RELATIONS BETWEEN the US and Pakistan were so poor before the May 2nd raid that killed Osama bin Laden that US forces planned to fight their way out if they were attacked by Pakistani forces, the New York Timesand Washington Postreported yesterday.
Ten days before the operation was mounted, President Barack Obama doubled the number of helicopters participating, from two to four, and added more troops, leaving nothing to chance.
Originally, two helicopters were to have hovered at the Afghan border, 90 minutes away, throughout the raid. But Mr Obama feared that would be insufficient, and ordered two Chinooks to follow the lead Black Hawk helicopters.
In the event, one of the Black Hawks hit a wall in the compound and a Chinook was called in to replace it.
The US navy seals were under strict orders not to engage with Pakistani forces, but would have fought if necessary. Throughout the 40-minute raid, US surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft watched Pakistani police, intelligence and military for a possible hostile reaction. There were contingency plans for top US officers, including chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mike Mullen, to call their Pakistani counterparts to prevent a clash.
The New York Timesalso revealed that the US had two teams waiting on a US ship in the Arabian Sea: one to take DNA evidence from bin Laden's body, then prepare it for burial; the other, composed of lawyers, interpreters and interrogators, if he were captured alive. Officials nonetheless "acknowledged that the mission always was weighted toward killing".
In an opinion poll published this week, 64 per cent of US respondents said they approved of President Obama’s decision not to release photographs of bin Laden’s corpse.
In another sign of the soured relations between US and Pakistani intelligence agencies, the Americans have blamed Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) for “outing” the CIA station chief in Pakistan, presumably to demonstrate leverage over the US, and as an expression of anger over allegations that the ISI was complicit in bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan.
The US station chief reportedly clashed bitterly with Lieut Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of the ISI, over the detention of Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis in January.
ISI officials, who allegedly keep some Pakistani journalists on their payroll, are believed to have given an approximate version of the name of the station chief to a private television station which broadcast it, and to the Nation newspaper, described by the New York Timesas "supportive of the ISI".
The previous CIA station chief left Pakistan in December, after he was “outed” in the same manner. The new station chief reportedly played a key role in bin Laden’s killing, by supervising the safe house in Abbottabad which spied on bin Laden’s compound.
US officials said that unlike his predecessor, the new station chief will not leave Pakistan because he does not need to go outside the US embassy compound in Islamabad.
"You live on the compound, you work on the compound, you walk to work," a CIA veteran of Pakistan told the Washington Post.
The question of bin Laden’s widows also appears unresolved, despite reports on Monday that Pakistan had agreed to allow the US to question the three women, as demanded by national security adviser Tom Donilon on television talk shows on Sunday.
A Pakistani security official yesterday told the New York Timesthat permission had not yet been granted.
The women have been identified as Khairiah Sabar, from Jidda, Siham from Medina and Amal al-Saddah, from Yemen, the youngest widow at age 29.
Sabar’s son Khalid was killed in the raid. Saddah’s daughter Safia, 12, is believed to have been in the upstairs bedroom with bin Laden and her mother and to have witnessed her father’s killing.
Reports of the number of women and children in the compound range from 12 to 17.
US officials hope the widows may have information about the workings of al-Qaeda.
US sources have also said they believe evidence of collusion by the Pakistani military and the ISI with al-Qaeda may be found in the material taken from bin Laden’s compound.