Pakistan says bin Laden is dead (or maybe not)

Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari raised some eyebrows on Monday when he said that Pakistani intelligence agencies believe that terrorist mastermind and the world's number one fugitive, Osama bin Laden, is in fact dead. Zardari didn't explain why the intelligence agencies thought that bin Laden was dead, though one reason seemed to be simply because he hasn't been caught after eight years of intensive searching.

US officials rushed to say that they believed bin Laden was still alive and that the hunt for him continues. Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani also worked to backtrack, at least a little, from Zardari's comments by saying that "nobody knows" whether bin Laden is alive or dead.

Part of the problem with the hunt for bin Laden is that in an absence of factual evidence, like a physical sighting of the man, much of it tends to be built on the prevailing conventional wisdom of the situation. For example, one reason given to believe that bin Laden is still alive is that there would be a lot of "noise" among the tribes along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, where he's believed to be hiding out, if he died. "Bin Laden's death will likely be celebrated by the group and its affiliates as him having achieved martyrdom," according to Ben Venzke, director of IntelCenter (which tracks extremist propaganda).

That's true, assuming that bin Laden died a martyr's death fighting the infidels. But what if he just died of pneumonia, or fell off his horse, or died some other un-martyrly death, would his supporters still celebrate? Or might they keep it a secret to preserve his mythic status?

While we're on the topic, I’ve had a problem with the idea of bin Laden running from cave to cave for much of the past decade, especially since the capture last summer of Radovan Karadzic. If you recall, Karadzic was the former president of the Bosnian Serb Republic in the former Yugoslavia; he was charged with war crimes for the deaths of thousands of Bosnian Muslims during the wars that swept through the region in the mid-1990s. Like bin Laden, he spent almost a decade on the run, the prevailing thought was that Karadzic was sheltering among a clutch of die-hard supporters in remote Orthodox monasteries in the mountains of Serbia. In reality, Karadzic lived a very public life (in a very flimsy disguise) in Serbia's capital city, Belgrade - he even practiced medicine as 'alternative healer', before finally being captured one day on a city bus.

So isn't it possible that rather than a cave, bin Laden might just be living in a city like Kandahar or Islamabad? Somehow blending into the hustle and bustle of a large city seems an easier way to hide than to scurry between caves that are under the constant surveillance of the world's most hi-tech military.

Just a thought...