From our good friends at Stratfor:
The Obstacles to the Capture of Osama bin Laden
Al Qaeda’s As-Sahab media arm released a video Sept. 11 to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Although the 47-minute video features a voice-over introduction by Osama bin Laden, the bulk of it is of Abu Musab Waleed al-Shehri, one of the suicide bombers who crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center’s north tower. That recording was made prior to al-Shehri’s travel to the United States in the spring of 2001.
There is nothing in bin Laden’s audio segment to indicate it was recorded recently. The production does include a still photograph of him — one taken from what appears to be a real bin Laden video released Sept. 7 (in which he sports a dyed beard), but bin Laden’s comments about the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi suggest they were recorded during al Qaeda’s 2006 media blitz.
The release of two successive bin Laden messages, however, has again focused attention on bin Laden, who before last week had not been seen on video since late October 2004. This increased attention has once again caused people to question why the United States has failed to find bin Laden — and to wonder whether it ever will.
While the feds generally get their man in the movies or on television, it is very difficult in real life to find a single person who does not want to be found. It is even harder when that person is hiding in an extremely rugged, isolated and lawless area and is sheltered by a heavily armed local population.
The United States and Pakistan have not launched a major military operation to envelop and systematically search the entire region where bin Laden likely is hiding — an operation that would require tens of thousands of troops and likely result in heavy combat with the tribes residing in the area. Moreover, this is not the kind of operation they will take on in the future. The United States, therefore, will continue intelligence and covert special operations forces efforts, but if it is going to catch bin Laden, it will have to wait patiently for one of those operations to produce a lucky break — or for bin Laden to make a fatal operational security blunder.
Finding a single man in a large area with rugged terrain is a daunting task, even when a large number of searchers and a vast array of the latest high-tech surveillance equipment are involved. This principle was demonstrated by the manhunt for so-called “Olympic Bomber” Eric Rudolph, who was able to avoid one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history by hiding in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. The task force looking for Rudolph at times had hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officers assigned to it, while some of its search operations involved thousands of law enforcement and volunteer searchers. The government also employed high-tech surveillance and sensor equipment and even offered a $1 million reward for information leading to Rudolph’s capture.
However, Rudolph’s capture in May 2003, more than five years after he was listed on the FBI’s most-wanted list, was not the result of the organized search for him. Rather, he was caught by a rookie police officer on a routine patrol who found Rudolph rummaging for food in a dumpster behind a grocery store. The officer did not even realize he had captured Rudolph until he had taken him to the police station for booking.
The terrain in the Smoky Mountains is tough and remote, but it is nothing compared to the terrain in the soaring, craggy Safed Koh range that runs along the Pakistani-Afghan border or in the Hindu Kush to the north. Some of the peaks in the Safed Koh range, including Mount Sikaram, are well over twice as high as any peak in the Smokies, while the Hindu Kush contains some of the highest peaks in the world.
But it is not only the terrain that is hostile. In the Great Smokies, there are some people who are not happy to see “revenuers” and other government agents — or other strangers, for that matter — but at least the area is under the federal government’s control. The same cannot be said of the lawless areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border — the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The presence of Pakistani military forces is resented in these areas, and troops are regularly attacked by the heavily armed tribesmen living there.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means, though. The Pashtun tribes in the rugged area along the Durand Line (the line set to demarcate the border between the British Raj and Afghanistan, which later became the Afghan-Pakistani border) have always been difficult to control. Even before the establishment of Pakistan, the inhabitants of the area gave the British colonial authorities fits for more than a century. The Britons were never able to gain full control over the region, so they instead granted extensive power to tribal elders, called maliks. Under the deal, the maliks retained their autonomy in exchange for maintaining peace between the tribesmen and the British Raj — thus allowing commerce to continue unabated.
However, some dramatic flare-ups of violence occurred against the Britons during their time in the region. One of the last of them began in 1936 when a religious leader known as the Faqir of Ipi encouraged his followers to wage jihad on British forces. (Jihad against invading forces is a centuries-old tradition in the region.) The faqir and his followers fought an extended insurgency against the British forces that only ended when they left Pakistan. The United Kingdom attempted to crush the faqir and his followers, but the outmanned and outgunned insurgents used the rugged terrain and the support of the local tribes to their advantage. Efforts to use spies to locate or assassinate the faqir also failed. Although the British and colonial troops pursuing the faqir reportedly numbered more than 40,000 at one point, the faqir was never captured or killed. He died a natural death in 1960.
Under U.S. pressure, the Pakistani military entered the FATA in force in March 2004 to pursue foreign militants — for the first time since the country’s creation — but the operation resulted in heavy casualties for the Pakistani army, demonstrating how difficult it is for the Pakistani military to fight people so well integrated in the Pashtun tribal badlands. Following that failed operation, the Pakistani government reverted to the British model of negotiating with the maliks in an effort to combat the influence of the Taliban and foreign jihadists — and has been harshly criticized because of it. Nowadays, jihadist insurgents are attacking Pakistani security and intelligence forces in the Pashtun areas in the Northwest.
The parallels between the hunt for the Faqir of Ipi and bin Laden are obvious — though it must be noted that bin Laden is a Saudi and not a native-born Pashtun. However, many of the challenges that the United Kingdom faced in that operation are also being faced by the United States today.
Aside from the terrain — a formidable obstacle in and of itself — U.S. forces are hampered by the strong, conservative Islamic conviction of the people in the region. This conviction extends beyond the tribes to include some members of the Pakistani military and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies — especially those at the operational level in the region. It must be remembered that prior to 9/11 the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency and military openly supported the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies. In addition to the relationships formed between bin Laden and the so-called “Afghan Arabs” (foreign jihadists) during the war against the Soviets, Pakistani troops also trained and fought alongside the Taliban and al Qaeda in their battles against the Northern Alliance and other foes. Because of these deep and historic ties, there are some in the Pakistani government (specifically within the security apparatus) who remain sympathetic, if not outright loyal, to their friends in the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Additionally, and perhaps just as important, many in the Pakistani government and military do not want to kill their own people — the Pashtuns, for example — in order to destroy the much smaller subset of Pakistani and foreign militants. The challenge is to eliminate the militants while causing very little collateral damage to the rest of the population — and some in the Pakistani government say the airstrikes in places such as Chingai and Damadola have not accomplished this goal. In August, Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri told television channel AAJ that Pakistan had done all it can in the war on terrorism and that, “No one should expect anything more from Islamabad.“
In an operation such as the manhunt for bin Laden, intelligence is critical. However, the Taliban and al Qaeda so far have used their home-field advantage to establish better intelligence networks in the area than the Americans. According to U.S. counterterrorism sources, U.S. intelligence had gathered some very good leads in the early days of the hunt for bin Laden and other high-value al Qaeda targets, and they shared this intelligence with their counterparts in the Pakistani security apparatus to try to organize operations to act on the intelligence. During this process, people within the intelligence apparatus passed information back to al Qaeda, thus compromising the sources and methods being used to collect the information. These double agents inside the Pakistani government did grave damage to the U.S. human intelligence network.
Double agents within the Pakistani government are not the only problem, however. Following 9/11, there was a rapid increase in the number of case officers assigned to collect information pertaining to al Qaeda and bin Laden, and the CIA was assigned to be the lead agency in the hunt. One big problem with this, according to sources, was that most of these case officers were young, inexperienced and ill-suited to the mission. The CIA really needed people who were more like Rudyard Kipling’s character Kim — savvy case officers who understand the region’s culture, issues and actors, and who can move imperceptibly within the local milieu to recruit valuable intelligence sources. Unfortunately for the CIA, it has been unable to find a real-life Kim.
This lack of seasoned, savvy and gritty case officers is complicated by the fact that, operationally, al Qaeda practices better security than do the Americans. First, there are few people permitted to see bin Laden and the other senior leaders, and most of those who are granted access are known and trusted friends and relatives. Someone else who wants to see bin Laden or other senior al Qaeda leaders must wait while a message is first passed via a number of couriers to the organization. If a meeting is granted, the person is picked up at a time of al Qaeda’s choosing and taken blindfolded via a circuitous route to a location where he is stripped and searched for bugs, beacons and other tracking devices. The person then reportedly is polygraphed to verify that his story is true. Only then will he be taken — blindfolded and via a circuitous route — to another site for the meeting. These types of measures make it very difficult for U.S. intelligence officers to get any of their sources close to the al Qaeda leaders, much less determine where they are hiding out.
The areas where bin Laden likely is hiding are remote and insular. Visitors to the area are quickly recognized and identified — especially if they happen to be blond guys named Skip. Moreover, residents who spend too much time talking to such outsiders often are labeled as spies and killed. These conditions have served to ensure that the jihadists maintain a superior human intelligence (and counterintelligence) network in the area. It is a network that also stretches deep into the heart of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Islamabad’s twin city and home to the Pakistani army’s general headquarters.
Although al Qaeda’s operational security and the jihadist intelligence network have been able to keep bin Laden alive thus far, they have lost a number of other senior operatives, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mohammed Atef, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Abu Faraj al-Libi and others. Most of these have been al Qaeda operational managers, people who, by the very nature of their jobs, need to establish and maintain communications with militant cells.
This drive to recruit new jihadists to the cause and to help continue operational activity is what led to the lucky break that resulted in the 1995 arrest of Abdel Basit, the operational planner and bombmaker responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Basit had tried to recruit a foreign student to assist him in one of the attempts to conduct “Operation Bojinka,” a plan to bomb multiple U.S. airliners. Having gotten cold feet, the student revealed the plot, thus allowing Diplomatic Security special agents the opportunity to coordinate an operation to arrest Basit.
Al Qaeda has learned from the mistakes made by the men it has lost and has better secured the methods it uses to communicate with the outside world. This increased security, however, has resulted in increased insulation, which has adversely affected not only communications but also financial transfers and recruiting. Combined with U.S. efforts against al Qaeda, this has resulted in a reduction in operational ability and effectiveness.
The tension between operations and security poses a significant problem for an organization that seeks to maintain and manage a global militant network. By opting to err on the side of security, bin Laden and the others could escape capture indefinitely, though they would remain operationally ineffective. However, should they attempt to become more operationally active and effective — and decrease their security measures to do so — they will provide the United States with more opportunities to get the one break it needs to find bin Laden.
(Gouge: NC)
Stratfor can always be relied upon to studiously avoid that great big elephant dancing in the corner of the room: Iraq, and the massive diversion of intelligence, military, pecuniary, human and other resources that it has entailed, along with the collapse of “goodwill” ( the intangible factor that really makes the difference ) that has followed in its wake.
I gave up halfway through this article. Excuses, Excuses, Excuses and nothing but Excuses. What effing bullsh*t.
The bullshit detector is pinging on the last two videos from OBL. He’s about as dead as they get, IMHO. At this juncture it really doesn’t matter if he was aerosolized at Tora Bora, died of kidney failure in a cave, was offed by one of Mullah Omar’s loyal neanderthals, or was abducted by aliens. When the boss can’t come out and rouse the troops regularly he ain’t the boss anymore.
Hell, even Saddam knew enough to pop out of hiding long enough for a little PR with CNN.
Granted it would have been a grand moment to drag his sorry ass out of hole like we did with Saddam or even a nice set of coroner’s photos just like Uday and Qusay. But it looks like we aren’t going to get them anytime soon… if ever. WWII ended without Adolf Hitler’s corpse and that meant another 60 years of neonazi wet dreams about the fuhrer’s imminent return from Argentina to restore the Reich. I submit the same will prove true for the goat-buggering OBL worshippers. “Oh! Another message from the Sheik! Allah preserve him!” Bah.
This Defense Tech article reads like a Bush Administration media release.
At Tora Bora, shortly after 9/11, bin Laden was permitted to escape because Bush decided to rely on a porous Pakistani Army blocking force. Bush and his men knew that the Pakistani’s were frequently sympathetic to al Qaeda and the Taliban. Hence no surprises all round that bin Laden was allowed to escape.
Why? The bin Ladens are one of the great familiies of Saudi Arabia who provided financial assistance to President Bush in oil ventures before he entered politics.
Basically the US and Saudi Arabia have made a deal that bin Laden shouldn’t be killed but just hemmed in. The Arab’s don’t want bin Laden to be killed to become a popular religious martyr for fear of destabilising Saudi Arabia.
The Bush Administration has remained true to its word. Bush has a hands off policy regarding the architect of 9/11 but has invaded Iraq for less.
Pete (http://spyingbadthings.blogspot.com)
– I’ve worked alongside US forces and my father fought in Vietnam.
Why isn’t OBL rotting in Gitmo? Gee, could it be because he’s DEAD, DEAD, DEAD, and has been for years? Soon we will outsource the production of OBL tapes to India just like everything else and maybe Baliwood will do a snappier job.
CoC
That’s a very telling (mis)-understanding of the term “goodwill” — I’m not talking about the “goodwill” of governments, but the “goodwill” of people on the ground, who just might be able to provide that key tidbit of information that opens up the trail.
As an aside, when the US government is adding $5–600 billion dollars to the Federal Deficit every year, the piper is gonna come calling sooner rather than later.
Congress has already had the letter from treasury regarding the full faith and credit necessitating another increase in the debt ceiling.
Hold on, I need to get my tin-foil hat out with all the conspiracy nuts around here…
OK, why is anyone convinced that OBL is dead? The random rumors that float around aren’t substantiated and indeed might even be purposeful disinformation. There’s certainly not any credible evidence to support it. As far as the videos, there is no digital video technology (yet) that can create anything like OBL videos we’ve seen. You simply cannot create a video with a specific person in it out of nothing — it’s not like Photoshopping an image. If there was such a technology, we could create live action movies the same way we create cartoons — and I have yet to see any of those.
Almost as good as that one is the “Bush is in league with the Bin Ladens!!!!1111″ crew. Please get a credible source and stop taking Fahrenheit 9/11 as anything more than propaganda. Capturing Bin Laden would have made Bush a national hero, and there is nothing to support the ridiculous notion that he would for some reason want Bin Laden to escape — other than Bush hatred taken to the point of insanity. If anyone actually remembers 2001 and the generally accepted thinking of the time, (rather than judging in heinsight) it was thought that local fighters were better suited to fight in Afghanistan than American soldiers (also cutting back on US casualties, which the US citizenry was not very tolerant of) and thus were used to surround Tora Bora just as they had been used the entire campaign in overthrowing the Taliban. (That is, local fighters + US airpower and intel) Clearly, in heinsight, that was an error and US troops should have been used. The fear inspired by Russia’s fate in Afghanistan should not have overcome the priority of capturing/killing OBL. At the time, however, many people (experts and civilians alike) were against using US ground troops there for fear of losing local cooperation and playing into the Taliban/Al Qaeda propaganda that the US was invading to conquer and occupy Afghanistan. Wrong as the decision was, it’s not reasonable to assume that it was based on some sort of desire for OBL to escape. Mistakes happen in war — it’s not an excuse, just a fact.
So can someone explain to me why this blog is named “DEFENSE TECH”
Re: dan
My apologies if I misread. If you mean the goodwill of the people on the ground, then what do you mean when you write “the massive diversion of intelligence, military, pecuniary, human and other resources that it has entailed”? From what was it diverted?
I am a SOB, but I’m not trying to be one with this. Just trying to get it straight in my brain housing unit.
As for the nature of financing this thing, I must say that if we did our books the way Uncle Sugar does we’d all be under the jail. He only counts his debt, doesn’t account for assets, and does a piss poor job of collecting his due.
While I agree that putting the whole war on the MasterCard is boneheaded, I don’t think that its unaffordable. Especially in the long run. Crushing this Islamic revival will earn us far greater returns on the investment. The global costs of band-aid fixes to the islamofascist cancer will, I believe, come with an bill that will be incalculably larger than confronting it decisively and directly.
Consider the global cost of Churchill and FDR’s pact with Stalin to carve up the world after WWII. They knew that Stalin was about as crude, dirty, deadly, and duplicitous as they come. They also knew what would be the fate of those caught on the Soviet side of the lines at war’s end. They also knew that our honeymoon with Soviets would be over as soon as Germany surrendered. Nonetheless, they gave Stalin what he wanted rather than confronting him and the communist threat. Kicking that can down the road cost us what? How many millions died at Stalin’s hand? How many lived in virtual slavery in the Soviet Union and all the Soviet satellite countries? What was the cost of more than a half-century of the Cold War (i.e., a very hot war fought by proxies)?
We were delivered from the Soviet threat only because it collapsed under its own weight. I doubt that we’ll see that with the islamfascist threat. We’ve been living with it twenty times longer than the Cold War.
A half-trillion a year is just the start. It’ll get a lot more expensive. Bet on it.
Maybe its time we all started to feel the pinch. Perhaps a dime per gallon at the pump to start?
Cheers,
Chief B.
If OBL/al Qaeda is “operationally ineffective” than why is the US … oh yeah, money. “War is a racket”–Smedley Butler.
its been a long time we have not seen this man bin laden/i feel we need to stop asking for help we need to get his mom and dad & his kids all who now him make them feel pain we felt on sept 11 we hurt them.it will make bin laden make mistakes.arabs dont want bin laden in there home land so they are helping him also they dont what happen to us hit there home. we need to get in hills get this man we have the men there so he no we will get him.…
With ref to OBL, like a strem of water, that stream starts some where, find that start point, cut it off and the flow stops, Like OBL find his money flow starting point and cut it off, his funds come from somewhere, North Korea, bank accounts were frozed, That’s a nation (at least they say so), we put a block around Cuba, another nation (they Say, Why cannot OBL resources be cut off? We but his oil, thru his country, are we helping to fund him? Crazy“The long arm of the Law” will get him, so says the Atty General, No haven’s says the President, Crazy. Thanks for reading.
The previous posters noted the diffculty of catching a single person on earth, especially in this part of the world. That is one reason he hasn’t been caught. The other is political will. Is catching or killing him worth the loss of life that would result trying to root him out of Waziristan? (we may change our minds if a US city is nuked).
As for the ‘defensetech’ angle, I’ll give it a shot– the US is hoping that our unprecedented electronic net and overhead surveillance we have over the border area is going to yield a gem.
Good luck.It will likely take a human source to betray Bin Ladin, which means he’ll probably die of some affliction before he is captured or killed.
His tradecraft in avoiding scrutiny is excellent.He is with a few very trusted people and doesn’t move often, if ever. There are probably few if any electronic devices in his residence, including no computers,phones, generators, TV’s, etc. Anything with measurable EMI. Multiple cut-outs are used to courier information to and from his group.Until we have the ability to see through every wall in every building, he’ll be able to elude us.
With any luck, he won’t be able to stand not calling his mother or kids, make a call and he’ll get zapped, like Pablo Escobar.
His ego may also do him in, though. He wants to preach and be heard.…shutting up and remaining silent is safer, but it is not in his character.In order to do that, he has to get out his message, which has to be distributed from his location by some means.He can’t do it electronically…he will be toast.
He has to run these messages out, that is why there are so few of them. We may get lead back to his general locale if we’re lucky, then move in and tighten the net, hopefully, with a full complement of GPS-guided 2000 pounders.
Bin Ladin knows of course that the latency between his recording of a message and its release helps keep him alive. He would be far more effective if he could broadcast weekly, or better, in real-time.He would rally more to his cause and humiliate the US severely in one speech. That of course, is a death sentence. So, he has to resort to whatever means possible that reduces his risk greatest.
I believe his weakest link is his family and desire to communicate with Zawahiri.It almost did him in in the late 90’s (via NSA’s ability to capture his IMMARSAT calls), so perhaps he’s learned his lesson.
heis dead one way or the other.
Nothing’s funny about all the mistakes made about this situation! I don’t know what to believe, but just like the editted scientists’ reports by the Whitehouse about the future(now present)effects of global warming on the planet before they became public dating back to the Reagan Administration, to the lack of coverage about the archeological discoveries of the first Homo Sapiens originating in Africa, the White House/George Bush is once again screwing with the American public somehow about this whole thing! Even if it is all truthful, the U.S. screwed up big about how they invaded Iraq, thinking everybody there will just be happy to see us and help. If your a person who believed the war was just, however, you should read the book “Fiasco”, which points out how we didn’t follow paths of past successful occupations of countries+gives an honest detailed account of the war and where we screwed up each step of the way!
Very splendid
OBL should have been tagged and bagged at Tora Bora. Why were Afghan tribesman used to fight the insurgents? Dalton Fury, the Delta operator, outlined wat happened in those mountains. The Afghans were not really interested in OBL, and at one point a “cease fire” was called, giving OBL a chance to get away. Guns were pointed at the Delta operators when they didn’t go for the ruse. They were right, it was bullshit, and Bush had his “boogeyman” for the next election. Why wasn’t the RDF used? XVIII Airborne Corps could have had a battalion of Paratroopers there in 24 hrs. Rangers? Even quicker. The disastrous reign of the neo-cons is over-I hope. They have led this country down the road to ruin. Iraq? There was a choice to go there, and now we have an Iran friendly gov. in place. Iran was the big winner. All that American blood spilled…
Could you help me. Hares can gambol over the body of a dead lion.
. Chay.
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Thanks
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