Bin Laden, deputy hiding in Pakistan, protected by locals, ISI

Under protection of Pakistan's ISI? // Source: reuters.com

Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan, but are not together, a senior NATO official said. “Nobody in al Qaeda is living in a cave,” said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the intelligence matters involved.

Rather, al Qaeda’s top leadership is believed to be living in relative comfort, protected by locals and some members of the Pakistani intelligence services, the official said.

CNN’s Barbara Starr reports that official said the general region where bin Laden is likely to have moved around in recent years ranges from the mountainous Chitral area in the far northwest near the Chinese border, to the Kurram Valley which neighbors Afghanistan’s Tora Bora, one of the Taliban strongholds during the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Tora Bora is also the region from which bin Laden is believed to have escaped during a U.S. bombing raid in late 2001. U.S. officials have long said there have been no confirmed sightings of bin Laden or Zawahiri for several years.

Starr notes that the area that the official described covers hundreds of square miles of some of the most rugged terrain in Pakistan inhabited by fiercely independent tribes.

The official also confirmed the U.S. assessment that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, has moved between the cities of Quetta and Karachi in Pakistan over the last several months.

The official would not discuss how the coalition has come to know any of this information, but he has access to some of the most sensitive information in the NATO alliance.

The NATO official, who has day-to-day senior responsibilities for the war, also offered a grimmer view of the state of the war than what has been publicly offered by others. “Every year the insurgency can generate more and more manpower,” despite military attacks, he said.

Starr quotes him to say that although there has been security progress in areas where coalition forces are stationed, in other areas “we don’t know what’s going on.”

He pointed to an internal assessment that there are 500,000 to 1 million “disaffected” men between the ages of 15 and 25 along the Afghan-Pakistan border region. Most are Afghan Pashtuns and make up some of the 95 percent of the insurgency who carry out attacks just to earn money, rather than fight for a hard-core Taliban ideology.

The official told Starr it is now absolutely vital for the Afghan government to address the needs of this group with security, economic development and jobs in order for the war to end and for Afghanistan to succeed. “We are running out of time,” he said.