The Guardian: Eight years and counting...

Eight years and counting ...

Osama bin Laden is believed to be in mountains on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. But is he any nearer to being captured?

Julian Borger and Declan Walsh
The Guardian, Thursday 25 June 2009

He is still alive. That is the one thing that can be said about Osama bin Laden these days with any degree of certainty. At least, he was still alive at the beginning of the month, when an audio tape was delivered to al-Jazeera bearing words in a familiar voice.

The tape, aired by al-Jazeera on 3 June, is genuine, according to British and US intelligence, and his references to recent events are proof that it is contemporary. It is a muttered sermon, mainly devoted to decrying Barack Obama on the day the new US president arrived in Saudi Arabia on the start of a Middle East tour - to sow "seeds of hatred", Bin Laden claimed.

But that is where the certainty ends, the facts peter out and the guesswork begins. We do not know what he looks like these days. His last 10 messages have been audio only. There has been no video of him since September 2007, and even that raised questions over exactly when it had been made.

Bin Laden may be incapacitated by injury or disease - persistent rumours have him suffering from kidney failure - or he may have shorn off his trademark beard and had plastic surgery, for all we know. After all, Radovan Karadzic - until last July, a fellow fugitive on the world's most-wanted list - managed to live for years in plain view of his fellow countrymen, disguised until his arrest by no more than a bushy white beard and a new-age top-knot.

It has been nearly eight years since George Bush declared Bin Laden "wanted, dead or alive" and described his capture as a national priority. Bush is now back in Texas, living a low-profile post-presidential existence. He has been photographed lugging shopping bags around and been heard complaining about picking up his own dog's droppings. Bin Laden, meanwhile, remains as elusive as ever, despite the billion-dollar, multi-force, multinational, state-of-the-art aerial drone search - the most extensive and expensive manhunt in history.

The best guess of the intelligence services in Washington and London is that the 52-year-old Saudi has hidden himself somewhere in the forbidding rocky expanse of North Waziristan, a semi-autonomous tribal region along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

The Afghan frontier, a 1,550-mile stretch of rock and desert, contains other possible boltholes. Captured al-Qaida members have placed him further north in Chitral, a peaceful district amid the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, cut off by snow for four months of the year. That may explain a recent surge in CIA interest in the area. A mysterious new base, believed to be a surveillance station, is under construction near the 13,000ft-high Boroghil Pass, close to the Afghan border. Locals widely believe it to be American-funded.

"The building is totally out of proportion to anything else up there," says local hotelier Siraj ul Mulk, a member of the traditional royal family of Chitral. To discourage visitors, the tourism ministry has stopped issuing trekking passes for the area, and an annual yak polo festival has been cancelled.

Ul Mulk says it is plausible that someone such as Bin Laden could hide in the mountain areas of Chitral, but not in the villages. "Very little remains a secret around here. In their books, the British mentioned that you don't need spies around here because the locals will come and tell you."

In February this year, an academic team at the University of California claimed to have narrowed down the search with the use of satellite imagery and "fundamental principles of geography". They went as far as to call for a search of three walled compounds in the Kurram tribal area. "If he's still alive, he honestly could be sitting there right now," the lead author of the study, Thomas Gillespie, claimed at the time, though it is not clear whether the recommendation has ever been followed.

The area the UCLA geography department pinpointed is less than 20km south of Tora Bora, the cave-riddled Afghan mountain where US-led forces thought they had Bin Laden and the remains of al-Qaida pinned down in December 2001, only for him to slip through their grasp and disappear. A last intercepted radio message on 14 December marks the last time the west had a definitive fix on his whereabouts.

"It's very hard to find just one person. Look, it took the Israelis 15 years to find Eichmann," says Peter Bergen, a journalist, terrorism expert and one of the few westerners to have actually met Bin Laden - he interviewed him in 1997. His personal guess is that the Saudi construction heir turned jihadist has sought sanctuary high up in the Hindu Kush, in Chitral or the nearby Bajaur tribal agency.

The general consensus that Bin Laden is hiding along the highland border is in part based on logic and personal history. The terrain is ideal for a fugitive accustomed to deprivation, riddled with crags and caves and vertical rock walls. In satellite pictures, the region looks like silver foil that has been crumpled, then scorched. This is Bin Laden's comfort zone, where he enjoys the protection of Pashtunwali, the honour code that makes the local tribes fiercely protective of their guests.

American and British intelligence think Bin Laden is in North Waziristan, in part because he has particularly good friends there. He has a long history with Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, a pair of formidable warriors whose militant empire stretches from Khost in Afghanistan to Miram Shah in North Waziristan. The links go back to the 80s, when the inexperienced son of a Saudi millionaire teamed up with the Haqqanis to fight the jihad against Soviet troops occupying Afghanistan. Bin Laden built his first base - the "Lion's Den" - on Haqqani turf.

There are scraps of intelligence to suggest that he has returned to these jihadist roots. Captured al-Qaida members have pointed to the remote mountain passes and recalled sightings, or rumours of sightings. Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of operations in the CIA's counter-terrorism centre, says there have been several intelligence reports that Bin Laden was in North Waziristan or nearby, "although none of the information is 'real time' ... It's always: 'He was there, but we're not sure today,'" Cannistraro says.

The CIA has claimed that its intelligence has been good enough to pick off other senior al-Qaida figures. A Washington Post report earlier this month quoted US and Pakistani officials as claiming that half the 20 "high-value targets" on the American hit list had been killed by Predator and Reaper drone aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles. But the missiles have also killed dozens of Pakistani civilians, deepening resentment of the faceless foreign presence in the sky.

Yet despite all the missiles rained down on the tribal areas, the US has never claimed to have even come close to Bin Laden himself. It is as if he represents another level of difficulty as a target.

"He and the senior al-Qaida leadership have become incredibly cautious. They have no affinity for any kind of technology. They use couriers to send messages," says Seth Jones, a US counter-terrorism expert who has just written a book about the Afghan war entitled In the Graveyard of Empires. "Pashtunwali makes it an extremely hard network to penetrate. You need information, and that means capturing people who know his mode of operations. That is a really small number of people."

A western diplomat with access to intelligence in Islamabad explains the limitations of a hi-tech manhunt. "The impressive stuff you see in the movies does exist," he says, describing the ability to watch live satellite feeds of attacks on remote compounds. "But that technology can only be deployed for limited periods of time and depends on obtaining good, timely information. That's much harder to come by."

There are also political limitations. Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) has strong historical linkages with Bin Laden's North Waziristan protectors, the Haqqani network. The ISI considers Haqqani a useful tool: last summer, US officials accused the Pakistani spies of working with him to bomb the Indian embassy in Kabul. And so, while Pakistani officials agree that Bin Laden is on the border, they tend to argue he is on the Afghan side.

Bin Laden's recent preference for producing audio tapes rather than videos could be testament to his risk-averse nature. Video cameras could require another set of hands and eyes, and the setting and his appearance could give away minute clues.

Bin Laden has been helped by the fact that his pursuers have frequently been distracted and cautious. At Tora Bora, in the last days of 2001, Washington ignored the advice of US agents and officers on the ground and relied on local allied militias to block the escape route of al-Qaida survivors into Pakistan. They failed. Soon afterwards, America's robot Predators and human manhunters were dispatched on another assignment, to Iraq.

"It's just a small number of specialists that can detect and track down individuals, and the specialist intelligence personnel and the elite special forces were all sent from the Afghan theatre to Iraq," says Rohan Gunaratna, an expert on international terrorism based in Singapore. "If that had not happened the world would have celebrated Osama bin Laden's death or capture."

Attempts were made late in the Bush presidency to focus efforts once more on tracking down Bin Laden. The CIA relaunched the manhunt in an operation codenamed Cannonball in 2006, sending dozens of agents to Pakistan. But the initiative was paralysed from the start by internal disagreements over whether and when to send special forces into the tribal areas on raids.

Last year, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon had drawn up new orders to dispatch special forces units into the tribal areas, but that the final green light was never given because of continued infighting in the last months of the Bush administration.

The election of Barack Obama and his administration's focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan has led to another attempt at making a fresh start. According to British and American sources, the new manhunt is a joint venture between special forces and the CIA, under CIA direction, and built around information-sharing with a select group of officials from Pakistan's ISI, long suspected of being infiltrated by jihadist sympathisers. It will continue to be spearheaded by unmanned Predators and Reapers, with special forces teams on constant standby should "actionable intelligence" become suddenly available.

Meanwhile, it is hoped that the Pakistani army will somehow flush Bin Laden out in ground operations with the help of US intelligence. Last week, the troops were sent into South Waziristan, against Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban leader also suspected of ties to al-Qaida.

But even if the hunters get lucky and capture or kill Bin Laden (the latter is widely considered to be more likely - his bodyguards are reputedly under orders to kill him rather than let him be captured), would it make us any safer? David Benest, a former officer in the Parachute Regiment who served as a British counter-insurgency adviser in Kabul last year, says it would serve little purpose.

"He is in a long line of Muslim philosophers/propagandists that stretches back over centuries and it is his ideas that need to be attacked and destroyed rather than himself per se," Benest argues. "Any action is bound to merely increase antipathy against the 'Satanic west'. The UK aim is very clear - to stop him and al-Qaida coming back into Afghanistan, and the hope that the Pakistanis will deal with him. I agree with that."

Most al-Qaida watchers believe that Ayman al-Zawahiri and another Egyptian, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, alias Sheikh Saeed, have taken over the day-to-day running of al-Qaida's operations, with Bin Laden elevated to an inspirational figurehead role. But the Obama administration clearly believes there is still a point in going after the figurehead, and Bergen, now working as an analyst at the New America Foundation in Washington, agrees.

"I think it would make a difference," Bergen says. "To the extent that the jihadists have a leader, it is him. The fact that jihadists are turning up in Somalia has a lot to do with him saying they should go. There is a relationship between what he says and what these people do. As they say in the American military, he provides 'commander's intent', and he makes that intent pretty clear".

All sounds like BS to me.

Most of that information came from US or British intelligence.
Should we even waste our time listening to their info?
You would think that the Guardian would have at least referenced David Ray Griffin's new book
on bin Laden, which says the most likely conclusion is that bin Laden is dead.

The Guardian is a big disappointment to me. I relied on this news outlet during the buildup to the Iraq invasion,
when the US media was consistently pushing the WMD propaganda, and the Guardian was giving
us evidence that it was likely all lies. It also didn't fall for the "links" stuff either.
But the Guardian has stayed clear of ANY reporting of any evidence that the official story of 911 is a lie.

I didn't expect this article to have any real information for us.
And I was right.

Pure propaganda.

If you want reliable information go dig it up youself on net.

John A MITCHELL
Herblay FRANCE

under the Soviets the russians knew that their news papers were just pure propaganda so they could dismiss what they read.

We in the west in the past had faith in our newspapers and it was very difficult to know what was propaganda or not.
Howerver today like said just above, we fall into the situation under the Soviets our newspapers are just pure propadanda outlets.

If you want to have reliable information go and dig it up yourself on the internet.

Yours

John

Still Dead

...and General Franco is 'still' dead (as the SNL joke went).

The writer chose not to use Bin Laden's real name...

... which is Emmanuel Goldstein.