One of the great bad boys of history, Osama bin Laden, is reportedly living in a house in northwest Pakistan, hanging with his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in relative comfort, and apparently still calling the shots for al Qaeda all over the globe.

According to CNN, the third member of the most-sought-after trio in recent memory, the Afghan Taliban head honcho, Mullah Omar, is also residing in Pakistan, and also doing fairly well, too, thank-you.

Despite the cost in millions of dollars and countless lives the past decade, these guys are still directing terror traffic in various bloody locales.
“Nobody in al Qaeda is living in a cave,” CNN quoted one NATO official.

(Illustration found here).

Pakistan is pissed, however, about the CNN report: “Stories like this keep on surfacing. Our reaction from day one to such stories is clear – he is not here,” deputy Information Minister Samsam Bokhari told the German Press Agency dpa. “They always say Osama is here but do not tell us exactly where he is located. We do not believe in these kinds of stories,'” he said responding to a story run by CNN on Monday.

Osama’s voice appeared earlier this month in recordings asking for help in Pakistan for the millions displaced by the floods last summer — he also chimed in with a few words supporting the horror of global warming:

“We are in need of a big change in the method of relief work because the number of victims is great due to climate changes in modern times,” Mr. bin Laden said, in the first of the messages posted to jihadist Web sites.

As Osama turns green, his minions continue to churn out bad shit (although the whole predicament, however, is due to US “blowback,” but that’s another story).
And buried down in the CNN story on Osama is a snip of this “blowback” that’s still earning recruits.

The NATO official, who has day-to-day senior responsibilities for the war, offered a potentially grimmer view than what has been publicly offered by others.
“Every year the insurgency can generate more and more manpower,” despite military attacks, he said.
Although there has been security progress, he pointed to an internal assessment that there are 500,000 to 1 million “disaffected” men between the ages of 15 and 25 along the Afghan-Pakistan border region, he said.
…
“We are running out of time,” he said.

And Osama is laughing his ass off, in relative comfort, of course.