My introduction to Osama bin Laden was a unique and unforgettable one. The morning of September 11, 2001 found my girlfriend (now wife) and I in a non-descript laundromat. A scruffy, rambling street person entered the place, walked straight over to us and started describing unimaginable carnage.
Being the critic I am, I instantly dismissed the man and his visions of jets crashing into buildings as having had one sniff-of-the-glue-bottle too many. Then -- as if having made his peace -- he stopped talking, looked strangely at us (and us at him), and exited the establishment.
I'm pretty sure my eyebrow was cocked in that “suspicious” position when Jackie turned to observe my response. Despite the peculiarity of the meeting, something the stranger said had left me slightly unsettled. His ramblings were uncomfortably specific and oddly passionate. So we left our tumbling clothes and headed out to the car to put these doubts to rest. Sitting in our ruby red Ford Festiva, we listened in shock to the radio reports coming out of New York City.
It didn't take much brainpower to comprehend that whoever had masterminded the attacks of that day would be living on borrowed time.
Shortly after came the American invasion of Afghanistan and it looked as if they were going to get their man. As it turned out, they probably had him tracked down to an area smaller than your average shopping mall, trapped in or near the mountain of Tora Bora. But when it came to tightening the noose around bin Laden, something went terribly wrong. Like a ghost, he disappeared from his hunters and escaped into the cold.
I was always curious as to where they would eventually find Osama. Most educated commentators figured he was hiding somewhere in the mountains along the Afghan/Pakistan border, probably a protected guest of a local tribal warlord. Others figured he had disappeared into the obscure back alleys of Yemen, hiding away in some dilapidated shanty while planning for the next great battle with the American infidels.
It must have come as shock then when US intelligence operatives discovered him in the affluent village of Abbottabad, 60 miles outside of Islamabad near the Indian border.
Far from cowering away in a barren mountain cave, Osama and his trusted aids instead relaxed in the relative luxury of their million dollar mansion. True, they didn't have phone service or cable television, but the living standards of the three story compound was a far cry from the Bedouin persona Bin Laden had carefully crafted for himself.
What is most revealing about the whole “finding bin Laden” fiasco is just how aware the local Pakistanis were that a major terrorist figure was living amongst them. Curious reports filtering out of Abbottabad tell just how out of place bin Laden's “Waziristan Mansion” was in comparison to the adjacent houses of the area. Locals apparently avoided the premise with its 15-foot high wall topped with barbed wire -- believing it to be the home of a high ranking terrorist or Taliban leader. Clearly recognizable as foreigners due to their language and dialect, even the football playing children of the village knew something was strangely out of place when instead of returning a stray ball back over the compound wall, bin Laden's goons would hand them money in compensation.
Even more difficult to reconcile is the fact that less than 800 meters away from bin Laden's compound sits the Pakistani military academy, a location where American troops had recently trained.
It certainly begs the question as to just how much of a terrorist safe haven Pakistan has really become. It was the home and training ground of the Lashjar-e-Taiba terrorist cell responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks. In that same year, there was the Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing. In the North, the Waziristan region operates like the American wild west, with occasional Pakistani army incursions or American UAV air strikes being the only manifestation of Federal authority in this mostly autonomous region. Then there are the random insurgent bombings across the country, the attacks on NATO supply convoys, and the free movement of Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces across the porous and unguarded border with Afghanistan.
A while back I worked as a car inspector alongside a fellow from Pakistan. An engineer with managerial experience in the Kuwaiti oil fields, he emigrated to Canada in hopes of creating a better life for him and his family (Instead, he ended up buffing cars in the detailing shop). One day I was boasting about the beauty and safety of residing in Canada, and asked him why anyone would want to live in such a dangerous place as Pakistan. He responded that in the overall scheme of things, a few people blown up here and there didn't really matter. He went on to note that there were 170 million people living in Pakistan, and for the most part it wasn't such a bad spot to live.
Notwithstanding his casual and apathetic attitude towards these random terrorist events, what bothered me most was his ability to look past a topic that had so ingrained itself in my psyche. Like any other North American at the time, the events of September 11, 2001 had a significant effect on my internal narrative. Sure, terrorism (with its characteristic assassinations and brutal randomness) is as old as history itself. But the fundamentalist maelstrom unleashed by bin Laden was something entirely different, both in terms of its overall scale and ideological influence.
While not sympathetic to bin Laden's cause, my Pakistani friend did view the issue from an alternative (though possibly more realistic) perspective. Not that I feel comfortable about a country as unstable as Pakistan possessing a cache of thermonuclear weapons, I just don't think the people of Pakistan are all that worried about their country descending into a orderless anarchic state. Nor do they seem interested in enacting a purge of all things “fundamentalist.”
Perhaps this has to do with the nation's history of illicit support for the Afghani Taliban movement (and in turn the Taliban's protection of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan), as well as individual fundamentalist sympathies within the Pakistani Intelligence and military services. Together, these factors contribute to a lack of cohesion and vision in tackling the roots of radical violence in this relatively new country. Perhaps the average Pakistani citizen cares more about living a normal life – that of working, raising a family and increasing his estate -- then involving themselves in the larger, often riskier business of dealing with the radicals around them.
I think this probably best explains why bin Laden ended up where he did. For the most part, he had the sympathies of those he needed to keep him safe, and the apathy of those locals he wanted to avoid. But the persistence of his American hunters eventually won the day.
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