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Peter Goodspeed: Bin Laden’s final attack
The death of the al-Qaeda leader has left a trail of diplomatic destruction in Pakistan
Spluttering with indignation and embarrassment, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is trying to change the topic.
Faced with a crescendo of criticism, at home and abroad, over the May 2 U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan, Mr. Gilani and his government have rejected all suggestions Pakistan played a dangerous and duplicitous game by protecting him.
The Prime Minister even told Time magazine he doubts U.S. claims bin Laden was in Pakistan for five or six years.
“Terrorists don’t normally stay in one place for more than 15 days,” he said, before shifting the discussion to Pakistan’s disappointment at a widening “trust deficit” that now dominates relations with the United States.
“Naturally, we wondered why [the U.S.] went unilaterally,” Mr. Gilani said. “If we’re fighting a war together, we have to work together. Even if there was credible and actionable information, then we should have done it jointly.”
The fact the world’s most wanted man, a terrorist mastermind who was supposed to be on the run, was living comfortably with three wives and 17 of his children in a custom-built fortress a few hundred metres from the gates of Pakistan’s top military academy has raised serious questions over the role of the country’s security services in protecting and supporting him.
“It is inconceivable that Osama could have lived so many years without a support system,” said John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism chief.
Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, pulled no punches when he told reporters: “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the target.”
And Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the U.S. Senate’s Intelligence Committee, suggested suspending billions of dollars of U.S. aid to Pakistan.
“Either we are going to be allies in fighting terror, or the relationship makes less and less sense to me…. To enable him to live in Pakistan, in a military community, for six years, I just don’t believe it was done without some form of complicity,” she said.
Inside Pakistan, Mr. Gilani’s government and the country’s military and intelligence services are being doubly pilloried for failing to find bin Laden and not preventing or even detecting the U.S. helicopter raid that penetrated the country’s air defences and flew unmolested to a target 60 kilometres from the nation’s capital.
“If we didn’t know, we are a failed state; if we did know, we are a rogue state,” columnist Cyril Almeida wrote in the newspaper Dawn. “But does anybody believe that we didn’t know?”
“This has humiliated Pakistan,” said former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, leader of the opposition Pakistan Muslim League, who was deposed and forced into exile for almost a decade by a 1999 military coup.
“These intelligence agencies, which keep following politicians and their activities, play political chess games day and night, but they couldn’t find Osama a few hundred metres away from the Kakul academy,” he said.
Even General Pervez Musharraf, the former military ruler who deposed Mr. Sharif and ruled from 1999 to 2007, cast doubt on his country’s innocence. He told The Daily Telegraph newspaper bin Laden may have been supported by a “shadow” element in the security services.
“As a policy, the army and the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence agency] are fighting terrorism and extremism, al-Qaeda and the Taliban,” he said. “A rogue element within is a possibility.”
In the past, just to hint at such a thing would be dangerous in Pakistan, where the military has ruled for 32 of the past 62 years, and the ISI is feared and revered as an embodiment of national power.
Outside the country, Pakistan’s politicians and security services have long been suspected of aiding radical Islamists.
“It is nothing new to assert that Pakistan’s government is incompetent when it comes to national policy and complicit at some level in the spread of radicalism within its borders — with some parts of the government quite ignorant as to who is doing what. This state of affairs has existed for decades,” said Parag Khanna, a research fellow at the New America Foundation.
Bin Laden’s assassination didn’t breed the distrust now plaguing U.S.-Pakistan relations. It simply exacerbated it.
In August 1998, when U.S. president Bill Clinton tried to kill the al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan in retaliation for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, U.S. officials believed they failed because he was tipped off by the ISI.
Washington alerted Islamabad 1½ hours in advance so Islamabad would not mistake the incoming cruise missiles for an attack by India.
Within minutes, bin Laden cancelled a meeting of al-Qaeda leaders at one of the target sites.
U.S. officials also have reason to doubt Pakistan’s incredulity at finding bin Laden hiding in Abbottabad. The city, which is practically a gated community for serving and retired military, has been an al-Qaeda way station for almost a decade.
Afghan Taliban received military training there before 9/11 and al-Qaeda operatives were repeatedly tracked passing through the town afterward.
In his memoirs, Gen. Musharraf recalls an incident in 2004 when intelligence agents trailed an al-Qaeda courier to a house in Abbottabad.
U.S. and Pakistani agents raided the home when they believed the courier would meet al-Qaeda’s operations chief and No. 3, Abu Faraj al-Libbi.
The raid failed but Libbi was captured a year later in Mardan, just west of Abbottabad.
Gen. Musharraf says Pakistan subsequently discovered he had rented three houses in Abbottabad.
“We were tipped off that someone important in al-Qaeda was living in a house there, and that someone else, also very important, someone we were looking for, was supposed to come and meet him,” he said.
That might have been bin Laden.
In January, Pakistan police captured Umar Patek, the Indonesian mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombings. He was carrying the equivalent of $1-million in cash and staying with his Filipino wife in an Abbottabad home.
Pakistan said nothing about his arrest for two months. Last week, Purnomo Yusgiantoro, Indonesia’s Defence Minister, said he believes Patek, deputy commander of al-Qaeda’s southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah, was there for more than a month, waiting to meet bin Laden.
Pakistan now claims it was working with Washington to follow up al-Qaeda leads in Abbottabad.
A government statement after bin Laden was killed insisted ISI shared information with the CIA about foreigners in Abbottabad between March 2009 and April 2011.
“It is important to highlight that, taking advantage of superior technological assets, the CIA exploited the intelligence leads given by us to identify and reach Osama bin Laden,” the statement said.
Not having bothered to check those leads themselves, Pakistan’s leaders are now threatening to review their intelligence-sharing arrangements with Washington to protest the “unauthorized unilateral action” of killing bin Laden.
National Post
pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/05/14/peter-goodspeed-bin-laden%E2%80%99s-final-attack/
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