This week’s conviction of a Sudanese man on charges of helping Osama bin Laden escape US forces in 2001 — along with last month’s attempt, by a lone American civilian, to hunt him down, Rambo-style, in Pakistan — begs, again, the question: Why can’t US forces find Osama bin Laden?
Ibrahim al Qosi, bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver from 1996-2001, was charged by the US government as a key player in the evacuation of bin Laden and his subordinates from Kandahar just two weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. Al Qosi got separated — or separated himself — from bin Laden during the US attacks in December 2001 in Tora Bora and was quickly captured. He’s been at Guantanamo for more than eight years.
This long-awaited war-crimes conviction barely registered in the national media — who cares about some low-level functionary who ran the other way, while his boss is still at large?
Meanwhile, Gary Brooks Faulkner, a rugged 50-year-old construction worker from Colorado, strides into Pakistan armed with a pistol, night-vision equipment, a 40-inch sword and a little hashish, convinced he can succeed where the world’s most powerful military has failed. His brother told the press that Faulkner’s not a “nut job.”
Whatever the case, that Faulkner wound up on the “Today” show instead of in a psychiatric wing is a testament to the profoundly deep, collective need Americans still have to see bin Laden captured or killed.
“We were very close in 2001,” said Gary Berntsen, an ex-CIA official who was the architect of that campaign in Tora Bora. “We had significant forces up there.”
In fact, the CIA obtained video from this time, in which bin Laden orders his subordinates to dig ditches for sleeping as the US drops bombs nearby. Bin Laden’s response? “We were there last night,” he said confidently.
Just two months later, the Bush administration withdrew the bulk of special forces in Tora Bora to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. The US has not had a decent lead since.
Berntsen has never gotten over it. “We wiped them out in 2001,” he said. “Bin Laden was depressed — he wrote his own will. The problem is that we didn’t put them out of business completely.” The lack of highly trained and embedded US intelligence agents, of course, ratcheted up the degree of difficulty.
“The intelligence is just so bad,” said Robert Baer, an ex-CIA agent who worked extensively in the Middle East. (Baer was the model for George Clooney’s CIA agent in the film “Syriana.”) “No one’s ever had intelligence on that area. Ever. Alexander the Great got hung up in those mountains for years. Those tribal areas — we can’t get into them. It’s the hardest place in the world, bar none.”
The geographic impregnability of the region is bolstered by the intractability of the populace. The area in which most experts believe bin Laden is hiding — the Pashtun tribal belt of Pakistan — is inhabited by 41 million people.
“They are armed to the teeth in that frontier region,” Berntsen said. “They have an honor code. Bin Laden has sought sanctuary under the honor code, and they provide it. And the tribes are very hostile to outsiders.”
Still, the lack of any intel over the past few years — not one rumored sighting, nothing detected by US drones, not a soul interested in the $25 million reward for information leading to bin Laden’s capture — has led to another popular theory: bin Laden’s dead.
“It makes me wonder,” said Baer. “He’s the most sought-after guy in the world. Even his supporters want to know where he is. Everybody I’ve ever been on the hunt for — the best assassins in the world — I’ve always found someone who had something. A piece of information always comes up. Everybody has a cellphone up there, and there’s not a phone call in the world that can’t be intercepted. Why is there nothing? Nothing?”
Bernsten said he’s had the same experience. “I’ve captured terrorists that I’ve pursued for 16 years,” he said.
But this, he added, is exactly why he thinks the US will eventually capture bin Laden: “We’re at it constantly,” he said, before employing the yardstick for success most typically used by terrorists: “We only have to be right once. He has to be right every day.”
Bin Laden’s death, some believe, can be discounted simply because it would elicit open reactions among followers. “Al Qaeda will mourn his death and will retaliate in a big way,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, told The Washington Post in 2006. “We are pretty sure Osama is alive.”
“You can’t disprove a positive,” said Baer, who thinks the chances that bin Laden is alive are 50/50. “I would like to see a plausible explanation as to why he cannot produce a good DVD. It would be a nice proof of life, and al Qaeda would get huge propaganda out of it.”
As for the lack of any actionable intel: al Qaeda has made a habit of slaughtering anyone suspected of cooperating with the West, leaving decapitated bodies, tagged with the word “spy,” in the street as a warning. (They also sell cheap DVDs — average cost $1 — of al Qaeda operatives beheading Westerners as both a means of intimidation and as recruitment tools.)
Berntsen reports that the most senior members of al Qaeda captured and debriefed by the US, however, “are full of anger and disgust for bin Laden. He fled the battlefield. He ran and ran and ran, and sacrificed young boys along the way. He abandoned them.” (They remain dedicated to the cause, if not the man.)
If this is the case — if even senior al Qaeda members are full of contempt for bin Laden, if they regard him as a coward for remaining in hiding with his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, while the No. 3 al Qaeda position remains “the death chair” — why are 41 million Pashtuns so loyal?
“Osama bin Laden, in some ways, is a myth to them,” said Berntsen. “Back in the early days, he was a hero in Pakistan. He established a relationship with those clans.”
He’s also not that active. “In the last eight years or so, bin Laden has separated himself from operations,” Berntsen said. “He’s franchised everything. He and Zawahiri are only concerned with their own skins.”
That neither uses cellphones or computers further hampers the hunt. “It’s like how we never understood the mob until wiretaps and RICO,” said Baer. “Bin Laden’s not part of the digital world.”
Both men believe, however, that the capture and/or killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces would be politically invaluable, that the other popular theory — bin Laden is worth more to the US alive than dead — is patently ridiculous.
“We’d all like to see him hit with a missile,” said Berntsen, who believes that the CIA’s public claims of cluelessness are strategic. “They don’t want the public to know what they know. Bin Laden might move.”
Baer thinks that’s nonsense: “When [Mike] Mullen and [Leon] Panetta say, ‘We have no idea’ — they’re not lying,” he said. “We have no idea what’s going on.”
Just a few weeks ago, CIA director Panetta said that it’s been years since the US had a lead on bin Laden’s location. In 2007, declassified documents showed that the British Ministry of Defence hired psychics in an attempt to find him.
Since 2001, bin Laden’s been rumored to be in China, in Iran, on a tropical island somewhere. It’s been reported that some in US intelligence are so amused by these rumors that they’ve dubbed Bin Laden “Elvis,” after the post-mortem sightings of the King. In May, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told ABC News that he believes bin Laden is hiding in Washington, DC.
In 2009, a UCLA biogeologist named Thomas Gillespie drew attention from Foreign Policy magazine, among others, when he submitted his hypothesis that the “standard and repeatable” principles of his scientific specialty could be used to find Bin Laden.
Gillespie came up with three possible locations, all in the Pashtun tribal belt, using his last known location — Tora Bora — as the starting point. Then he looked for cities and structures, using Google Earth, that aligned with bin Laden’s “life history and characteristics”: A place big enough to accommodate his 6-foot-4 frame, had at least two rooms (one for bodyguards), could be easily protected, and had electricity to power his dialysis machine.
Next, Gillespie applied a principle known as “distance decay,” which holds that the farther one strays from their last known point — in essence, the familiar — the greater the chances they’ll be caught.
“Political scientists wave their hands and say, ‘I think he’s here,’ but it’s a geographical question,” said Gillespie.
Gillespie narrowed down bin Laden’s location to three structures, and his hypothesis was intriguing enough that each site was checked out by civilians. “If I were to repeat this study, I would include political data next time,” Gillespie said.
He added that he now believes bin Laden is in an area where there are currently no drone bombings. “Those drones do a really good job of surveying those areas,” he said. “They have thermal sensors that allow them to detect movement.”
The one thing he’s certain of: bin Laden isn’t hiding in a cave. “During the dead of winter, it’s too easy to see heat being given off,” Gillespie said. He also thinks there’s credence to the theory that bin Laden may be dead: “If he’s alive, it’s just unbelievable that no one’s turned him in.”
“It’s a wonderful mystery,” Baer said. “If I were around him when he died, I’d put him in a woodchipper and tell no one, to demonstrate the impotence of the West.” As for bin Laden’s ultimate fate, Baer said, “We may never know.”