Questions about bin Laden embarrassing to Pakistan !!!

[canadian]

Questions about bin Laden embarrassing to Pakistan

Published On Tue May 3 2011

Supporters of pro-Taliban party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam shout anti-U.S. slogans during a protest in Quetta on May 2, 2011, after the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
BANARAS KHAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
By Rick Westhead South Asia Bureau




ISLAMABADTaxi driver Mahsood Ahmed's mind races when he contemplates Osama bin Laden's assassination.
The 56-year-old father of five wonders whether the Pakistani military knew in advance about the raid early Monday morning that killed bin Laden, and whether his country's infamous spy agency was aware that the world's most wanted man was living just a few kilometres away from a Pakistani military college, in a town populated by retired army officers.
So many questions, Ahmed said on Monday night, leaning against his battered white and yellow cab in downtown Islamabad. Half the people I talked to today say they are glad that bin Laden was killed, that he was a traitor to Islam, and the other half say that he should not have been killed. But everyone has questions about what happened.
Pakistan's government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, hailed Monday's operation as a major setback to terrorist organizations around the world.
Speaking at the provincial assembly of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in northwest Pakistan, provincial Senior Minister Bashir Bilour, a Zardari ally, told lawmakers: Thank God, we are rid of this scourge. Bin Laden was supplying our children in the Swat Valley with suicide jackets, guns and explosives.
But in the same chamber, Mufti Kifayetullah, a lawmaker with Islamist leader Fazlur Rehman's Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party, called upon Muslims to regard bin Laden as a hero.
Today, Americans have killed a great hero of Islam, Kifayetullah said. Americans should keep in mind that they have killed Osama, but they cannot eliminate his ideology.
There was no explanation from Pakistan over how bin Laden could have been holed up, possibly for years, in an expensive compound in Abbottabad, less than 100 kilometres' drive northeast of Islamabad.
It's the most unpardonable thing, said Shah Mahboob Alam, a former director general with Pakistan's intelligence bureau. The government should be presenting the facts to the people.
But the facts may prove embarrassing for Pakistan.
The news that bin Laden was living in a three-storey residence in a military garrison town so close to Islamabad, and not, as many speculated, in the country's lawless and remote border region near Afghanistan, is considered a huge embarrassment to Pakistan, whose relations with Washington have worsened in recent months.
Alam said he believes bin Laden was caught because of a leak within the Al Qaeda organization.
I don't think it would be from a wiretap, Alam said. But I'm just speculating, like everyone is right now.
Alam and other intelligence experts here also said it was nearly impossible to conceive that the Americans orchestrated the raid on bin Laden's compound without the help of Pakistani officials.
You don't fly four helicopters across Pakistan without telling the government here what you're doing, said one security analyst. How does the U.S. respond if those helicopters are shot down? No way that they didn't tell the Pakistan government.
Alam said he suspects the U.S. told Pakistan at the last minute they were pursuing a high value target in their raid.
Even when we were doing raids with the help of local police, we wouldn't tell them who we were after specifically, he said.
While some experts say they expect a backlash in Pakistan from bin Laden's supporters, there hasn't been an indication that more violence is a certainty. There were few rallies in support of bin Laden on Monday and even conservative TV commentators resisted calling him a martyr.
We'll wait until Friday to see what the mullahs say, said Pervez Hoodbhoy, an Islamabad-based activist who has spoken out against religious extremism.
They could say he was a soldier of Islam who has fallen in battle and for every one Osama bin Laden you kill, another 1,000 will rise up, Hoodbhoy said.
But I don't see that happening, he said. Al Qaeda's methods were so brutal that they had lost almost all support here.(http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/984289--questions-about-bin-laden-embarrassing-to-pakistan)

 

[canadian]

Uncomfortable Silence: Pakistan After Bin Laden
Posted: 03 May 2011 10:28 AM PDT
Adil Najam
What do Pakistanis think about how Osama Bin Laden met his end, the implications of that end?

There are as many opinions on what happened in Abbottabad as there are Pakistanis. Maybe more. But there is no sense whatsoever where the government of Pakistan (or any of its major institutions) stand on what happened – or stood when it was happening. For 36 hours now the world has been waiting to see what Pakistan does and says – the silence and incoherence from Islamabad has not just been embarrassing, it has been damning. Finally, key institutions in Pakistan have begun trying to piece a narrative together – unfortunately it is way too late and the narrative itself rather lame.
When I put up a short post on Osama Bin Laden’s death soon after the news broke, I had hoped that in time more details would become available and we would get more clarity on what happened and how. We do now have more detail. But certainly not more clarity. The story about what happened in Abbottabad now lives in Spin-abad. Everyone – from governments, secret agencies, the media, the Twitterati, and your spinster aunt – are taking a spin. Many are taking multiple, sometimes contradictory, spins. Everyone except the Pakistan government.

That, of course, is a surprise – not only because the Pakistan government does have a lot of explaining to do, but even more because it is in the interest of the Pakistan government to do that explaining itself rather than have someone else do it for them. Yet, up until it was already too late, Pakistan seems to have abdicated that responsibility. In fact, President Barack Obama, Secretary Hillary Clinton and Senator John Kerry seemed to be making that (half-hearted) case for Pakistan more than anyone in authority in Pakistan. Given that President Obama had informed President Zardari before the speech from the US President, one would have assumed that the Pakistan President and his media handlers would have their own statement ready to go on the air minutes, if not seconds, after President Obama’s speech. This is not about spin and PR, this is Diplomacy 101: Own and define the narrative as soon and as clearly as you can before someone else defines it for you – especially if the narrative is likely to be unfavorable.
But the narrative, itself, is not the core of Pakistan’s challenges. The problem is the facts on the ground and the government’s inability and unwillingness to explain them. Pakistan is used to the feeling of the world ganging up on it. But there are good reasons for the questions being asked of Pakistan by the world today. There are even better reasons for the questions being asked of Pakistan by Pakistanis today. Whether the government comes clean to the world or not, it is vital that it respond to Pakistanis. The first is a matter of national image (no trivial issue, that), but the latter is a question of citizen trust in national institutions (an existential element of statehood).
The fact is that there is a Pakistan case to be made on this issue. And it needs to be made to Pakistanis much more than to the rest of the world. It is a case that forcefully stresses that a world, and a Pakistan, without Osama Bin Laden in it is a vastly better world than one with him in it – this is a villain who orchestrated events that have left more than 30,000 Pakistanis dead in extremism and terrorism. It is a case that legitimately highlights the sacrifices that Pakistan and Pakistanis have, in fact, made in the fight against terrorism. Most importantly, it is a case that honestly analyzes what happened in Abbottabad – it is not a surprise that Osama Bin Laden was found in Pakistan and in a large urban area (just like nearly every other major Al Qaida figure captured) – but an explanation is owed on why Pakistani intelligence failed to make the connections that led to him, an explanation is owed on exactly what Pakistan’s official role in the final operation was (or was not), and an explanation is owed on exactly what Pakistan’s strategy on countering terrorism is, who is running it, and why it is not working well enough or fast enough.
In a country and an ‘establishment’ as divided as Pakistan, this cannot be an easy conversation; it is not supposed to be. It is time to ask honest and tough questions of everyone. It has long need a necessary conversation; now is the time to have it.

 

[canadian]

Beyond bin Laden

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Sana Saleem

Image via Wikipedia


This post first appeared on the Dawn Blog
So how do you react to the news of the world’s most wanted man being caught in a compound less than two kilometres away from the country’s finest military academy? Shocked? Embarrassed? Baffled? Difficult to say since most of us are still trying to make sense out of it all.
In the aftermath of one of the most dramatic manhunts in recent history, statements coming in from the Foreign Office left many questions unanswered. Both the military and the government appeared to be struggling with possible ways to deal with the situation. The initial statements suggested an intelligence failure from Pakistan’s end while the US announced a successful operation carried out by the CIA along with the US Navy SEALs.
Unsurprisingly, not many fell for the explanation. The fact that the Pakistani military – who have been fighting the war on terror for the past decade – were unaware of the world’s most dangerous man living right under their nose could only suggest two things: incompetence or malice. Neither of which are in anyway favorable to the country’s image or future. Fortunately, it became increasingly evident that the military was probably trying to do some damage control in an attempt to neutralise possible backlash. Even if we were to go by the statement that the Pakistani military did not take part in the operation itself, the fact that the operation was a collective effort is undeniable. There is no way a 40-minute gun battle went unnoticed just round the corner from the Kakul Military Academy.
The extent of the role played by the Pakistani military, whether limited to intelligence reporting only, might not be clear for now. But even that does not absolve us from the many questions that have been raised – how did Osama bin Laden get here? How long has he been living in Abbottabad? When was his presence first reported or were the authorities aware of his presence all along? If so, why did it take so long to execute the operation, and the list is endless. There is in fact, a lot to explain about what happened between Tora Bora and Abbottabad.
Obama, in his address,while announcing the death of bin Laden said that the operation was being planned for many months. Some news sources claim that first intelligence reports date back to April 2010. Dawn reports that Osama might have been killed by own guard rather than the US Navy SEALs. Questions have also been raised about his burial in the sea. At this point in time, when the story is still developing and we are yet to see DNA reports and photographic evidence of Osama’s death, these questions shall have to wait.
(The Christian Science Monitor answers some questions regarding the operation.)
These incidents and statements do not exist in a vacuum; the implications and repercussions of bin Laden’s capture and killing, are a grave reality. The initial statements that the military had no information on the operation led to a frenzy of queries in mainstream media. Television channels, specifically Urdu news channels resorted to calling bin Ladin a ‘shaheed,’ while a leading investigative journalist declared that bin Laden was in fact, not a terrorist. The analysis on bin Laden’s killing became more of a debate on the country’s sovereignty and whether foreign troops should be allowed to enter our territory and conduct operations. Some went as far as suggesting that bin Laden’s death meant an end to al Qaeda and therefore an end to the war on terror – all the while naively forgetting that al Qaeda was never a one-man army to begin with and that killing bin Laden would be more of an incentive for terror than an end to the war.
But that’s just our side of the story; the bigger picture puts Pakistan in a rather compromising state. As the world celebrates Osama’s death as a victory there’s little to celebrate for us. While we cannot deny the fact that Osama’s death is a milestone for the war on terror it is also inevitably the beginning of a new era of violence, terror and destruction in Pakistan. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan has already announced its’ retaliation.
Lest the world forgets: “As many as 12,580 people were killed across Pakistan in 2010 alone, as per (HRCP) report. 1,159 people were killed in 67 suicide attacks whereas US drones strikes were responsible for 957 extra-legal killings.”
As the facts about the operation that killed bin Laden unravel, we must brace ourselves to stand united against violence. No redemption here; not yet.