The Al Qaeda leader has not been scuttled away to a network of caves, but instead is living life as the world’s most wanted man in conventional surroundings.
His deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri is also hiding out in a separate house in an area close to bin Laden under similar arrangements, the official claimed.
After 9/11 the hunt for bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership focused on the remote Tora Bora region of Afghanistan which is known for its huge warren of caves burrowed into the mountains.
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It now appears he has been moved around on a regular basis to boltholes in the Chitral area of Pakistan in the far northwest and the Kurram Valley, which neighbours Tora Bora.
‘Nobody in Al Qaeda is living in a cave,’ said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the intelligence matters involved.
The prospect of bin Laden living in comfort will be a rebuke to the U.S. which has made finding and killing him a central plank of its war on terrorism.
President Barack Obama has said that he remains determined to track him down, adding that bin Laden had been forced ‘underground’ by U.S. drone attacks on the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan including one on Tora Bora in 2001 which nearly caught him.
He had also claimed the leaders of al Qaeda are ‘holed up’ in a way that makes it hard for them to cooperate - an assertion which the NATO official appears to contradict.
The NATO officer, who has day-to-day high-level responsibility for the war, claimed bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are protected by locals and some members of the Pakistani intelligence services.
Finding them will be complicated by the size of the area they are in - it covers hundreds of square miles - the rugged terrain and the tribal warlords who run it.
The official offered a grim view of the war in Afghanistan and said that there were up to one million disaffected young men on the border with Pakistan who would be prepared to fight coalition forces.
‘Every year the insurgency can generate more and more manpower,’ he said, adding that despite a military presence in Afghanistan ‘we don't know what's going on’.
Pakistan has repeatedly denied protecting members of the al Qaeda leadership.
The country’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik was dismissive of the NATO official’s claims and said similar reports in the past had turned out to be incorrect.
Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, added: ‘We hardly have a day that goes by where somebody doesn't say they know where Osama bin Laden is.’
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