Taking the optimal approach doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed 100% of the time so Bin Laden’s method, even though it ended in failure, may have been optimal.
However, that’s not how I would have done it. While there are many such compounds in poor countries, having a compound with screened windows, high and thick walls and guards attracted attention while not offering a significant protection in case it was found out. If the US military finds you, high walls and a handful of guards will be useless.
I would have lived in a smaller house with tunnels to nearby houses and a few guards (to protect against common criminals) but without a courtyard or high walls.
In the woods behind a Burger King in Asheville, North Carolina.
Really where OBJ was living didn’t seem to offer that much protection from aerial assaults, which is what the US is famous for. It would just keep out the locals.
These types of compounds are usually multi family, having high walls allows you to build multiple stories and still keep privacy both from within and without.
Guards from what I can see were not specialized guards, just rather run of the mill domestics who doubled as guards.
If he was willing to change his lifestyle, disguising himself as a Thai ladyboy would have been quite effective. Or he could have phoned Elvis to get some tips.
I think AK84 is right, his hiding place was not nearly as remarkable as it seemed from the first reports.
His problem wasn’t that he had a mansion, the trouble was he stayed put. You need to constantly move.
As my mother was fond of saying, “If you have a secret, don’t tell anyone. Once you tell one person it’s no longer a secret.”
I wonder if Bin Laden’s neighbors were mad. Just think all that reward money and they could’ve had it if they had ratted him out, that is if they knew about him.
I think he sort of did choose the optimal strategy. I mean, presumably he would’ve been better off leaving the region altogether, but given thats where his supporters were and the difficulty of traveling when your the most hunted man in the world, that probably wasn’t an option.
So find a community big enough that a few more people won’t be cause for much curiosity, buy a house with an enclosed grounds so that neighbors can’t snoop, rely on as few people as you can to bring you food and the like and resign yourself to staying inside the compound for the rest of your life. As AK84 says, walled off compounds weren’t particularly out of place in Pakistani cities. It sounds like he was caught by the US following his old associates, but given that he probably needed to stay linked to Al-Queda to fund his new digs, totally cutting himself off probably wasn’t an option either.
In retrospect, the conventional wisdom that he was hiding out in the backwoods of Pakistan was kinda silly. I think he probably did find the best strategy he could, and just got unlucky in that one of his close associates got tagged by the US.
I really don’t think any intelligence agency thought that, almost all of the major Al Qaeda operatives have been caught in cities, Khalif Sheikh Muhammad was caught in Rawalpindi IIRC. You can disappear in a city, in the wild areas, human habitation is fairly obvious.
Incidentally, I am not surprised that he was found near the Academy, Abbotabad pretty much is built around the Academy, very few places are far from it. Security on Pakistan Army bases has become laughable over the last few years as many bases (called “Cantonments”) have merged with the surronding Civilian Population, in Rawalpindi for instance, you actually do not know when you are in the Cantonment and when you are not; and this has in the last few years been a very major problem for the Army.
Moving is dangerous, though. You could run into a border crossing. Or a police checkpoint. Or get pulled over for speeding. Or for not-speeding, but the cop is bored and looking for yucks. It’s much easier to come to a cop’s attention while moving than while staying in your home. And if the local police are honest and law-abiding, it’s also much easier to them to have a pretense to search your car than your home in most countries.
OBL lasted ten years with many of the world’s best intelligence services doing their level best to find and kill him. Give the devil his due, it certainly seems that he either made some very good choices, hired advisors who made very good choices, or was extraordinarily lucky. That last option may have had something to do with it, but isn’t really a satisfactory explanation for such an extended period of time.
At the risk of giving offense, though, there is another component to this question: How often do police ignore the warrant requirement? The impression we tend to get in the United States, rightly or wrongly, is that lawlessness among police in Pakistan is more common than it is in the US.
Very very rarely. The sanctity of the home is something which is culturally entrenched and there would be a major backlash if the police went about ignoring it.