It's been many months since President George W. Bush declared he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive," but with America distracted in Iraq, and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf leery of stirring up an Islamist backlash, there is no large-scale military force currently pursuing the chief culprit in the 9/11 attacks, U.S. officials concede to Newsweek.

Military officials now openly worry about whether they'll have enough troops for just the tasks they have, given declining re-enlistments by frustrated Reservists and National Guardsmen, report Senior Editor Michael Hirsh, Investigative Correspondent Mark Hosenball and Special Correspondent Sami Yousafzai report in the September 22 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, September 15). "The point is: why would we open that new front? It wasn't related directly to the war on terror," says retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former Centcom commander who has long criticized the administration's switch from bin Laden to Saddam.

The United States still has only about 9,000 troops in all of Central Asia, even as it struggles to fight off demands that it increase its presence in Iraq. And some U.S. military officials trace the Taliban's gradual resurgence to the abrupt diversion of so many resources to Iraq, including Predator aerial vehicles, in a critical period beginning in 2002. One example: in February and March of 2002, the Arabic-speaking Fifth Special Forces Group-the teams that were mostly credited with winning the Afghan war-were largely pulled out to be soon redeployed in the Mideast. They were replaced by other teams such as the Seventh Group, whose focus is Latin America. The result: a loss of good intelligence. "From the very beginning we f---ed it up," says a Fifth Group officer who fought in Afghanistan. "The conventional army came in and new teams...didn't have the same relations. Continuity is everything. The trust you develop with another guy by fighting alongside him is everything. We did it wrong."

Other intelligence resources were also badly strained. "It was widely reported after September 11 that we didn't have enough intelligence officers who are familiar with [the Islamic] world," notes one former staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "If we didn't have enough for Afghanistan, how did they make the argument they had enough for Afghanistan and Iraq?"

Bush officials insist they did not stint in their intelligence gathering for bin Laden and Al Qaeda. "That's a canard. There was a deliberate effort not to make that happen," one administration official tells Newsweek. But privately, some U.S officials acknowledge that the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may have seriously drained away resources from the hunt for bin Laden