several occasions, senior C.I.A. officials at agency headquarters had to intervene to dampen tensions between the dueling C.I.A. outposts. Other intragovernmental battles raged at higher altitudes, most notably over the plan in early 2005 for a Special Operations mission intended to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Mr. bin Laden's top deputy, in what would have been the most aggressive use of American ground troops inside Pakistan. The New York Times disclosed the aborted operation in a 2007 article, but interviews since then have produced new details about the episode.

As described by current and former government officials, Mr. Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting at a compound in Bajaur, a tribal area, and the plan to send commandos to capture him had the support of Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, and the Special Operations commander, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.

But even as members of the Navy Seals and Army Rangers in parachute gear were boarding C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan, there were frenzied exchanges between officials at the Pentagon, Central Command and the C.I.A. about whether the mission was too risky. Some complained that the American commando force was too large, numbering more than 100, while others argued that the intelligence was from a single source and unreliable.

Mr. Goss urged the military to carry out the mission, and some C.I.A. officials in Washington even tried to give orders to execute the raid without informing Ryan C. Crocker, then the American ambassador in Islamabad. But other C.I.A. officials were opposed to the raid, including a former officer who said in an interview that he had "told the military guys that this thing was going to be the biggest folly since the Bay of Pigs."

In the end, the mission was aborted after Mr. Rumsfeld refused to give his approval for it. The decision remains controversial, with some former officials seeing the episode as a squandered opportunity to capture a figure who might have led the United States to Mr. bin Laden, while others dismiss its significance, saying that there had been previous false alarms and that there remained no solid evidence that Mr. Zawahri was present.

Bin Laden Hunt at Dead End

By late 2005, many inside the C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia had reached the conclusion that their hunt for Mr. bin Laden had made little progress since Tora Bora.

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who at the time ran the C.I.A.'s clandestine operations branch, decided in late 2005 to make a series of swift changes to the agency's counterterrorism operations.

He replaced Mr. Grenier, the former Islamabad station chief who in late 2004 took over as head of the agency's Counterterrorist Center. The two men had barely spoken for months, and some inside the agency believed this personality clash was beginning to affect C.I.A. operations.

Mr. Grenier had worked to expand the agency's counterterrorism focus, reinforcing operations in places like the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia and North Africa. He also reorganized and renamed Alec Station, the secret C.I.A. unit formed in the 1990s to hunt Al Qaeda.

Mr. Grenier believed that the Counterterrorist Center and Alec Station had both grown very rapidly since 2001 and needed to be restructured to eliminate overlap.

But Mr. Rodriguez believed that the Qaeda hunt had lost its focus on Mr. bin Laden and the militant threat in Pakistan.

So he appointed a new head of the Counterterrorist Center, who has not been publicly identified, and sent dozens more C.I.A. operatives to Pakistan. The new push was called Operation Cannonball, and Mr. Rodriguez demanded urgency, but the response had a makeshift air.

There was nowhere to house an expanding headquarters staff, so giant Quonset huts were erected outside the cafeteria on the C.I.A.'s leafy Virginia campus to house a new team assigned to the bin Laden mission. In Pakistan, the new operation was staffed not only with C.I.A. operatives drawn from around the world, but also with recent graduates of "the Farm," the agency's training center at Camp Peary in Virginia.

"We had to put people out in the field who had less than ideal levels of experience," one former senior C.I.A. official said. "But there wasn't much to choose from."

One reason for this, according to two former intelligence officials directly involved in the Qaeda hunt, was that by 2006 the Iraq war had drained away most of the C.I.A. officers with field experience in the Islamic world. "You had a very finite number" of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. "Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq."

Surge in Suicide Bombings

The increase had little impact in Pakistan, where militants only continued to gain strength. In the spring of 2006, Taliban leaders based in Pakistan launched an offensive in southern Afghanistan, increasing suicide bombings by sixfold and American and NATO casualty rates by 45 percent. At the same time, they assassinated tribal elders in Pakistan who were cooperating with the government.

Once again, Pakistani Army units launched a military campaign in the tribal areas. Once again, they suffered heavy casualties.

And once again, Mr. Musharraf turned to General Aurakzai to deal with the problem. Having retired from the Pakistani Army, General Aurakzai had become the governor of North-West Frontier Province, and he immediately began negotiating with the militants. On Sept. 5, 2006, General Aurakzai signed a truce with militants in North Waziristan, one in which the militants agreed to surrender to local tribes and carry out no further attacks in Afghanistan.

To help sell Washington on the deal, Mr. Musharraf brought General Aurakzai to the Oval Office several weeks later.

In a presentation to Mr. Bush, General Aurakzai advocated a strategy that would rely even more heavily on cease-fires, and said striking deals with the Taliban inside Afghanistan could allow American forces to withdraw from Afghanistan within seven years.

But the cease-fire in Waziristan had disastrous consequences. In the months after the agreement was signed, cross-border incursions from the tribal areas into Afghanistan rose by 300 percent. Some American officials began to refer to General Aurakzai as a "snake oil salesman."

A Rising Terror Threat

By the fall of 2006, the top American commander in Afghanistan had had enough.

Intelligence reports were painting an increasingly dark picture of the terrorism threat in the tribal areas. But with senior Bush administration officials consumed for much of that year with the spiraling violence in Iraq, the Qaeda threat in Pakistan was not at the top of the White House agenda.

Mr. Bush had declared in a White House news conference that fall that Al Qaeda was "on the run."

To get Washington's attention, the commander, Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, ordered military officers, Special Operations forces and C.I.A. operatives to assemble a dossier showing Pakistan's role in allowing militants to establish a haven.

Behind the general's order was a broader feeling of outrage within the military — at a terrorist war that had been outsourced to an unreliable ally, and at the grim fact that America's most deadly enemy had become stronger.

For months, military officers inside a walled-off compound at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where a branch of the military's classified Joint Special Operations Command is based, had grown increasingly frustrated at what they saw as missed opportunities in the tribal areas.

American commanders had been pressing for much of 2006 to get approval from Mr. Rumsfeld for an operation to capture Sheik Saiid al-Masri, a top Qaeda operator and paymaster whom American intelligence had been tracking in the Pakistani mountains.

Mr. Rumsfeld and his staff were reluctant to approve the mission, worried about possible American military casualties and a popular backlash in Pakistan.

Finally, in November 2006, Mr. Rumsfeld approved a plan for Navy Seal and Army Delta Force commandos to move into Pakistan and capture Mr. Masri. But the operation was put on hold days later, after Mr. Rumsfeld was pushed out of the Pentagon, a casualty of the Democratic sweep of the 2006 election.

When General Eikenberry presented his dossier to several members of Mr. Bush's cabinet, some inside the State Department and the C.I.A. dismissed the briefing as exaggerated and simplistic. But the White House took note of his warnings, and decided to send Vice President Dick Cheney to Islamabad in March 2007, along with Stephen R. Kappes, the deputy C.I.A. director, to register American concern.

That visit was the beginning of a more aggressive effort by the administration to pressure Pakistan's government into stepping up its fight. The decision last year to draw up the Pentagon order authorizing for a Special Operations campaign in the tribal areas was part of that effort.

But the fact that the order remains unsigned reflects the infighting that persists. Administration lawyers and State Department officials are concerned about any new authorities that would allow military missions to be launched without the approval of the American ambassador in Islamabad. With Qaeda operatives now described in intelligence reports as deeply entrenched in the tribal areas and immersed in the civilian population, there is also a view among some military and C.I.A. officials that the opportunity for decisive American action against the militants may have been lost.

Pakistani military officials, meanwhile, express growing frustration with the American pressure, and point out that Pakistan has lost more than 1,000 members of its security forces in the tribal areas since 2001, nearly double the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan.

Some architects of America's efforts in Pakistan defend the Bush administration's record in the tribal areas, and vigorously deny that Washington took its eye off the terrorist threat as it focused on Iraq policy. Some also question whether Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri, Al Qaeda's top two leaders, are really still able to orchestrate large-scale attacks.

"I do wonder if it's in fact the case that Al Qaeda has really reconstituted itself to a pre-9/11 capability, and in fact I would say I seriously doubt that," said Mr. Crocker, the American ambassador to Pakistan between 2004 and 2006 and currently the ambassador to Iraq.

"Their top-level leadership is still out there, but they're not communicating and they're not moving around. I think they're symbolic more than operationally effective," Mr. Crocker said.

But while Mr. Bush vowed early on that Mr. bin Laden would be captured "dead or alive," the moment in late 2001 when Mr. bin Laden and his followers escaped at Tora Bora was almost certainly the last time the Qaeda leader was in American sights, current and former intelligence officials say. Leading terrorism experts have warned that it is only a matter of time before a major terrorist attack planned in the mountains of Pakistan is carried out on American soil.

"The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today that is comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001," said Seth Jones, a Pentagon consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation.

"The base of operations has moved only a short distance, roughly the difference from New York to Philadelphia."

	Tariq Mahmood/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images FATAL STRIKE Near the Afghan border, Pakistanis earlier this month investigated damage from an American airstrike that killed 11 paramilitary soldiers, causing tensions between the governments of Pakistan and the United States.