Letter From Kabul
by Warren Coats

I returned to Kabul January 22 to continue my technical assistances to Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB—the central bank) in developing the policy instruments and staff analysis needed to formulate and implement monetary policy. It is a very cold time of year here in this city almost 6,000 feet above sea level. Slow but good progress is being made.

At dinner the other night two Pakistanis working here in Kabul made some very interesting comments about why we have not been able to find Osama Ben Laden, who is thought to have been living in the boarder area between Afghanistan and Pakistan for the past four years. We were chatting about how amazing and fun Goggle Earth is and moved into other examples of modern technology such as spy satellites, when someone asked, “How is it that the U.S. has not been able to find Ben Laden sitting here under their noses for so long.”

The first Pakistani, who had spent over a decade as a narcotics agent in the Peshawar area where Ben Laden is probably hiding, explained that police work there (as elsewhere) relied on a large network of informers. He said that it was NEVER a case of not getting the information or person they sought; it was only a matter of the price. How could it be, he pondered, that the $24 million dollars offered by the U.S. for Osama was not enough?

He wasn’t sure, but he speculated that perhaps those hidden in the area between Peshawar and Kabul by the U.S. twenty years earlier had become so integrated into that society through marriage and long contact that to reveal them would be to reveal and cause the death of ones own family. Osama Ben Laden was one of those the U.S. had paid the Peshawaris to hide two decades ago when we were financing insurgents to drive out the Soviet rulers of Afghanistan. Over time many of these insurgents (called freedom fighters by us and terrorists by the Soviets) became thoroughly integrated in every way. My Pakistani dinner companion suggested that there might be no price at which Osama’s harborer would turn in someone whose children were his grandchildren. What goes around comes around.

The other Pakistani dinner guest offered a very different possibility. Many Afghans had felt betrayed and deserted by the U.S. when it quickly ignored Afghanistan after the Soviets had been driven out and left it to twenty years of civil wars between different ethnic groups and warlords. The second dinner guest suggested that the Peshawaris might fear that the U.S. would do it again once they had Osama and thus they were refusing to reveal his location in the hopes of keeping U.S. interest and presences in the area. I was so taken a back that I had to ask him to confirm that I had understood him correctly.

After dinner I tried zooming in on the area north west of Peshawar with Goggle Earth but couldn’t find Ben Laden. The area is close to Kabul and I could see what we call Keiber Pass and I noticed that Goggle had the courage to designate the boarder between Afghanistan and Pakistan in that area, something no one else knows for sure. There is something for every one here, except Osama.

Best wishes, Warren Coats

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