Graphic: the search for bin Laden | Send us your farewell message for President Bush

The voice of Osama bin Laden emerged to taunt President Bush over one of his biggest pieces of unfinished business yesterday and to threaten his successor with a renewed jihad only days before he takes office.

For more than seven years the pursuit of America’s most wanted man has twisted, turned, stumbled and stalled through some of the world’s most inhospitable mountain terrain. Yesterday bin Laden said that his al-Qaeda network was ready to fight “for seven more years, and seven more after that, then seven more”, and asserted that the United States would be unable to sustain a long fight against the Mujahidin.

In a 22-minute audio recording posted on extremist websites the al-Qaeda leader reprised familiar themes, urging Muslims to launch a jihad against Israel and condemning Arab governments as allies of the Jewish state. It was his first recording since May and its apparently hasty production indicated that it was timed to harness anger in the Middle East about the three-week-old conflict in Gaza.

It was the threats to Barack Obama however — who has in the past vowed to kill bin Laden — that will remind the US and its allies that bin Laden has eluded them ever since the September 11 attacks. He promised the President-elect that the terror network would open new fronts against the US. “If he withdraws from the war, it is a military defeat. If he continues, he drowns in economic crisis,” bin Laden said of Mr Obama, whom he did not mention by name.

The President-elect was quick to respond. “Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are our number one threat when it comes to American security,” Mr Obama said. “We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that they cannot create safe havens that can attack Americans. That’s the bottom line.”

However, in an interview with CBS news last night, Mr Obama suggested that eliminating the al-Qaeda leader was less important than containing him. “I think that we have to so weaken his infrastructure that, whether he is technically alive or not, he is so pinned down that he cannot function,” he said.

“My preference obviously would be to capture or kill him,” he added. “But if we have so tightened the noose that he’s in a cave somewhere and can’t even communicate with his operatives then we will meet our goal of protecting America.”

Few would have believed that bin Laden, the target of everything the world’s superpower could throw at him, would outlast Mr Bush. Some blame Pakistan’s complicity with militant groups and the sanctuary given to al-Qaeda by lawless Pashtun tribes.

However, it is important errors of judgment rather than elaborate conspiracies that are the real cause of bin Laden’s liberty. Mr Bush had his chances to get bin Laden, and he blew them. On November 14, 2001, a 90-year-old Pashtun named Sayeed Mokhter watched an al-Qaeda convoy approach his home at the foot of the Tora Bora valley. “There were many nationalities,” he later told The Times. “They were well armed, and good Muslims — many carried the Koran in one hand and their Kalashnikov in the other.”

This was bin Laden’s flight from Afghanistan, less than two months after the twin towers had crumbled. A $25 million bounty was on his head. His capture or death was a primary war aim. Scores of Western special forces backed by thousands of allied Afghan fighters were ready to fulfil Mr Bush’s “dead or alive” proclamation.

The battle of Tora Bora has passed into history as a bungled opportunity by American commanders. Beset by double-dealing and discord, it set the template for much that followed.

In the absence of regular troops US commanders were relying on Mujahidin from the Northern Alliance, backed by US and British special forces, to pursue bin Laden up Tora Bora. Yet the Afghans’ motivation was questionable from the start. Ill equipped for a late-autumn mountain battle their warlord commanders were at odds with one another and jealous of the differences between what the British paid and what the US offered. They had no night vision equipment, little cold-weather clothing and their logistics were haphazard.

After many delays fighting began in earnest on December 3, by which time all surprise had been lost. The Northern Alliance fighters pushed directly but extremely slowly up the valley behind their enemy, relying on the 100 or so special forces to call in airstrikes before any leap forward. The one Mujahidin commander who did overtake his quarry promptly defected to al-Qaeda with most of his men.

The al-Qaeda vanguard was probably in Pakistan long before the 15-day operation began. Pashtun villagers on the Pakistan side at Tora Bora welcomed hundreds of withdrawing al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters as early as November 17. When, on December 17, the Mujahidin captured the last village before the border there was no one there. The Mujahidin claimed to have recovered more than 100 al-Qaeda bodies from the valley area, most in bits, but bin Laden and his key followers had disappeared.

Since then the hunt has relied on technology. But this has been a source of rabid disagreement between competing US security agencies and has met severe limitations on the ground.

By 2003 the CIA appeared to be winning this internal battle after Pakistan called a halt to joint raids with US special forces teams inside its tribal areas. Drones have killed several al-Qaeda commanders inside Pakistan. In 2005 an ambitious plan was launched to seize Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, from a compound in Pakistan’s Bajaur tribal agency using more than 100 US Navy Seals and Rangers. Even as troops were boarding their C130 transporters, the plan was called off.

Donald Rumsfeld, then the US Defence Secretary, vetoed the operation at the last minute, swayed by arguments concerning faulty intelligence. Memories of this still haunt the US security service community, some of whom say they missed their biggest chance to get intelligence on bin Laden’s location.

Some US officials have tried to play down bin Laden’s significance, suggesting that al-Qaeda is beaten and on the run. So this latest tape is a reminder that, for all its superpower status, the US has been outwitted and outmanoevred at every turn.

In the murky depths of Pakistan’s tribal agencies, the hunt goes on.

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