Abbottabad panel plays safe on Pak complicity
Instead of exposing sections of the Pakistani establishment for being an integral part of the conspiracy to protect Osama bin laden, the Abbottabad Commission has painted them as merely inefficient public servants. The high-powered judicial panel that investigated the May 2, 2011, unilateral American raid on Osama bin laden's house in Abbottabad, took the safe view that, when compared to complicity, incompetence is the lesser crime. It is simply not a convincing way forward.
The world's most wanted terrorist lived in a high-security fortress less than a mile away from the Kakul military academy for more than five years, and it is inconceivable that the authorities, no matter how inept and apathetic, knew nothing about anything at all. If the report is to be believed, the closest that the Pakistani state ever got to Osama bin laden was sometime in 2002, when his car was flagged down for speeding in the Swat region where the Al Qaeda chief lived with his family for a few years before settling down in Abbottabad in 2005.
That one traffic policeman could have potentially closed what eventually became a decade-long, global, manhunt costing billions of dollars, makes for an interesting anecdote. But it does nothing to credibly explain the Pakistani establishment’s, particularly the military's, claimed ignorance about the terrorist at residence. The land for the Abbottabad house was bought on fake identity papers, the third floor was raised illegally, the occupants of the house paid no taxes, and they were rarely if ever seen in public. Most striking of all, the house had excessive security measures even when factoring its location in a high-security garrison town. Yet, none of these attracted anybody's attention — not even during the many security sweeps that were conducted to sanitise the area when dignitaries visited the nearby military academy. This, the Commission agrees, beggars belief, but the panel still does not conclude on possible official connivance.
Nevertheless, the Abbottabad Commission's report is not only about obfuscation and smokescreens for the Army-ISI combine. In certain sections, the 336-page report does raise important questions, and not all of its conclusions are flawed. For instance, the Commission points out that even after the US raid, the local police had failed to seal the area and take charge of the crime scene. Similarly, the report also questioned the ISI about Bali bomber Umar Patek, who was arrested in Abbottabad in January 2011, and when it got little by way of cooperation from officials of the spy agency, the Commission did not hesitate to record its displeasure. The report says that the Indonesian jihadi was possibly assisted by the same Al Qaeda network that helped bin laden find a home in Pakistan. Thus, the former's interrogation should have turned up “actionable intelligence”. Finally, the Commission has also criticised the ISI for its refusal to share intelligence with the local police, and even laughs at it for giving up the search on bin laden because the ISI naively believed that the US had done the same — when in reality, the Americans had merely decided to keep the Pakistanis out of the loop. Eventually, the Commission’s report confirms India’s and much of the world’s worst fears about Pakistan turning into a haven for terrorists.