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Whatever became of Osama bin Laden? If the question was not put to visiting Pakistani President Perves Musharraf by a section of the US press in Washington, the possibility is great of this public enemy number one in a good part of the West, being forgotten by a sizeable chunk of public opinion in even this part of the world.

In fact, the whereabouts of bin Laden should continue to be a preoccupation of the US defence establishment if it was in earnest when it made out that the neutralizing of bin Laden and his terror network was an important rationale for the US-led military incursion into Afghanistan and the subsequent worldwide "war on terror".

Pakistani paramilitary soldiers inspect a cache of seized arms and ammunition in Quetta, November 30, 2004. Paramilitary soldiers have seized a huge quantity of arms and ammunitions and recovered some 1,550 kilos of morphine during a pre-dawn raid in the Chaghi area close to Pakistan-Afghanistan border. AFP

More than two years after the Afghan operation Osama bin Laden, who was projected as personifying political terror of the most brutal kind, is apparently being allowed by the US political establishment to slip out of the Western public consciousness.

Musharraf couldn't have been more plain-spoken when he told reporters on being asked whether he was aware of the whereabouts of bin Laden, that the high profile fugitive's trail had "gone cold". "He is alive, but more than that, where he is, no, it'll be just a guess and it won't have much basis", Musharraf is reported as telling US journalists.

While it could be argued by defence planners in Washington that Iraq has upstaged Afghanistan in the "war on terror" and that US-British priorities in the South-West Asian region have changed, the respective tax-paying publics are entitled to question their governments on the need to persist with the now low-intensity war in Afghanistan if the latter is indeed now in the back burner of US security policy.

As in most other spheres of knowledge, true understanding in the field of international relations arrives as a result of one asking the correct questions. That vast sections of the US and British publics were easily convinced that the hunt for Osama bin Laden necessitated a substantive US-led military incursion into South-West Asia, testifies to the cogent persuasive power of Western governments. Public opinion was cleverly influenced into focussing on some key personalities as being the prime causative agents of the wave of terror the West was confronted with.

What was left unexplained were the true compulsions which drove the US and Britain into conducting aggressive and prolonged military campaigns in this part of the world.

The conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq could be said to have been overly personalised (the Afghan operation revolving around bin Laden and the Iraqi incursion around Saddam Hussein) to deflect public opinion in the West from probing the real reasons for the successive Western military operations.

It shouldn't come as a surprise, therefore, if the prime personalities in these theatres of war are already being allowed by the US and British governments to slip out of the public consciousness. For, these personalities have served their purpose of being trigger factors for the Western military onslaughts.

While militarily quashing what are seen as religious fundamentalist forces through the vehicle of the "war on terror" is one US objective, another is the regaining of its lost foothold in South-West Asia and the Persian Gulf region.

Ever since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the US has been aiming at regaining its lost influence in these oil rich regions of the world. The hunt for Osama bin Laden, then, served as a sound excuse for the US to prolong its military presence in South-West Asia. Our analytic lenses need to probe what's "behind the news".