I’m intrigued by some very interesting research done by geographers at UCLA. It’s available from the MIT International Review as a large downloadable file in PDF format.
They claim to have identified Osama bin Laden’s likely whereabouts by applying geographic science to publicly released intelligence information. According to Science Daily:
The UCLA findings rely on two principles used in geography to predict the distribution of wildlife, primarily for the purposes of designing approaches to conservation. The first, known as distance-decay theory, holds that as one travels farther away from a precise location with a specific composition of species — or, in this case, a specific composition of cultural and physical factors —the probability of finding spots with that same specific composition decreases exponentially. The second, island biogeographic theory, holds that large and close islands have larger immigration rates and will support more species than smaller, more isolated islands.
. . .
The approach netted 26 cities within a 12.4-mile radius of Tora Bora on imagery from Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), a global archive of satellite photos managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. With a 2.7-square-mile footprint, Parachinar turned out to be the largest and fourth-least isolated city, the team determined.
“Based on bin Laden’s last known location in Tora Bora, we estimate that he must have traveled 1.9 miles over a 13,000-foot-high pass into Kurram and then headed for the largest city, which turns out to be Parachinar,” said Agnew, who is the current president of the Association of American Geographers, the field’s leading scholarly organization.
The researchers ruled out cities on the Afghanistan side of the border because the country was occupied at the time by U.S. and international forces and has been particularly unstable ever since.
“The Pakistan side of the border is much better for hiding because of its ambiguous political status within the country and the formal absence of U.S. or NATO troops,” Agnew said.
Faced with the prospect of picking from more than 1,000 structures clearly portrayed in the satellite imagery of Parachinar, the team decided to come up with a short list of the criteria that bin Laden would need for housing, based on well-known information about him, including his height (between 6’4″ and 6’6″, depending on the source), his medical condition (apparently in need of regular dialysis and, therefore, electricity to run the machine) and several basic assumptions, such as a need for security, protection, privacy and overhead cover to shield him from being spotted by planes, helicopters and satellites.
So they looked for buildings that could house someone taller than 6’4″ and were surrounded by walls more than 9 feet tall (both as judged by mid-afternoon shadows depicted on the satellite imagery), and that had more than three rooms, space separating them from nearby structures, electricity and a thick tree canopy.
Only three structures fit the criteria. The buildings also appeared to be the best fortified and among the largest in Parachinar. Two are clearly residences, the study states. The third may be a prison. But whatever the third structure is, it has “one of the best maintained gardens in all of Parachinar,” the study says.
There’s a lot more at the link.
That’s fascinating! Without ever seeing him, relying entirely on fundamental scientific principles and applying them to publicly-known data, the team seems to have come up with a very likely result. I daresay US intelligence operatives are making some fairly urgent inquiries there, right now, in the hope of finding their elusive target.
Of course, we don’t know if similar approaches were applied by the CIA and other agencies looking for bin Laden. One hopes the publication of this research won’t spoil something that they had going on. However, almost eight years after 9/11, I daresay they’d have acted by now if they had this sort of information.
It begs the question, though . . . did these academics offer their conclusions to the security authorities prior to publication? If so, was their offer accepted or declined? If they turn out to be right, how can this sort of publication be held up, next time, until someone’s checked out their conclusions and dealt with bin Laden first?
Peter