I’m not surprised that Bin Laden was in Pakistan. I’m not surprised by either possibility of the Pakistani government protecting him, or not knowing he was there. But I am surprised that we couldn’t find a million dollar mansion recently built in Pakistan, with high protective walls, privacy screens in front of doorways, an absentee landlord, lots of food deliveries, and full of Bin Laden’s wives and children.
Were we even looking? Were we unaware of the location or existence of these family members? Did we simply count on Pakistan to do the work for us?
My understanding is that the US was aware of the compound for a few years and believed it housed a high-level terrorist, but not bin Laden, because they expected that he would be heavily guarded and that compound was not.
It’s a big world. How many secluded mansions do you think there are in Pakistan? Personally, I find it somewhat surprising he was hiding in such a suspicious place rather than somewhere more normal.
That just raises more questions. Why were we sitting on a high-level terrorist living in a mansion in the suburbs of Islamabad? Why did we think Bin Laden would make himself obvious with a large contingent of guards?
How much more information did we have to take action a few days ago? We used the word of some questionable source provided by other questionable sources to take action. There was no photograph, and apparently questions about Bin Laden’s presence until a SEAL was up close and personal. It doesn’t sound like we were taking much positive action towards getting him, just waiting for someone to rat him out.
I don’t who these family members are. Maybe they’ve been with him since he left Afganistan. It just doesn’t sound like we were doing a good job keeping track of his family. I wonder how much we relied on our ‘allies’ to do that for us.
I don’t think you understand how complex intelligence work is. How do you suggest “keeping track of his family”? They were most likely moving in secret as well.
I’ve never been to Pakistan, but due to the high disparity between the rich and poor there, I’d be surprised if its that unusual for people with a lot of money to live in walled off mansions, so I’m not sure its quite that suspicious.
The neighbors believed the house belonged to smugglers or other kinds of people engaged in clandestine activities. There are no doubt any number of houses of this description in Pakistan (and other countries) that belong to people engaged in criminal activities of various sorts. (And in a country like Pakistan, many of these not be investigated by local authorities due to bribery or other connections.) Only a very small percentage are hiding highly wanted terrorists.
Bin Laden’s wives almost certainly remained inside all the time, or if they ever went out would have been at least veiled. How would we have recognized them? And his younger children would probably not ever have been photographed since the family was on the run. Again, how would anyone know they were Bin Laden’s?
Without any obvious criminal activity to create the local law equivalent of probable cause the authorities are not going to be going into a place like that.
There are probably about a thousand buildings just like that in Pakistan. Each with what looks to us 'Merkin civilians like way too much physical security and each of which has a murky ownership situation. In a country with no reliable paper trail of anything.
Imagine this was the 10th one we’d raided and killed folks in before we got lucky. That wouldn’t have worked out so well.
Clearly something became apparant that this one this time was different. Different enough to take a swing at it.
You and I have no idea how many hundred other such buildings we’re keeping track of, more or less, right now. Waiting, occasionally getting a shred of data, and hoping to have something pop up which either implicates or exonerates the people who frequent the place.
It’s tough for us to understand, but it’s common in Muslim families that some familiy members never leave the walled compound for years at a time. Moslty women & female children, but also the elderly. So seeing 3 people coming & going with enough groceries for 8 each week isn’t the smoking gun it would be if your next door neighbor was doing it.
In third world countries there is a huge disparity between rich and poor but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of rich people. It’s the disparity, not the lack of money that distinguishes the underdeveloped countries. You can go to Haiti or the Congo or any number of places and countries and there are a large number of people living lavishly behind walls.
I recently traveled through Laos. I saw dirt poor villages in very remote areas amongst which there were very some nice houses with modern vehicles parked in front. Those were the privileged ones. Most of the others in the village were living on a subsistence basis.
bin Laden’s hideout looked rich in comparison to the average. However, there is nothing that makes it really unique or stand out from what would be expected from any person that was connected, part of the inner circle or dealing in some nefarious business such as drugs or arms. In third world countries the privileged live very well but still, there are plenty of them. As a percentage of the population they are a very small part but there are enough of them that they don’t necessarily stand out.
bin Laden, as evil as he might have been, was a very smart guy. He apparently knew how to find a balance between living well (not in a cave) and being found. For years he was a step ahead of what people thought he might be or how best he would hide. Talk about thinking outside the box . . .
Kuddo’s to those that stayed on the path and figured it out.
The most shocking part of the whole story to me is that we knew about it since last August and nobody tipped him off. Wikileaks would have loved to have published it.
There’s a very good chance, IMO, that they have done many more of these raids for the exact same reason, and come up empty. The only reason we know about it is that it worked. It it hadn’t, we would never have known it happened. Even with a crashed helicopter, they would have thrown out some cover story and it’s unlike mainstream American media would have ignored it.
From what I’ve heard, they were following these couriers. I would guess they went to a bunch of different places, any of which or none of which might have housed bin Laden. The CIA (or whoever) might have had dozens or even hundreds of sites all over the world to analyze.
How ling does it take, looking at the traffic in and out, and whatever other clues might be available, to decide a given place is or isn’t a likely target? I dunno, but they probably had to repeat that process many times.
Even at the end, they didn’t know. Not for certain. They made their best guess and went in. The could have been 90% certain of this place, but also have other places that were almost as probable.
We didn’t know where bin Laden was because he was hiding. And he was pretty damned good about it. Of course we were looking. I know a few people – Americans included – who insist we were actually protecting bin Laden, because he gives The Man an excuse to keep the people down, but those people I have as little to do with as possible and do not yet know what they make of recent developments, but I’m sure they’ll have their own unique spin.
1: The price of the mansion has sine been reduced in various reports to about $ 200,000 or so.
2: Walled, compound like living spaces that can support multiple families, are the standard types of house for upper middle class people in many areas of the near east, middle east, and north Africa. I gew up in just such a house in my youth as a State Department brat in Khartoum, Sudan.
The compound by itself was not all that huge a red flag.
It’s not a function of looking for “mansions in Pakistan”. What got Ben Laden was good old fashion investigation. He was smart enough to stay away from phones and the internet. He only trusted a couple of people to do his bidding.
They discovered a trusted courier and tracked him to the building. It wasn’t a mansion in the “Charlie Sheen” sense of the word. It was a mansion in that they spent money to isolate and protect him from the outside world. It’s not an unusual structure in that part of the world.
I don’t know why everyone is so “shocked” that he was right there in Pakistan in a “civilized” place. OF COURSE the Pakistanis knew where he was–at least the military and/or ISS. And OF COURSE the U.S. knew that they knew.
I have very strong feeling that what happened is that the civilian factions in the Pakistani government 'helped" a lot to make this happen, in order to appease the U.S. with its deep-pocket foreign aid.
