the other day thomas gillespie and john agnew, a pair of geography professors from UCLA claimed to have found osama bin laden. well, not exactly "found". rather they used models for tracking the spread of animal species to conclude that bin laden is probably in one of three walled compounds in parachinar, a town in the FATA of pakistan.
if he's right, that's a pretty cool trick. the problem is that professor murtaza haidar is from that area and he notes that parachinar is a highly unlikely place for bin laden to be hiding. parachinar is a predominantly shia town, something that gillespie et. al. could have discovered themselves from reading the wiki entry. considering bin laden's hostility to the shia and the recent sectarian violence in pakistan, that makes parachinar a pretty bad choice. as haidar says, "I find it hard to believe that after having hundreds, if not thousands, of Shiites murdered by the followers of Osama bin Laden, the Shiites of Parachinar would like to aid and abet Osama bin Laden."
i never heard of parachinar before this week. but if haidar is right, it seems like the UCLA team goofed pretty badly on this. haidar characterizes their report as "This is yet another example of technical analysis devoid of any understanding of the local socio-cultural and political contexts." maybe there's a problem with applying models designed for tracking animals to track a human being.
