Finally got round to setting up this blog just five or six years after blogging supposedly became the cutting edge of modern journalism. The idea, in theory, is to enlighten the blogosphere with regular insights about places like Iraq, Iran, Somalia and Yemen, and other places that The Sunday Telegraph has kindly paid me to go to over the years. In practice, it will probably be something rather more self-indulgent, on pretty much anything that catches my attention.
So what about this week? Only one story in the news really, which is the capture of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Much speculation, of course, that Pakistan's all-seeing Inter-Services-Intelligence agency - or ISI - may have been hiding him, fuelled in part by the fact that he was staying in a garrison town that was home to the cream of Pakistani military. I do, however, have my own conspiracy theory on this, which is that OBL may have actually been hiding with no outside help at all - save, that is, for the few people who were actually sheltering him in the house. After all, if one wants to keep one's whereabouts secret, is the best way not to keep the circle of people in the know as small as possible? Had various senior figures in the Pakistani government known he was there, I can't help thinking that one or other of them would have shopped him long ago to the Americans, either to claim a reward or to buy Islamabad out of some diplomatic spat with Washington, of which there have been no shortage over recent years. Bin Laden, I would argue, might well have feared this himself, and chosen as a result to cut himself from as many Pakistani government "handlers" as he could, rather than cosying himself ever more into their bosom. As long as he remained indoors in that high-walled compound, and had a few trusted fixers running his errands, I'm not really sure why he'd need lots of senior ISI men looking out for him as well.
There is also a precedent for this, in terms of high-profile fugitives. When Radovan Karadzic, the indicted Serb leader, went on the run, it was always assumed he was hiding with the connivance of Serbian intelligence, yet when he was finally found in 2008, he was living alone as a New Age guru in Belgrade. It was a great disguise, but the most effective part of it all was that he didn't need anybody else to help with it - the beard, the ponytail and the hippy lifestyle meant nobody ever thought he was anything other than a harmless crank. In other words, when it came to looking after himself whle on the run, he eventually turned to the one person he knew he could completely trust - himself.
So what about this week? Only one story in the news really, which is the capture of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Much speculation, of course, that Pakistan's all-seeing Inter-Services-Intelligence agency - or ISI - may have been hiding him, fuelled in part by the fact that he was staying in a garrison town that was home to the cream of Pakistani military. I do, however, have my own conspiracy theory on this, which is that OBL may have actually been hiding with no outside help at all - save, that is, for the few people who were actually sheltering him in the house. After all, if one wants to keep one's whereabouts secret, is the best way not to keep the circle of people in the know as small as possible? Had various senior figures in the Pakistani government known he was there, I can't help thinking that one or other of them would have shopped him long ago to the Americans, either to claim a reward or to buy Islamabad out of some diplomatic spat with Washington, of which there have been no shortage over recent years. Bin Laden, I would argue, might well have feared this himself, and chosen as a result to cut himself from as many Pakistani government "handlers" as he could, rather than cosying himself ever more into their bosom. As long as he remained indoors in that high-walled compound, and had a few trusted fixers running his errands, I'm not really sure why he'd need lots of senior ISI men looking out for him as well.
There is also a precedent for this, in terms of high-profile fugitives. When Radovan Karadzic, the indicted Serb leader, went on the run, it was always assumed he was hiding with the connivance of Serbian intelligence, yet when he was finally found in 2008, he was living alone as a New Age guru in Belgrade. It was a great disguise, but the most effective part of it all was that he didn't need anybody else to help with it - the beard, the ponytail and the hippy lifestyle meant nobody ever thought he was anything other than a harmless crank. In other words, when it came to looking after himself whle on the run, he eventually turned to the one person he knew he could completely trust - himself.
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