Hostility and Hosts Await Bin Laden in Pakistan

When Osama bin Laden seemed to melt into the snowcapped mountains of eastern Afghanistan more than a week ago, many speculated that he had made a simple escape, taking an obvious route.

Bin Laden had headed east, the thinking went, out of the rain of U.S. bombs on Tora Bora and into the arms of friendly tribes along the lawless and porous border with Pakistan.

It’s a fine theory, many in Pakistan say--although perhaps only a bit better than a few others. Any travel, they insist, even into the tribal lands that produced many of his Al Qaeda fighters, would be far more difficult than many Western analysts suggest.

But those who have spent their lives in this region are very careful about making predictions regarding the frontier, where virtually every man carries a gun--or a grenade launcher, or both--and much of the territory has no government police force at all.

“He could maybe stay in tribal areas, but not for very long,” said Lateef Asridi, a former member of parliament from the Khyber tribal district. “The Pakistan government is after him, the Americans are after him, the British are after him, and they know to look here.”

While many tribes share Bin Laden’s militant Islamic beliefs and may be inclined to help him, many also share a culture in which family--which extends to the tribe--always comes first. Harboring Bin Laden or the also-vanished Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar would almost certainly put a conspirator’s tribe in peril and could be considered a transgression punishable by death.

Of course, there also is the multimillion-dollar bounty on both men’s heads.

All of which has prompted people in these parts, appropriately known as North-West Frontier province, to join Americans in their obsession with the pursuit of the world’s most wanted man.

“You could make it in the mountains all the way from Tora Bora to Kashmir,” said Mumtaz A. Bangash, a professor at Pakistan’s University of Peshawar, referring to the Himalayan region that has pushed India and Pakistan to war two times. “They might keep him there.”

“I think Paktia,” said Fahd, a farmer from Pakistan’s North Waziristan district, referring to an Afghan province just across the border. “Who knows?”

Developing “Where’s Osama?” theories is a waste of good time, everyone here seems to agree, even while acknowledging that they spend a fair amount doing it.

The technique begins with making a few necessarily broad assumptions--the first being that Bin Laden is still alive.

Then you cross out several other possible but more treacherous escape routes.

Iran, on the western boundary of Afghanistan, opposed Bin Laden’s now-fallen hosts, the Taliban, from the start. Most Iranians are Shiite Muslims, while Bin Laden is a Sunni. He would probably find few friends in Iran.

Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the former Soviet republics that ring northern Afghanistan, all produced fighters for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, and several powerful Afghan warlords who fought the Taliban are ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks.

One man said he guessed that Bin Laden would find a perfect hide-out in Chechnya, the separatist Russian republic, even while acknowledging how unlikely that would be: It’s very far away, for one thing. But if Bin Laden could somehow make his way there, Islamic Chechen brothers would be loath to hand him over to their Russian enemies, and Moscow would not be likely to welcome U.S. troops in the region.

One soon realizes, however, that Pakistan, a crescent-shaped nation that borders Afghanistan as it swoops southwest from top to bottom, does indeed offer plausible options for the man accused of overseeing the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

From its uniquely wild border to the fact that the Taliban movement was born in Pakistan’s madrasas, or religious schools--funded in large part by Pakistan’s vast Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI--Pakistan remains the place to start.

Under pressure from the U.S. to track escaping Al Qaeda fighters and mitigate growing Islamic extremism as well as drug trafficking by Pushtuns and other tribes, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has for the first time in the nation’s history sent troops into the tribal areas.

The oddities of the pseudo-border between Afghanistan and the tribal areas date to 1893, when the British drew the Durand Line to separate their empire on the Indian subcontinent from the land of the Afghans.

Understanding that many of the tribes in the region had lived on both sides of this line for thousands of years, however, Britain gave the tribes the right to pass back and forth at will.

A seemingly wise acknowledgment of ethnic realities, the Durand Line, it is clear a century later, has served largely to create a sort of no man’s land, where the people are for all practical purposes without a real country, their ties being almost entirely tribal, their laws, as such, largely unchanged for centuries, their standard of living scarcely improved.

“They live a very primitive life,” said Asridi, an attorney and one of a relatively tiny number of tribesmen with any advanced education. Asridi and his family spend much time in their home village, and he says he loves it there. But he also says it is “lawless, utterly lawless and completely impoverished.”

Roads are almost nonexistent along the Durand Line. Five million people live in the tribal areas, yet there is not a single university, and most children get very little education that isn’t religious in nature. Banditry and blood feuds are the norm in some areas.

The provincial government in Peshawar has allowed no journalists into the tribal areas recently, and even the few Pakistani citizens from the interior of the country who find reason to visit are allowed in only with heavily armed government guards as escorts.

With virtually no education available and few jobs other than smuggling, many of the tribes subsist on rice, yogurt and the kind of Islamic fundamentalism that gave rise to the Taliban and Bin Laden.

The ISI, meanwhile, has an enormous presence in the tribal districts, most experts agree. Some believe that agents would have little trouble hiding Bin Laden, Omar and others, as well as a great interest in doing so.

“Pakistan’s ISI knows every rabbit along that border and which way it is moving,” said Peter Tomsen, the last senior U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, from 1989 to 1992. “It knows where Osama is and where Omar is. . . . [The ISI] is trying desperately to remain this Islamist infrastructure.”

Few from the tribes dispute that the ISI has great influence along the frontier. They simply believe tribal culture is even stronger.

“You go to a tribal area, you will be monitored [by residents] the moment you enter,” Asridi said. “Everybody knows everybody. Everyone in the village would know they were there.”

If Bin Laden is indeed in Pakistan, most tribesmen agree he likely would be in one of the three southernmost districts: Kurram, North Waziristan or South Waziristan, home to many fundamentalist and sympathetic Pushtun tribes.

Another popular school of thought here places Bin Laden and company in Afghanistan, in the same forbidding Hindu Kush range as Tora Bora, but about 120 miles to the south. The province of Paktia, or perhaps Khowst, would offer the kind of natural protection Tora Bora did, only with fewer caves and tunnels.

An escaping party headed for Paktia might even have rested and resupplied near Parachinar, a city in Pakistan’s Kurram district, which juts west into Afghanistan like a finger; heading nearly due south, a group could have crossed into Pakistan and then back into Afghanistan in just 15 miles.

Then there’s the Kashmir theory, which has the Al Qaeda leader trekking 200 or more miles through difficult but protective Pakistani terrain. Many Kashmiris share Bin Laden’s fervent form of Islam and might also view him as a potential ally in the ongoing standoff between Pakistan and India over the region.

The two nuclear powers are on heightened alert after gunmen attacked India’s Parliament last week in a brazen daylight raid that left five attackers and eight Indians dead, none of them government officials. India has alleged that the attackers were Kashmiri separatists with ties to Pakistani militant groups.

This week, another shootout gave “Where’s Osama?” theorists yet another twist. Fleeing Al Qaeda fighters who had been captured in Pakistani tribal villages and were being transported to jails here overpowered their guards Wednesday, killing at least six of them. Nine Al Qaeda fighters died, and more than 20 escaped, though all but about five had been captured by this morning.

The Pakistani government said it had detained more than 150 “Osama men,” as they’re called here, earlier in the week. But reports swirled that many of the fighters had been in the area for as long as a month before being rounded up--suggesting that while Musharraf has been pledging cooperation with the White House’s war on terrorism, his military and intelligence forces were not in a hurry to arrest suspected terrorists. None of those reports could be confirmed.

And of course, there’s the Chechnya scenario. There’s also the rush south, through Pakistan’s Baluchistan province to the Arabian Sea and a freighter to Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines or Morocco. There’s the one where he was spirited out of Tora Bora by ISI operatives, had a haircut and shaved his beard, was given some sunglasses, perhaps, and is living in a safe house in an urban center such as Karachi or Lahore.

“Nobody knows, nobody knows,” Fahd, the farmer, said as he sipped green tea at an outdoor cafe here. “I would like to have a TV, so if they get him I could watch.”

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Times staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.