Well, who doesn’t have a few embarrassing party pix or yearbook photos from the Eighties, eh? Why should Osama Bin Laden, who rocked the bell bottoms and turtleneck look as hard as anyone in the Seventies, escape this universal fate?
Turns out that during the Eighties he was living with the Kalasha tribesmen of the Chitral region of Pakistan, a strangely timeless Asiatic tribe documented by Wilfred Thesiger.
Chitral is also the home of the Kalasha, a unique pagan civilization that’s lived in the area for 2,000 years or more, now boxed in by an increasingly militant Islam. Thinly populated, Chitral covers 5,800 square miles, with war-torn Afghanistan to the north and west and the extremist strongholds of Swat and Dir to the south.
According to locals, bin Laden lived with a Kalasha family in Chitral for some time during his first Afghan jihad, against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. With his now much more severe ideology, the al Qaida leader wouldn’t be able to easily live among these polytheistic people, whose men and women mix freely…
Kalasha women also don’t cover, so was OBL covering his eyes the entire time? I doubt that.
And now he wants to fight polytheists? Osama Bin Laden: demeaning Islam in leaps in and bounds.
Hey, old habits die hard. I mean; did you SEE him in that turtleneck?
raincoaster 
Yup, we all started out as a babe in arms. Makes you wonder why some turn one way and others down another path….
By the way, I’ve added you to my blogroll. I’m enjoying your variety of interesting posts!
Thanks! Much appreciated. I should do another edit of the blogroll, because there are people who should be added and dead blogs that should be dropped.