In the annals of British military colonial history lies an unpromising precedent for the massive manhunt for Osama bin Laden now underway in the rugged border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The homelands of Pakistan's proud Pashtun tribesmen were also the scene of a 24-year hunt for another Islamic firebrand, the Fakir of Ippi - who died in his bed, a free man, in 1960.
The fruitless search for the Fakir is recalled with unease by Western defence attaches now advising governments on how to catch the world's most wanted man in Pakistan's wild tribal borderlands.
The Fakir of Ippi was a Pashtun tribal leader, who led rebellions against British troops from a cave on the border of Afghanistan in what is now Pakistan's mountainous Waziristan district.
Ippi's stomping ground was the most remote and conservative of Pakistan's seven semi-autonomous tribal districts on the Afghan border, and the stage for the Pakistani army's largely unsuccessful bid since March to capture 500 al Qaeda, Taleban and tribal fighters.
The Fakir orchestrated ambushes and sabotage missions against the British, then against the Pakistani troops who followed after the British granted independence in 1947 and was considered the region's most notorious figure.
Countless raids and sweeps by both forces between 1936 and his death and offers of bounties failed to capture him.
"The ubiquitous and talented Fakir managed to elude the British despite bombing raids directed against his various hideouts and substantial rewards offered for his delivery, dead or alive," writes James W. Spain in "The Pathan Borderland."
The British colonial army's protracted hunt for Ippi, born Mirza Ali Khan into the Torikhel sub-tribe, began almost 70 years ago on the Waziristan's sun-baked ridges.
His first clash with the British came in 1936 in a dispute over a Hindu bride's conversion to Islam.
Ippi went on to raise "lashkars" (armed tribal forces) who ambushed British army convoys. In a raid in 1938 an entire detachment of British Indian "Scouts" was wiped out. After two years of ambushing, looting and evading British forces, Ippi retired to "caves in a cliff...almost astride the Afghan border," according to Spain.
There he gathered bands of followers and fought off attempts to kill him from both the ground and the air.
Retired air commodore Sajjad Haider flew air raids against Ippi and his men in 1954.
"We were called in to rescue ground troops. Flying overhead we saw hundreds of tribal fighters, in groups of 10 and 15, hiding behind big boulders.
"They knew the terrain, they moved very quickly and understood the limitations of our aircraft. They used to hide at the bottom of steep hills so pilots would have no space to pull up after attacks."
Like today's forces hunting the al Qaeda leader, he too blamed the failure to capture Ippi on the inhospitable terrain, a patchwork of cave-pocked mountain ridges.
"It's like Osama bin Laden today. All these American, British and Afghan forces are trying to capture him, but it's the same story," Haider said.
"The border is treacherous, it's 1,500 miles long, very porous, they can go back and forth with their supporters and they have the sympathies of the local population.
"Ippi was fighting in the same area as today's hunt. He went from one cave to another, there were hundreds of caves so it was difficult to find out which cave he was in."
The chief difference between the bin Laden hunt and the doomed bids to capture the Fakir of Ippi is technology, Haider said.
"The tactics now are far more sophisticated. Bin Laden and his people are operating with Internet, they have access to communications and access to counter communications."
Academic Taqi Bangash, chairman of Peshawar University's History Institute, said bin Laden mimicked Ippi's tactics to evade capture.
"Like Ippi, bin Laden would wake at 2:00 am to travel from place to place. Ippi would get dressed suddenly in the middle of the night and tell his followers 'get up, we have to move'," Bangash said.
In another historical mirror, the same problems of poor intelligence among the independent tribesmen are plaguing Pakistani forces now.
"The Pakistanis didn't succeed in capturing Ippi because intelligence was weak, the area was difficult to access, he would move from one place to another, and Ippi's men fled across the border into Afghanistan," Bangash said.
History had been ignored by planners of the bin Laden hunt and now they are paying the price, Haider said.
"We've ignored history and that's why we are where we are today. It is reaching into the present to condemn us".
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