Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Osama alive and well in Pakistan, claims report

WASHINGTON: Osama Bin Laden is alive and well and has been living in Pakistan for the last three years, it has been claimed here.

Veteran journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, who in the past has declared Bin Laden to be living in Peshawar, has once again expressed his certainty that the Al Qaeda fugitive has found refuge in Pakistan. In an article published on Monday by Washington Times, de Borchgrave claims that Bin Laden “evidently enjoys high-ranking protection” in Pakistan. He believes that the Saudi dissident is seeking to assume a leadership role in the Islamic world after Yasser Arafat’s eclipse because of ill health. He points out that Bin Laden enjoys popularity in most Muslim countries and among South Asians living in the greater London region.

“Pakistani denials notwithstanding, Osama Bin Laden has been living in Pakistan since December 9, 2001, when he escaped from the Tora Bora mountain range into Pakistan,” he writes. Bin Laden has a countrywide approval rating of 66 percent, which moves up to more than 80 percent in the NWFP and Balochistan.

Arnaud de Borchgrave claims that he and a multilingual United Press International (UPI) team, tipped by a major tribal leader about Bin Laden’s progress as he exited from the Tora Bora mountain range through the Tirah Valley, arrived at the location on December 11, 2001. Local villagers confirmed that Bin Laden, on horseback, accompanied by some 50 fighters, had come out of the Tirah Valley two days before. They were close to a main road that led from FATA to Peshawar. Bin Laden left in the direction of Peshawar in an SUV with smoked windows. On either side of the road from Quetta, to the Afghan border, there are large adobe-walled compounds of landowners and important tribal leaders. Osama Bin Laden would be safe in any one of scores of such compounds, he adds.

According to this imaginative account, the Taliban’s top leaders own similar estates where they are allowed to “live with impunity”. Chaman, the Pakistani border town, he adds, is also home turf to a new crop of Taliban leaders. Some Pakistani journalists have the satellite phone numbers of Taliban’s intelligence chief and other officials who feed them exaggerated or imagined titbits about their exploits against US forces on the other side of the mountain range.

Bin Laden could be sheltered in any of Pakistan’s major cities. Karachi contains some 15 million people. “In Peshawar, a city of 3.5 million, many Pathans, like Bin Laden, are over six feet. In FATA, rickety local buses, display posters of Bin Laden captioned ‘Freedom Fighter’.”

The somewhat fanciful report claims that Bin Laden enjoys the protection of renegade members of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. It also maintains that the Musharraf regime is reluctant to launch a countrywide crackdown to find Bin Laden. Whether captured dead or alive, President Musharraf would feel obligated to turn him over to the United States. And Pakistan might then have to face a disinterested US administration and the loss of billions in aid.

He writes, “Musharraf has said at different times he knew Bin Laden was dead, then that he was alive but ill. Today, he concedes Bin Laden may be in a mountain hideout where fiercely loyal local tribesmen would not betray him for the $25 million offered by the United States. Three months before the release of the 9/11 Commission report, commission chief of staff Phil Zelikow asked a prominent Pakistani whether he could ‘fill in the gaps about what was happening behind the scenes in Pakistan in the period immediately preceding the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington’. He travelled the length and breadth of Pakistan working his sources, which included many former ranking government officials, retired senior officers and ex-ISI personnel.”

According to de Borchgrave the requested report arrived in Washington too late to be included in the commission’s 567-page report, which mentioned Pakistan 311 times. Even if it had arrived in time, it probably would not have been included. The material that was turned over to Zelikow, a former member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (2001-2003), could prove even more embarrassing to Musharraf than the information supplied by US intelligence about the international nuclear black market arms bazaar that was run for the benefit of North Korea, Iran and Libya, de Borchgrave claims. khalid hasan


http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_2-11-2004_pg7_35