How I’m (Virtually) Hunting for Bin Laden
Scott Bailey
I’ve done my fair share of international traveling. In fact, if you count places like Luxembourg and the Vatican, I’ve lived in or traveled to more than 50 countries. I fully recommend to students that they take every opportunity to get out and experience the world beyond our borders first hand. Unfortunately, circumstances as they are, I’m not able to maintain that same jet-set lifestyle these days (nor do I get the same kind of kick out of traveling out of a single backpack and staying in fleabag hostels), but that hasn’t kept me from seeing the far corners of the world.
Recently I’ve spent time in some of the most remote and volatile places around the globe, like North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan—virtually, that is. You see, databases of satellite imagery and web-based mapping software such as earth.google.com allow me to fly to and observe in great detail almost anyplace, almost any time I want, without ever leaving my home office.
And now, with this technology at everyone’s fingertips, we’re all potentially world travelers. It’s not the same, of course—no one wishes to have food poisoning in Saigon, get lost in Nairobi, or to be pickpocketed in Rome, but these things become indelible experiences of those places that at least are real. The virtual trip is sanitized of risk and void of any human interaction, which (along with local smells, tastes, and sounds we can’t quite get from a computer screen) are crucial aspects of any traveling experience. Still, there is much to be gained from poking around with the computer that arguably makes it a much better way to spend time than a lot of other activities.
As an artist, I am enamored with the aesthetic value of satellite images and the exquisite colors, shapes, and textures as surveyed from so many miles above. The way things look from space is inherently abstract, but the detail in which we can explore the nooks and crannies of the earth is mind-boggling.
One of my future series of paintings may well be a bunch of beautiful landscapes of Northern Pakistan. It is incredibly interesting to me aesthetically, geographically, and politically. For research, I’ve been virtually trekking around the foothills in Waziristan and Kurram, finding pastoral scenes, sublime mountain ranges, and walled compounds. While I am roving about over there, I can’t help wondering if I am looking at places where Bin Laden is hiding, or where Al Qaida and the Taliban are training—it’s a stark contrast between the grandeur of the landscape and the anxiety of what might actually be happening there, which is the kind of tension that much of my artwork is built on. (You can see what I do at here and here.)
Smarter people than me, with better tools than I have at my disposal, are looking for Bin Laden this way, too. A couple of UCLA geography professors, Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew, have used the satellite images, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and theories of biogeography, distance-decay, and island biogeography to come up with three compounds that they think have a high probability of being his current hideout. Could it be that with all of these eyes wandering over there, we might actually be terrorizing the terrorists?
OK, I’m not expecting to be receiving the $25,000,000 reward for Bin Laden’s capture any time soon. But if I can see intimate details of this fascinating place without getting kidnapped or worse, I’ll happily do my Pakistani walkabout virtually. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to Tora Bora.