Last Wednesday afternoon, along the Karakoram Highway, which runs through Abbottabad, Pakistan, and continues about five hundred miles to China, Faisal Sardar and his cousin Jehangir Ahmad were in the office of their real-estate firm, Rana Estate, drinking tea. The office is on the second floor, above a former homeopathic clinic and a ladies’ shoe store called Shoebox. The four-o’clock news had just ended, and Sardar, who is narrow-chested and tidy, and Ahmad, whose mustache and waistline are thicker, were waiting for the afternoon’s clients to arrive. They were discussing Osama bin Laden’s house, three miles down the road.
The hulking white compound, its gates now sealed with hot-pink police tape, has become the town’s main attraction. A carnival atmosphere has sprung up in the fields of wheat and sugar-snap peas that surround the place, as they have become makeshift parking lots for Land Cruisers and minibuses. Packs of schoolboys in neckties and flannel trousers race around the site. One showed off a video on his cell phone of what he claimed were fires that had been left burning inside the compound. Four sisters who live nearby were walking past the site. “We don’t believe it,” Maria Tehseen, nineteen, said. Her sisters, tugging at their chadors, giggled at her audacity. One of them, who wore braces, added, “Tell them to show us Osama bin Laden.”
Unlike many of their neighbors, Sardar and Ahmad don’t have any doubt that American forces killed bin Laden. “After 9/11, we expect everything,” Sardar said. “If you told me some guy on the street was carrying an atom bomb, I’d believe it.”
But they dismissed reports that described bin Laden’s compound as a palace. “No way that cost one million dollars,” Sardar said. “Let’s add up the numbers.” The cousins, who are both forty-one, regularly put in eleven-hour days. “That’s longer than any man could stand to be next to his wife!” Sardar said.
Ahmad got out a calculator. First, the land. The plot spans about six and a half kanals, which is around thirty-six thousand square feet.
“I’m no good with figures,” Sardar said. His new phone also baffles him, and he uses his laptop only to play solitaire.
The compound’s neighborhood, called Bilal Town, isn’t prepossessing. Open sewers line the dusty lanes, and services, such as water, gas, and shopping, are lacking. Ahmad estimated the land to be worth roughly two hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars.
A few hours later, a visit to the town’s land-revenue office, where six young men sat on the floor at low desks and copied deeds into red-bound ledgers, yielded more information: Arshad Khan, the man who had been sheltering bin Laden, had paid the equivalent of about sixty-six thousand dollars for the land, which he bought in three parcels, in 2004 and 2005. One of the plots had been purchased from a doctor named Qazi Mehfooz ul Haq. When Haq was reached at his clinic, he reluctantly said, “Yes, I sold it to Arshad,” adding that Arshad had approached him several times about buying the land “for his uncle.” Haq finally agreed to sell, making a profit of almost twelve thousand dollars.
“He was a very ordinary man,” Haq said, of Arshad. “He had a little beard, like that man there.” He pointed to a local with a bushy goatee. “He just very simply gave me a good offer.” Haq said that he was tired of the chaos that had descended. Terrorism, the Taliban—these were issues for the governments to handle. “A typical man is worried about his daily living,” he said. “What difference does it make to him if it is Osama bin Laden or not?”
Back in the real-estate office, where Ahmad was still working on his calculation, discussion turned to a joke going around town—that Abbottabad should change its name to Osamabad. Ahmad said that building costs ranged from nine dollars a square foot, for an average house, to fourteen dollars a square foot, for a high-quality structure. He figured that building bin Laden’s house would have cost, at the most, forty-one thousand dollars. So, allowing for appreciation of the amount paid for the land, Ahmad and Sardar estimated the compound’s value at under three hundred thousand dollars.
The statement that John Brennan, the President’s top counterterrorism adviser, made about the house—“Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound”—seemed intended to shame the dead man. Ahmad and Sardar found it funny that the United States was portraying the house as opulent.
“Osama was living here in this bullshit compound inside a military base with a TV from 1994!” Ahmad said. The cousins had seen the television set in news footage.
Sardar didn’t care about such characterizations. “We need light, water, health, education,” he said. “Not visas to America and war equipment.” That day, there had been power for only two hours of the workday, and a small generator whirred in the corner.
“Terrorism is a real concern,” he continued, “but it is only one of many.” Several years ago, Rana Estate stopped handling rentals.
“We were concerned what would happen if strangers moved in,” Sardar said.
“We were worried about terrorists,” Ahmad said.
“No, not only terrorists,” Sardar said. “Last year, some Chinese people came here for the first time and wanted to rent a building, and we didn’t rent to them. We gave them cold drinks and sent them away.” It had been hard to turn away business.
“I’m afraid of our economy,” Sardar said, “not of Osama bin Laden.” ♦
