It’s actually a bit more complex of a situation than my title makes it sound. Maybe. Or not.

You see, Robert Gates is now an Obama Administration official and as such his job is to protect the current administration. Even if that means attacking the previous administration he served in, or at least bringing it down to the same level. So we’d have to assume he’s really telling the full truth and not covering butts.

President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, said bin Laden, believed hiding mainly in a rugged area of western Pakistan, may be periodically slipping back into Afghanistan. But Obama’s Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, said the U.S. has lacked good intelligence on bin Laden for a long time — “I think it has been years” — and did not confirm that he’d slipped into Afghanistan.

He “think(s)” it has been years since good intelligence, but he doesn’t sound sure. Is that because he’s trying, without making a full commitment, to expand that time frame well into the Bush Administration? So that the Obama Administration’s own ineffectiveness seems less important?

Or is he telling the truth and it’s really been years since we’ve had good intelligence on Bin Laden and his movements?

I’m actually inclined to believe it’s the latter. I doubt we would’ve hesitated to make a low-key cross-border entry into Pakistan if we knew where Bin Laden was and could’ve grabbed him. Unfortunately, it seems more likely that our intelligence services just don’t know where the terror mastermind has been hiding.

Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether the administration has reliable intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts, Jones replied, “The best estimate is that he is somewhere in North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border.” He did not comment on the intelligence behind that estimate, nor did he cite a time period or describe more specifically bin Laden’s apparent border crossings.

Assuming, yet again, he’s telling the truth and not covering butts or keeping national security information confidential, Jones doesn’t seem to have any more information on Bin Laden’s hideout than your average nightly news viewer. “He’s on one of the two sides of the border,” isn’t particularly definitive.

Gates told ABC’s “This Week” that “we don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is,” although he agreed that his likely location is North Waziristan.

Again, not promising. North Waziristan is home to over 360,000 people and consists of about 2,924 square miles (if I remember correctly). And that would be assuming Bin Laden doesn’t move out of that area, which is extremely unlikely.

Bottom line: Not only have we not captured Bin Laden eight years later, but we only have a general idea as to where he lives on any given day. Pathetic.