Leathery ridges, mountains of shale, high desert plateaux dotted with mud-wall fortresses, and a barely-marked frontier with Afghanistan: Pakistan's tribal borderlands are where most intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden is hiding.
Two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, some 60,000 Pakistani troops and thousands of US troops on the Afghan side are still hunting for him along this porous 2,450km frontier.
But despite a US$25 million bounty and the capture of three of his top lieutenants in Pakistani cities, the figurehead of the al-Qaeda terror network has eluded the world's biggest manhunt.
What that hunt lacks, say people familiar with bin Laden and the terrain, is human intelligence.
"I once asked Osama in Kandahar in 1998 `What is the secret of your survival?'" recounts bin Laden's chosen biographer, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, of their first meeting in Afghanistan's main southern city.
"He told me: `It's very simple. There is no Lawrence of Arabia now. There is no-one who can speak Arabic to my fighters, who can recite the holy Koran, who can offer prayers with us, who can infiltrate our ranks."
Mir, who interviewed bin Laden four times between 1998 and 2001, sees the hunt as "a great failure."
"They have spent billions of dollars, Pakistan has captured more than 500 al-Qaeda operatives and handed them over. But they still have no information on where he is," Mir said. "They lack human intelligence."
Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist in the frontier city of Peshawar, met bin Laden twice in 1998 and had frequent contact with him until September 2001. He believes bin Laden is forever moving "on either side" of the rugged borderlands. "He's moving, shifting places, especially after the arrests of key al-Qaeda members."
Yusufzai also blames weak intelligence for the failure to find him. "If you spend a lot of money on getting information, people will tell you what you want to hear because they just want to make money," he said.
Less than 20 bodyguards would be surrounding the 1.96m al-Qaeda chief, and he would only be using "chits" or scraps of paper to issue messages, Yusufzai said.
In July last year Mir was invited to interview bin Laden a fifth time, near the Afghan-Iranian border. Arab intermediaries instructed him to travel to Zabul province in southern Afghanistan.
Mir was told that from Zabul he would be taken to another location, but when he refused to cross borders without Afghan or Iranian visas, they dropped the interview.
"So in those days I think he was in the border areas of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan," Mir said.
Mir is "waiting to see the end of the drama" before penning the final chapter.
"I don't think he'll be captured alive. He told me he would like to die fighting the enemy, with his last drop of blood."
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