To find Osama bin Laden, try Peshawar's smugglers' bazaar on the road to the Khyber Pass. Walk past the small mountains of almonds, lemongrass and green tea. Turn at the stacks of TVs and cheap cosmetics. Stop at the stalls with the topless women.
Down a cramped alley, bearded shopkeepers squeezed behind tiny counters offer a fine selection of fanciful sex products. "Delay sprays" carry the promise of lingering pleasure. For the discerning lover there is Lovely Curves, a product that claims to be a "bust-developing cream."
If all else fails, there is plenty of knock-off Viagra at knock-down prices. Worry not about the quality: "Made is Germany" reads the label.
The merchandise hidden under the glass counters, however, caters to a different kind of customer. For a discreet inquiry and US$1.50, the smiling traders offer a wide selection of jihad DVDs. Slickly edited footage shows beheadings of alleged collaborators, bombs that flip US Humvees into the air and the last words of suicide bombers.
Then there are the images of the lanky Saudi tycoon's son with a bad back, a scraggly beard and a dead-fish glare.
"I've sold about 100 since Friday," says Abdul at one of the stalls, sifting through a stack of discs. "Some ask for [Afghan militant] Gulbuddin. Some ask for Taliban. Some ask for Osama."
The sheikh, the director, the emir, even "the Samaritan" -- bin Laden violently changed the course of our world in 2001, and then began his own audacious flight from justice. Six days after the Twin Towers folded into Manhattan, while dazed Americans fumbled for meaning, US President George W. Bush promised to lasso in the al-Qaeda leader, Texas style.
"There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said: `Wanted: dead or alive,'" he told a press conference at the Pentagon.
The order went down the line. Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterrorism chief, later told a subordinate: "I want bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice."
Yet five years on, a pokey video stand on the Pakistani frontier is about as close as anyone has got.
Rarely has so much brought so little. The US has spent billions on the search. It has mobilized armies, bribed informers, bullied allies, emptied bank accounts, tapped phones, abducted suspects and assassinated his henchmen. It has seriously damaged al-Qaeda's ability to carry out terrorist attacks. Yet still the scarlet pimpernel of jihad roams free.
The foolhardy words of the US general who promised a scalp by the end of 2004 have been quietly forgotten. Embarrassment has crumbled into recrimination. The Americans blame the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis blame the Afghans. The Afghans shrug their shoulders. Bush wanted to invade their country and catch bin Laden, they say. So why hasn't he?
Guessing the location of bin Laden's lair is the favored parlor game of South Asia, played out on the 2,400km Pakistan-Afghanistan border where the participants -- spies, soldiers and journalists -- believe he is hiding. It is a massive and daunting arena. Scraps of intelligence and educated guesswork slim the odds, but not much. Theories shift with the seasons. Three years ago, some put bin Laden in Pakistan's Waziristan, nested behind serried ranks of flinty pro-Taliban fighters. Last year it was Bajaur, a tribal agency further north, where a group of harried Arabs were spotted lugging supplies up a mountainside. This year's hot bet is closer to the Chinese border, in Chitral.
Peaceful, mountainous and sprawled across the lower Himalayas, until recently Chitral's main attractions were hiking, rare falcons and a rather rough version of horse polo. Then, one day last winter, three Americans arrived, and all that changed. The strangers checked into the Hindu Kush Heights, a luxury hotel with sweeping views over Chitral's main valley. The owner, Siraj ul Mulk, a genial former air force officer and a prince of the local royalty, offered his help.
"They said they wanted to develop the area," he recalls. "They said American development money was coming."
Ul Mulk whipped out his maps, which the Americans eyeballed enthusiastically. But when the conversation turned to talk of tourism, their faces glazed over.
"You could tell it was going in one ear and out the other," he says.
As it turned out, the Americans were only interested in one tourist. By last May, word spread that the CIA or the FBI -- nobody was ever sure which -- had come to Chitral on the trail of bin Laden. Locals grew angry. A cleric organized protests and a politician kicked up a fuss in parliament. Reporters snooped around a house that the now-absent Americans had rented, noting a fitness machine and a satellite dish on the porch. The Americans never came back, leaving locals scratching their heads and wondering if the bizarre episode was a blessing or a curse.
"I'm thinking of spreading new Osama rumors," says Ul Mulk sardonically. "It seems a good way to bring in visitors."
ANOTHER DEAD END
For the US, it was another dead end in a long manhunt. The "development experts" had come from the US consulate in Peshawar, a colonial-style house ringed with enough razor wire to protect a small prison. It is the sort of place where visa inquiries are politely referred elsewhere. Behind its fortified walls is a major nerve center in the bin Laden hunt -- some of the world's most sophisticated decryption and eavesdropping equipment.
And yet Western intelligence has not had a bead on bin Laden in years, says Michael Scheuer, the CIA analyst who set up the Osama bin Laden cell in 1996 and resigned two years ago.
"As far as I know there's been no serious credible information about his location since Tora Bora," he says.
That high-octane cave chase in December 2001 was probably bin Laden's luckiest break. After Kabul fell, he fled south to the saw-toothed White mountains, on the border with Pakistan, and burrowed into Tora Bora, an underground warren that the CIA once helped fortify. Surrounded by an estimated 1,000 al-Qaeda diehards and pounded by a blitz of US bombs, it was a harrowing time.
By one account, US officers listening on a captured radio heard bin Laden apologize to fighters for leading them there.
But then, many believe, the US generals made a mistake. Instead of sending in the elite rangers to finish the job, they turned to unreliable Afghan militias. As daisy-cutter and bunker-buster bombs exploded around him, bin Laden slipped through the dragnet and into North Waziristan, a remote Pakistani tribal agency of fortress-like compounds and stern tribesmen.
US General Tommy Franks disputes this account, saying it was never clear if bin Laden was in Tora Bora. Nevertheless, in 2004, under intense US pressure, Pakistan dispatched tens of thousands of soldiers to Waziristan, by then a major haven for al-Qaeda fugitives. But it was too late. The sheikh had fled.
Since then, the trail is mostly conjecture. In interviews with Pakistani army officers, Western officials and local reporters, a common theory emerges. Bin Laden is surrounded by two or three concentric circles of security with a small corps of battle-hardened men at its center. He has not used his satellite phone in years and communicates only through handwritten notes carried by trusted couriers. He travels only at night, possibly in disguise. At an early stage, Pakistani police were instructed to check all burkas in case he was hiding underneath.
"He's morphing all the time," one Western official says.
The armor has two possible chinks. Since 2001, al-Qaeda has released at least 37 video or audio recordings. The latest, produced last week, shows bin Laden meeting with the Sept. 11 bombers. Earlier this year, he released five audio tapes. Could the tape trail unravel his cover? The early cassettes were delivered to the office of al-Jazeera in an Islamabad suburb. The US was watching, but to no avail.
"They did it at night using cut-offs," says one official, using the term for someone who does not know his employer. "It's one of the most reliable measures in spycraft."
Now bin Laden's messages are distributed via an even more elusive channel -- the Internet.
His other weakness is his health. Rumors of sickness have swirled around bin Laden for years. Le Figaro reported in 2001 that he had visited Dubai for kidney treatment. Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Peshawar journalist who interviewed bin Laden in 1998, noticed his copious consumption of water and green tea, which may indicate kidney disease. At the time, bin Laden walked with a cane, he says, and complained of back problems.
"He said he used to love playing soccer and horse riding, but had to stop," Yusufzai says.
But when he photographed a stooped bin Laden shuffling into a tent, his followers erased the digital images.
"They said they didn't want him to look weak or disabled," he says.
Even if bin Laden is ailing, he enjoys an ideal sanctuary. The Pashtun tribal belt is a broad swathe of high-walled villages, sprawling orchards and fiercely conservative tribesmen that straddles the Pakistani-Afghan border. Pashtunwali, the strict Pashtun code of honor, dictates that all guests must be treated to warm hospitality, no matter who they are. But the tribal belt can also be a tough place to keep a secret, which leads many to believe that bin Laden has a powerful protector.
"It seems that someone very important has given him refuge," Yusufzai said. "Someone we don't suspect and someone the Americans don't suspect. Someone with so much commitment that he would risk losing everything."
That may help explain why Washington's US$25 million bounty -- advertised on Pakistani television and hawked on cheap State Department matchboxes bearing his picture -- remains untouched. Assumptions that a sweaty-palmed Pashtun tribesman would trade his loyalty against a fistful of dollars have proved fantastically misplaced.
"Everyone thought they were feckless, that they would sell him for the money. It hasn't happened," laments a US official in Pakistan. "These people are direct and forthright. They can't be bought."
And they call bin Laden their Robin Hood. A poll last year said 51 percent of Pakistanis, 60 percent of Jordanians and 35 percent of Indonesians support bin Laden. They share his world view not, as Bush claims, due to some irrational hatred of US elections and women who work, but because the Saudi has flamboyantly defied a superpower they see as a threat to their religion and way of life.
"We underestimate bin Laden's popularity," says Scheuer, arguably the intelligence agent who has followed bin Laden most closely. "For better or worse, he stood with the Afghans for 25 years. And whether we like it or not, he's a hero. We're going to be awfully lucky to find a source willing to turn him over."
In the tribal belt, that popularity has been nourished by a current of radicalism that swelled after Sept. 11. The provincial assembly is controlled by the MMA, a pro-Taliban coalition that has steadily attacked women's rights. Last week, the Pakistani government signed a peace deal with fundamentalist militants in Waziristan who publicly execute accused thieves and shut down music shops. Hostility toward the US and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has never been higher.
The bin Laden we know was forged in the hot fire of frontier radicalism. He arrived in Peshawar in the early 1980s, one of thousands of Arab idealists drawn by the jihad against the godless Soviets who had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Armed with nothing but his tycoon father's bank account, he set up an office in the well-heeled University Town neighborhood under the mentorship of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian academic who had once lectured him in Jeddah. Azzam later died in a bomb blast that some blame on an ambitious bin Laden.
However, other allies from that period have proven more enduring. Intelligence officials think bin Laden is supported by the forces of Younis Khalis and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, two of the seven mujahideen leaders whom the CIA and Saudi intelligence used to arm during the 1980s jihad.
Kunar, where Hekmatyar's men roam large, had the strongest Arab presence during the 1980s jihad. Not coincidentally, it is the province with the greatest concentration of US troops in Afghanistan, and some of the highest casualty rates. Some say bin Laden is hiding there.
The other wild card is Pakistan. Some accuse its powerful ISI intelligence agency of, at best, not looking very hard for him and, at worst, helping him, a notion that Pakistan angrily rejects. Officials point to the 600 al-Qaeda suspects they have killed or detained, including the Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, now heading to Guantanamo Bay for trial.
"They are on the run," Musharraf told me in an interview at his office last April. "Wherever we locate them, we hit them."
Intelligence cooperation with the US is close. When a US Predator drone fired missiles at a mud-walled house in Bajaur last year -- thinking mistakenly that Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's deputy, was inside -- Musharraf protested. In fact, he had approved of the strike in advance.
"For domestic reasons, we had to say we knew nothing," a senior aide said.
But after five years of searching, with the trail still cold, the recriminations have started. The US, frustrated at the limitations of its electronic surveillance, wants to develop more "human intelligence" -- essentially, local tribesmen it can pay for information.
"The outer shells [of his security] are more attenuated. They are the ones that can be turned," says one US official in Islamabad.
NO ENTRY
But Pakistan's ISI refuses permission to roam the tribal areas, saying that it is too dangerous for any white man, much less an American. Tensions are rising.
"We give Musharraf US$300 million a year in military aid alone," the official says. "People will start saying, `What the hell are we getting for this? What are the results?'"
The Americans also admit that they have themselves to blame. Infighting is one problem. The CIA recently shut down the specialized bin Laden unit due to bureaucratic wrangling, Scheuer recently disclosed. The US official blames Bush for employing the shoot-'em-up tactics that have alienated Muslim opinion in places where the US needed help the most.
"It should have been presented as a search for justice using intelligence and law enforcement. If we kept it in that ideological space, simply asking Muslims for help in tracking down a criminal, we would have made headway," he says. "Instead, we regarded it as a war we could fight through the military with heavy and blunt instruments that were telegraphed for hundreds of miles."
The other pressure is Iraq. As with the army, many intelligence assets have been transferred from Afghanistan to the Middle East, Scheuer says.
"What is left is now engaged almost fully in trying to prevent the fall of Hamid Karzai's government, not looking for Osama bin Laden," he says.
It may already be too late. Bin Laden has evolved into more of a symbol than an operator, some argue.
Maulana Muhammad Alam, a radical preacher in the Dir valley, 130km above Peshawar, says: "Osama is not the name of an individual; it's a movement ... Osama is the right of every individual to fight and defend Islam."
And anyway, bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahri is the true brains of the outfit.
But Scheuer disagrees: "This business that he's the puppet and Zawahri is the string-puller is completely wrong. Bin Laden is dangerous because he is talented. He is a genuinely historic personality."
But capture, even if possible, would also bring problems. If it happened in Pakistan, Musharraf would face colossal public protest. In the US, they would face the prospect of the world's most potent media manipulator in a New York courtroom, on CNN, for possibly three years.
In that case, the only solution is assassination, even at the risk of creating a martyr -- perhaps the only thing that bin Laden himself agrees with. In speeches, he repeatedly stresses that his own survival -- a "slave of Allah" -- is unimportant. One rumor has it that his bed is surrounded by land mines hooked up to a trigger.
In the meantime, we await the next tape or the next attack. A video message last weekend by Adam Yehiye Gadahn, a 28-year-old American al-Qaeda convert urging US soldiers to embrace Islam, passed off largely unnoticed. But it could have an ominous significance. After Sept. 11, Islamic scholars criticized bin Laden for failing to follow a Koran teaching that enemies should be offered a chance to convert before an attack. Now that obligation has been fulfilled, Scheuer says.
"The tape was directed at Muslims to show that [al-Qaeda] has gone the extra mile to get us off the hook," he says. "It's a mug's game to guess when, but I wouldn't be surprised to see another attack in the United States before the end of this year."
US$18.278 billion is a simple dollar figure; one that’s illustrative of the first Trump administration’s defense commitment to Taiwan. But what does Donald Trump care for money? During President Trump’s first term, the US defense department approved gross sales of “defense articles and services” to Taiwan of over US$18 billion. In September, the US-Taiwan Business Council compared Trump’s figure to the other four presidential administrations since 1993: President Clinton approved a total of US$8.702 billion from 1993 through 2000. President George W. Bush approved US$15.614 billion in eight years. This total would have been significantly greater had Taiwan’s Kuomintang-controlled Legislative Yuan been cooperative. During
Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in recent days was the focus of the media due to his role in arranging a Chinese “student” group to visit Taiwan. While his team defends the visit as friendly, civilized and apolitical, the general impression is that it was a political stunt orchestrated as part of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, as its members were mainly young communists or university graduates who speak of a future of a unified country. While Ma lived in Taiwan almost his entire life — except during his early childhood in Hong Kong and student years in the US —
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers on Monday unilaterally passed a preliminary review of proposed amendments to the Public Officers Election and Recall Act (公職人員選罷法) in just one minute, while Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators, government officials and the media were locked out. The hasty and discourteous move — the doors of the Internal Administration Committee chamber were locked and sealed with plastic wrap before the preliminary review meeting began — was a great setback for Taiwan’s democracy. Without any legislative discussion or public witnesses, KMT Legislator Hsu Hsin-ying (徐欣瑩), the committee’s convener, began the meeting at 9am and announced passage of the
In response to a failure to understand the “good intentions” behind the use of the term “motherland,” a professor from China’s Fudan University recklessly claimed that Taiwan used to be a colony, so all it needs is a “good beating.” Such logic is risible. The Central Plains people in China were once colonized by the Mongolians, the Manchus and other foreign peoples — does that mean they also deserve a “good beating?” According to the professor, having been ruled by the Cheng Dynasty — named after its founder, Ming-loyalist Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功, also known as Koxinga) — as the Kingdom of Tungning,
RSS