ANALYSIS:The nature of Osama bin Laden's hideout has again raised questions over Pakistan's attitude
IN AN ironic departure from the ascetic image he had carefully nurtured over years, the end for Osama bin Laden came, not in a cave, but in an imposing villa in the sleepy town of Abbottabad, little over an hour’s drive from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
The revelation that the world’s most famous fugitive had been holed up in a former Victorian hill station turned garrison town, possibly for years, has prompted fresh hand-wringing over how much of a double game nuclear-armed Pakistan is continuing to play in its dealings with Washington.
The high-walled compound where bin Laden was killed during an airborne raid by US special forces earlier this week is close to the Kakul military academy, Pakistan’s equivalent to Sandhurst or West Point. The fact his hideout was literally right under the army’s nose has left the country’s media agog. “The failure of Pakistan to detect the presence of the world’s most-wanted man here is shocking,” one newspaper said in an editorial yesterday. Pakistan has been awash with theories as to why its government appears to have played a very minor role – if any. Some speculate that Pakistan helped track bin Laden down but, mindful of a possible militant backlash, allowed the US to take responsibility for his killing. Others insist it would be impossible for US helicopters to fly undetected in Pakistani airspace, and that therefore the operation must have been run past Islamabad.
After a welter of sometimes contradictory messages and reports about Pakistan's role, President Asif Ali Zardari yesterday acknowledged his government was not involved in the mission. But "Pakistan did its part", he insisted in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post. "A decade of co-operation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden."
The al-Qaeda leader “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone,” Zardari wrote, while offering no explanation of how bin Laden was able to live in comfort near the nation’s capital.
A number of disturbing questions refuse to go away: were Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies too incompetent to track and capture bin Laden, or did some within its ranks know all along where he was hiding? Many who have long harboured suspicions that elements of the country’s security apparatus sympathise with and continue to support militants believe the latter is the most probable answer.
It is not the first time a major al-Qaeda figure has been captured or killed in Pakistan. Shortly after the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad in 2002, another senior operative, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was arrested in the sprawling southern coastal city of Karachi. In 2003, one of the biggest prizes, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, was hauled from his bed in Rawalpindi – another garrison town close to Islamabad. Two years later, another senior figure, Abu Faraj al-Libi, was caught in northwest Pakistan. Several mid-level al-Qaeda commanders have been killed in the tribal badlands that straddle the country’s border with Afghanistan.
"If evidence does surface that Pakistani authorities were complicit in creating [bin Laden's] hideout, then all bets are off," wrote Shuja Nawaz in Foreign Affairsyesterday. "The US-Pakistani friendship is in serious trouble."
Last year, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton raised eyebrows when, on a visit to Pakistan, she stated what many had long suspected: “I’m not saying that they’re at the highest levels, but I believe that somewhere in this government are people who know where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda is, where Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban is, and we expect more co-operation to help us bring to justice, capture or kill those who attacked us on 9/11.”
Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, similarly used a visit to Islamabad last month to raise concerns about the “long-standing relationship” between Pakistan’s ISI spy agency and the so-called Haqqani network of militants, which, he said, works alongside the Taliban, “supporting, funding, training fighters that are killing Americans and killing coalition partners” in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has a long history of nurturing militants as part of its policy of “strategic depth” in the region. Much of this is rooted in its fear of the country it considers its biggest threat – India. Islamabad sponsored separatist militants in Kashmir and it has supported the Taliban to prevent Delhi from gaining a foothold in Afghanistan.
But the web of militancy that spans Afghanistan and Pakistan has grown more intricate in recent years, with foreigners including al-Qaeda members and other Arab, Turk and Uzbek groupings often overlapping and cross-pollinating with home-grown factions such as the Pakistani Taliban.
Scores of attacks within Pakistan, including several targeting army bases, have given the impression that those who helped create the militants are no longer able to control them as they once did. The virus they helped incubate has mutated several-fold to devastating effect.
Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid has noted that since the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, nearly five times the number of people who died on September 11th have been killed by militants in Pakistan. “America’s 9/11 has given way to Pakistan’s 24-7-365,” he wrote this week. “The battlefield has been displaced. And in Pakistan it is much more bloody.”
It is this sentiment that informs much of Zardari’s argument in yesterday’s op-ed. “Some . . . have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet, that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing,” he wrote. “Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact. Pakistan had as much reason to despise al-Qaeda as any nation.”
This may be so, but still the impression lingers that not everyone within Pakistan’s security apparatus is singing from the same sheet. Pulled between the patronage of Washington – which rewards its supposed ally to the tune of billions in aid per year – and its own geopolitical interests, Pakistan is likely to continue being as much part of the problem as part of the solution.
Mary Fitzgerald is Foreign Affairs Correspondent