The question continues to rage: Where’s Osama?
The latest suggestion: he’s in the remote area of Pakistan.
A top U.S. counterterrorism official said Saturday that parts of Pakistan are a “safe haven” for militants and Osama bin Laden was more likely to be hiding there than in Afghanistan.
Henry Crumpton, the U.S. ambassador in charge of counterterrorism, lauded Pakistan for arresting “hundreds and hundreds” of al-Qaida figures but said it needed to do more.
“Has Pakistan done enough? I think the answer is no. I have conveyed that to them, other U.S. officials have conveyed that to them,” he told reporters at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul after talks with Afghan officials.
Naturally, the Pakistanis disagree:
The chief spokesman for Pakistan’s army, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, dismissed Crumpton’s assertion that Islamabad was not doing enough.
“It is totally absurd,” he said. “No one has conveyed this thing to Pakistan, and if someone claims so, it is absurd.”
Crumpton said U.S. officials continue to believe that bin Laden is somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border, and was more likely to be on the Pakistani side.
“If we knew exactly where bin Laden was, we’d go get him,” Crumpton said. “But we’re very confident he’s along the Pakistan-Afghan border somewhere,” he said.
He added that there was a “higher probability” that the al-Qaida leader was hiding on the Pakistan side.
Two things on this score:
(1) Although Pakistan is allied with the U.S. in the war on terror, it is widely believed that its security forces and Army may be less than secure. Al Qaeda sympathizers could be in their ranks. A sign of this is how on President George Bush’s last trip to Pakistan he arrived at night and got off his unlit plane…whisked away in the dead of night.
(2) It is a fact that areas of Pakistan are quite remote along the Afghanistan border.
I experienced this first-hand in the mid-70s when I left New Delhi, India, where I had written for the now defunct Chicago Daily News and other papers including the Christian Science Monitor. I was en route to Spain and basically hitched a ride with the spokesman of the Iranian Embassy in New Delhi, who was returning permanently to his country. Our final destination was Tehran. This was before the Shah’s fall and exit — before Islamic fundamentalists took over the country and an American ally became one of America’s biggest enemies.
We went by car through Pakistan, through the Khyber Pass. We were warned that it was dangerous, remote, that if something happened to you chances are no one would find out. So the Iranian diplomat insisted on breaking the trip and sleeping in a countryside “hotel” which was about the size of a dresser drawer. We had sleeping bags and slept with tourist-type walking sticks that had swords inside…just in case.
He was relieved to be out of Pakistan’s frontier area and talked about how dangerous and remote it is.
So Pakistan perhaps could do more. But its border region is indeed a no-man’s land…unless you happen to be someone like Osama who’s looking for a good place to get “lost.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.