Donald Rumsfeld, the United States’ Secretary of Defense, says that finding Bin Laden is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Leaving aside rumors that he has fled to his ancestral homeland of Hadhramaut, experts agree that the fugitive is somewhere in Afghanistan.
But where? To be safe he must be somewhere under the control of his ally Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taleban leader.
Nominally, the mullah controls almost 80 percent of the country. In reality, however, his forces hold only 11 of the 30 provinces. Ten other provinces are controlled by warlords who have sworn allegiance to him but who may betray him for money.
The opposition Northern Alliance controls five provinces. The remaining provinces are battlegrounds between the Taleban and a variety of opponents, including the Hazara backed by Iran.
In his hiding place Bin Laden would look for three things.
The first is inaccessibility by American troops and Afghan enemies looking for him. The second is the friendship or at least neutrality of the local population. The third is the possibility of easy exit into another safe haven.
Those conditions exclude almost 80 percent of the Afghan territory. There are inaccessible places around the Paropamissus range in the northwest and in the Hindu Kush range in the east. But most of these areas are controlled either by anti-Taleban groups or by unreliable warlords.
Almost half of Mullah Omar’s domains border Iran, a country hostile to Bin Laden and thus not a safe haven. In other Taleban-held provinces the local population, mostly Hazaras, Uzbeks or Tajiks, would have no love lost for the fugitive. After all, he organized the murder of their chief Ahmad Shah Masood on Sept. 9).
That narrows down the choice to just two provinces, Paktia and Paktika, roughly five percent of Afghan territory.
The two provinces, in the southeast bordering Pakistan, offer plenty of hiding places in the Safed Kuh range with its world famous collection of almost 3000 caves. The two provinces also border on the areas of Pakistan controlled not by Islamabad, but by the tribes of the Afridi confederation. Several Arab "Afghans" have set up mini-emirates in the no-man’s land between Pakistan and Afghanistan since the mid-1980s. Most have been linked with Bin Laden since the mid-1980s. If need be, they could hide him for years.
And if flushed out of there, Bin Laden could simply cross into Pakistan where he has countless supporters, including among the military and intelligence services. Pakistan is the only neighbor of Afghanistan where Bin Laden would not risk being handed over to the Americans.
Paktia and Paktika offer yet another advantage. The local population is friendly to Bin Laden. He has invested in the region for years to build Qur’anic schools, clinics and village bathhouses. The two provinces lie halfway between Jalalabad and Kandahar. The first city is controlled by Jalaleddin Haqqani, a long-time friend of Bin Laden; the second is the capital of Mullah Omar.
There is one other, perhaps more important, reason why Bin Laden would want to hide in Paktia or Paktika. This is the area of Afghanistan that he knows best. He built his first bases there, complete with underground bunkers and well-equipped command centers in caves. Until 1998 at least, he also had a villa in Gardeyz where part of his family lived. He also has a house in Zareh Sharan.
Ahmad-Wali Masood, an anti-Taleban Afghan diplomat, says that Bin Laden has at least four look-alikes, or dummies, who keep moving in many different places to sow confusion about the fugitive’s exact whereabouts.
Most of our Afghan sources, however, agree that Bin Laden’s hiding place will be either in Paktia or Paktika. He may not be there now but he is sure to end up there once the Taleban have been flushed out of other provinces.
Some even claim that Bin Laden’s principal hiding place is a string of caves in Paktika to the southeast of Shab-Juy, in a village called Changeh. American, French and Iranian geologists who worked in Afghanistan for years claim that they recognize the Paktika caves from the background of videos broadcast by the Arab TV channel Al-Jazeera.
Only the house number is not mentioned. Well, house-caves have no numbers.
