Pakistan's mysterious silence on Osama's death | |
| Raheel Khursheed |
At about 1 am Pakistan Standard Time, Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual), tweeted: 'Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).'
Sohaib, unwittingly, had put out the first live tweet about a super-secret US Special Forces operation that killed Osama Bin Laden.
The details of the operation slowly started to un-spool. Helicopters had circled in on the safe house in Abbotabad, three hours from Pakistan's capital Islamabad, where Osama was suspected to be hiding.
After a 40-minute fire fight, Osama was killed; shot in the head. His burial at sea marked an end to one of the biggest and longest manhunts for a terrorist in the history of mankind.
US President Barack Obama confirmed the news in a public address, sharing broad details of the operation. He said he authorised the hit on Sunday, after determining last week that the US had enough actionable intelligence to launch a targeted operation.
Questions remain, particularly on Pakistan's role in the killing.
Given that the operation was conducted in what has been described as a custom-built terrorist safe house, the nature of involvement of the Pakistani Military-Intelligence comes into question. The house is barely 100 meters from Pakistan's premier Military Academy at Kakul - Army chief Ashfaq Kayani visited it just ten days ago.
The Pakistani government's rather late and woolly statement that the Operation was "intelligence driven" and was "conducted by US forces in accordance with declared policy of US" did not answer the questions directly.
One Pakistani analyst told an Indian news channel that an "intense game of chess was being played since 9/11" and this had culminated in Osama's death in Abbotabad.
The Pakistani link in the operation isn't exactly clear. There is little doubt however that the Army and the ISI were involved in some way. Since the operation was carried out in a garrison town using helicopters that would definitely show up on Pakistani radars, it becomes all the more difficult to believe that the Pakistani government wasn't in the know.
President Obama acknowledged Pakistan's role in the operation. "It's important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding," Obama said.
The Pakistani government's distancing itself from the strike could then be a strategic decision to avoid local extremist blowback. Perhaps a direct application of the lessons learnt by the Pakistani Military-Intelligence complex from Islamabad's Lal Masjid siege in July 2007. The fall out of that assault, codenamed Operation Sunrise, resulted in a surge in suicide attacks that claimed thousands of lives within Pakistan.
Understandable then that by avoiding credit for Osama's death, the Pakistani government is actually denying the extremists a rallying point domestically. Inside Pakistan and elsewhere, the fear of revenge attacks by Al-Qaeda and Taliban is very real.
Even as the fall-out from the death of America's most wanted is analysed, the kill vastly improves Obama's re-election chances. The death of the Al-Qaeda founder also provides the US President with an opportunity to reassess American presence in the Af-Pak region through a strictly "need-based paradigm".
For domestic consumption, the war on terror has actually been won. We could see a troop pull out from Afghanistan and the American involvement in the area limited to minimal on ground presence and continued drone strikes.
Amid a deluge of news and analysis still coming in on Osama's death and what it means in the larger geo-political context, the only question that might remain unanswered forever is why and in return for what did the ISI give Osama up.
