With Saddam nailed, Osama’s back in the news. Is he, as our people say, as near as hammered?

“We’re sure we’re going to catch Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar this year,” said Brian Hilferty, the U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan this past Thursday. His boss, Gen. David Barno, agreed: “The sand in his [Osama’s] hourglass is running out.”

Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., wants double Osama’s bounty. “I will be going back to Washington to propose a $50 million reward,” announced Kirk at the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

This tough talk comes at a rough time. Also on that Thursday and not far from Kabul, seven U.S. troops were killed and another disappeared when a weapons cache exploded. Earlier in the week – ominously within Kabul itself – two ISAF troops (from Britain and Canada) died in separate suicide attacks.

And yet the Bush team continues to boast. “The al-Qaida of the 9-11 period is under catastrophic stress,” says Cofer Black, our Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism. “They are being hunted down. Their days are numbered. The clock is ticking.”

Actually true or wishfully false?

All these temporal metaphors – numbered days, ticking clocks and hour- glass sand – invite a historical perspective. What happened to former Osamas? Do past cases point toward future captures? Back to 1936 and the irresistibly named – but never captured – Faqir of Ipi.

Originally Arabic, faqir means “poor person” and, by extension, “religious mendicant.” By shunning material wealth, a faqir is believed to enhance his spiritual energy. Again, true or false? Some demonstrations, like the so-called Indian Rope Trick, exceed our modern, Western sense of physical possibility. During my 1970s fieldwork in rural Afghanistan, I was told of a nearby faqir who, by willfully generating body heat, could melt huge snowdrifts at the touch of a hand.

(Are faqirs fakers? Three decades later I wonder what kept me from meeting this man. At the time I told myself, self-importantly, that such stunts were unworthy of anthropological research. I now suspect that what I really felt was ontological fear. What would have happened to my accustomed notions of Reality if the snow had melted?)

Some faqirs are more than spiritual stunt men. Like Osama bin Laden – and in the exact same region – the Faqir of Ipi waged a decades-long holy war against insufficiently pious interlopers. First his enemies were the “infidel” British. When they left in 1947, he turned on the new state of Pakistan whose Muslim identity undermined his self-appointed status as “defender of the faith.”

His turf of choice was Osama’s: the ungovernable borderland separating Afghanistan and Pakistan. The people on both sides are ethnic Pashtuns who despise and ignore the “Durand Line” frontier which, supposedly, divided them in 1893. Perhaps no area in the world is more hostile to outsiders, including the rulers of both countries. A pair of anecdotes illustrate this unfriendliness toward representatives of nation-state control.

In 1972, together with two other young U.S. diplomats, I visited the Afghan border town of Khost. Our driver had lost the way in a maze of dirt roads, scrub forests and Suleiman mountain foothills. It got dark. “Make town by sunset,” we’d been warned, and no one spoke much for the last three hours. Finally Khost loomed from the shadows with its rickety “government” hotel. The lobby boasted a standard portrait of Zahir Shah, then on the throne for 39 years and an emblem of stability.

We breathed deeply. When my voice lost its quaver, I asked the desk clerk, “How long since the King was last here?”

The desk clerk, unhappily posted from Kabul, regarded Khost as a den of murderers. “You were lucky to make it so late in the evening,” he said. “As for His Majesty, we’ve never enjoyed a royal visit. He could be killed, even in this hotel.”

Things are just as anti-government on the Pakistani side. A story is told of then Brigadier Muhammad Ayub Khan – later Field Marshal, Army Chief, President of Pakistan, and nobody’s coward. He’d been in command at Razmak, the main army base in Pakistan’s Federal Administered Tribal Areas where, except for a few roads and outposts, power belongs to the tribes. Like his British predecessors in these boondocks, Ayub Khan had been skirmishing with the locals. Now it was January 1948, less than half a year after Independence, and his force was being transferred to confront enormous India. Full-scale war seemed imminent. Amazingly, Ayub Khan felt relief rather than worry. “Thank God,” he said, “for getting us safely away from the Faqir of Ipi.”

Ipi is a tiny hamlet, one of hundreds of the Tribal Areas of North and South Waziristan. Each cluster of mud-walled compounds has its own imam or prayer leader. How did one of these – the Faqir of Ipi ? come to such fearful prominence?

The answer lies in tribal temperament and politics. Waziristan is inhabited by two Pashtun tribes, the Mahsuds and the Waziris, whom Sir Olaf Caroe, Britain’s great scholar-administrator, likened respectively to wolves and panthers: “Both are splendid creatures; the panther is slyer, sleeker, and has more grace; the wolf pack is more purposeful, more united, and more dangerous.” These two tribes and their numerous segmentary sub-groups co-exist in – are, in fact, defined by – a state of chronic feud. Their forces unite only when attacked from outside. And that temporary unity can be headed only by a Muslim cleric, a holy man whose “saintliness” transcends mundane factionalism.

During the British era, Waziristan tribesmen constantly harassed the “settled” plains but only in small packs. In 1936, however, they were united by crisis. Chand Bibi, the 15-year-old-wife of a Hindu shopkeeper, was abducted by (or eloped with) a Pashtun school teacher, embraced (or was forced into) Islam, and become known as Islam Bibi. The Hindu husband went to court with his side of the story. In a decision unthinkable in rabidly Islamist Pakistan today, the woman was returned to her Hindu husband, and the other man, a Muslim, was imprisoned.

Like Osama, the Faqir of Ipi responded to a perceived insult to Islam. Thirty thousand tribesmen flocked to his cause, much as millions of Muslims resonated with Osama in his opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s and the American military presence in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. In 1937 Pashtun tribal forces destroyed an entire British brigade. When the British bombed, the Fakir, like Osama, hid in caves. One British political agent observed (with a touch of whimsy unthinkable among American officials today) that “… blowing up a cave is apparently a difficult job. Your best efforts are apt merely to enlarge it to the subsequent satisfaction of the owner.” The British called the Faqir’s own cave “The Vicarage.”

They never got him. When the Faqir died old and free in 1960, he was accorded this London Times obit: “a doughty and honorable opponent … a man of principle and saintliness … a redoubtable organizer of tribal warfare.” Again, how times have changed in today’s War on Terror. Consider how unimaginable such a retrospective for Osama would be from our Establishment.

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Some things haven’t changed.

Pakistan’s effort to catch Osama, even with much U.S. technological support, has failed thus far. Now the Chicago Tribune reports Pentagon plans for on-the-ground American intervention: “This planning is like planning for Iraq. They want this plan to be executable – now.”

How feasible is this notion? We got Saddam, but our pursuit of Osama seems far more complicated. American troops on Pakistan soil would inflame the tribes more than ever.

Nor would that incendiary effect be limited to the borderlands. All of

Pakistan is now an Islamist tinderbox. In that sense, American hot pursuit may be less a viable option than it was for the British seven decades ago.

Technology, of course, may provide the necessary American advantage. Space-age gizmos may get Osama after all. Even so, this cautionary close from that British political agent of another age: “There’s a ruddy war on. … The faqir is still at large, though he has been completely inactive for some time as he is ill [with pneumonia rather than Osama’s apparent diabetes]. Military opinion, of course, is that he should be hounded and hunted, but then they either don’t realize or don’t believe that the hunting of Faqirs merely prolongs or enlarges the war and never by any chance results in the capture of the Faqir.”

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is available from Waveland Press.