No more heroes any more...

Latest word on OBL fall-out is that Bin Laden's secret pad in Pakistan is to be demolished to stop it becoming a shrine to the al-Qaeda leader. The local officials are pretty convinced that it will indeed draw in the crowds, although I can't really see it myself. It might get the odd rubbernecking foreign reporter like me, but tourists to Pakistan aren't exactly thick on the ground at the moment, and the average Al Qaeda sympathiser in Pakistan is unlikely to want to draw himself to the attention of the ISI by turning up and laying a wreath. I'm sure the ISI will be watching too, if my own experience of working in Pakistan is anything to go by. I was apprehended by one of their agents on a trip to Pakistan in 2008 - not during an exclusive interview with Mullah Omar, I regret to say, but during the rather more innocent business of shadowing some British embassy officials who were trying to rescue a woman from a forced marriage . As I recall, at the time all we'd done was pull over in a village to make a few phone calls en route to where we were going; the mere sight of a few passing strangers, though, was enough to make the local ISI man materialise and ask the diplomats what they were up to. All seeing, indeed...
Besides which, the track record of recent bogeymen in the "War on Terror" for becoming bigger in death than they were in life isn't that impressive. Saddam Hussein, for example, has an elegantly turned-out mausoleum near his home town of Tikrit, where he is buried alongside a fairly full hand of the old "Deck of 55" most wanted, including his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti, who was the Five of Clubs, Taha Yasi Ramadan, the Iraqi vice-president who was the Ten of Diamonds, and Saddam's psychotic sons Uday and Qusay. Yet visitor numbers are seldom more than a trickle, as the Telegraph discovered when we sent our old Iraqi stringer, Akeel, to pay a visit on the anniversary of Saddam's death. Rather touchingly, though, some folks round there did still call him "The President", and apparently claimed that his face now appeared as that of the Old Man in the Moon. No such affection for Abu Musab al Zarqawi, however, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose body was apparently buried at a secret location in the Iraqi desert after the US killed him with a rocket strike. I am unaware of any kind of shrine to him anywhere, including in his home town of Zarqa in Jordan, nor has his name particularly lived on in death. Bin Laden, I guess, will be different, although it just how much continues to inspire from beyond the grave, only time will tell...

ISI with my little eye

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.