The White House’s desire to find Osama bin Laden continues to be strong, with reported plans for a new covert push within Pakistan emerging in The New York Times earlier this month. But the leader of that country, President Pervez Musharraf, sounds sick and tired of hearing about the Al Qaeda chief.

On the second day of a tour of Europe, the Pakistani leader spoke plainly about his priorities, which seem to be at odds with those of the United States, according to The Associated Press:

“The 100,000 troops that we are using … are not going around trying to locate Osama bin Laden and Zawahri, frankly,” Musharraf told a conference at the French Institute for International Relations. “They are operating against terrorists, and in the process, if we get them, we will deal with them certainly.”

Mr. Musharraf’s previous statements on the issue also left open the possibility of American participation in a mission to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri — but only “if we have good intelligence,” the president told one newspaper.

And that’s exactly why American intelligence officials have told The New York Times privately that Mr. Bush will probably leave office with Mr. bin Laden still at large. “We haven’t had a good lead on his exact whereabouts in two years,” a senior American military official said in December.

It also made it easy to doubt rumors earlier that month that Morgan Spurlock had found the terrorist chieftain while filming his new documentary, “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?”

As it turns out, he didn’t come close. Patrick Day of The Los Angeles Times saw the movie at its Sundance Film Festival premiere, and offered his take:

He didn’t even find one of Bin Laden’s abandoned caves or safe houses. Nor did he locate any former employees or get face-to-face interviews with family members. Faced with a sign at the border of Pakistan’s hostile tribal areas warning of the strict prohibition against foreigners in their lands and the impending arrival of his first child back home in the United States, Spurlock ultimately decides not to risk his life chasing a phantom and heads home. It may seem like I’m spoiling the movie, but I’m really not. Because as Spurlock himself discovers in his odyssey across the Middle East, Bin Laden the man is beside the point now. His ideas and followers have grown much larger than anything a single person could hope to harness and locating him would do nothing to stop the horrific tide of violence in that part of the world.

 

With so few leads from Pakistan’s top military intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency or Hollywood, it’s unsurprising that Mr. Musharraf would judge other problems to be more important than hunting Mr. bin Laden — like, say, the survival of his leadership and government.

“I can assure you that nothing will happen in Pakistan,” he told the A.P. today. ‘’We are not a banana republic.'’