Clueless

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

The failure to capture or locate any of the senior leadership of the Taliban in Swat or Waziristan may show a lack of capacity or competence by our forces and agencies – but this pales into insignificance beside the failure of all concerned to find Osama bin Laden. We may never know what part we have played in the hunt for him, but we may be sure that the US has deployed every resource at its disposal to find him and failed. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said on Sunday that US intelligence agencies did not know where the Al Qaeda leader was and had lacked reliable information on his whereabouts for years. The US has sophisticated surveillance systems both on and off the planet. Systems that can identify faces and read car number plates from geo-stationary satellites which can also stream live video. Systems aboard long-loiter drones that fly day and night. Systems that can read encrypted emails and pluck phone calls from the ether. But suppose they are the wrong systems for the target they seek…

What the US has lacked from the outset in its hunt is that most vital of intelligence assets – humint. Human intelligence is based upon a network of informers that reveals what is going on inside a target organisation or group. They are often paid for their work and run the risk of discovery – with death a likely outcome if they are revealed. The lack of human intelligence is perhaps unsurprising considering the milieu within which Osama exists. He lives in a word-of-mouth culture, where messages are passed by individuals who have memorised them – and there is yet to be invented a surveillance system that reads minds. He exists within a social context that is largely impermeable to external probing if it so desires and is protected by an honour code hard-wired into the minds of those who host him. He and those around him do not use mobile phones, or so it is rumoured, nor the Internet. And the most recent report is that he spends more time in Afghanistan than he does in Pakistan because of the need to avoid the eyes of the drones which might spot him if he is in the open. Looking for Osama bin Laden by relying on modern technologies is like fishing without a hook – unlikely to succeed. There is a 50-million-dollar reward on offer for him and so far nothing but silence. We expect no change in the foreseeable future.