A year of fallout from bin Laden raid

“The passage of a year might have dulled the pain,” said Momin Iftikhar in The Nation (Pakistan), but “the anger and bitter feelings continue to rankle.” When U.S. Navy SEALs violated Pakistani territory to swoop in on a compound in Abbottabad and kill Osama bin Laden, Pakistan’s “sense of pride and patriotism” took a crushing blow. It was the second time in a matter of months that the U.S. had “walked roughshod” over Pakistani sovereignty. In January 2011, CIA contractor Raymond Davis murdered two people on the streets of Lahore, and he was “just one among a large contingent of U.S. intelligence operators who had, in an unauthorized and surreptitious manner, saturated the Pakistani landscape to run clandestine spy networks.” Nor was the bin Laden raid the last such event. Last November, U.S. forces launched an “inexplicable” attack on a Pakistani outpost, killing 24 soldiers. No wonder anti-Americanism is now “widespread and entrenched.”

This anti-Americanism is bin Laden’s triumph, said Hamid Mir in The News International. As the first Pakistani journalist to meet bin Laden and the last journalist to interview him, seven weeks after 9/11, I know what he wanted: to inflame the youths of Pakistan with hatred of America, to drive them to seek martyrdom. That dream is now coming true. The more Pakistanis the U.S. kills with its drone attacks and insulting violations of sovereignty, the more angry youths are available to be radicalized by al Qaida’s ideology. “If the U.S. and its allies want to prevent al Qaida attacks in future, they must throw their bad policies into the sea,” just as they dumped bin Laden’s body.

Nearly as bad as the violations has been the American attitude, said Sajjad Shaukat in the Peshawar Frontier Post. After the Abbottabad raid, U.S. officials suddenly forgot “all the sacrifices of Pakistan’s armed forces, which broke the backbone of the Taliban militants.” They ignored the arrests by our intelligence service, the ISI, of terrorists such as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Americans acted as if Osama’s presence in Abbottabad was somehow damning evidence of Pakistani complicity with al Qaida. How could the Pakistani military not have known that bin Laden was living for years near a military academy? they asked. One could ask the same thing about the world’s greatest intelligence service, with the vastest resources on the planet—how could the CIA not have known of 9/11? If we are to accept that the CIA was taken by surprise, why can’t the U.S. accept that the ISI was similarly duped?

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An apology could go a long way toward mending this broken relationship, said the Khaleej Times (United Arab Emirates) in an editorial. The U.S. doesn’t have to apologize for violating Pakistani sovereignty to take out bin Laden, of course. But why can’t it “say sorry” for killing the Pakistani soldiers last November? As the U.S. tries to extricate its forces from Afghanistan, it will need Pakistani cooperation. Stubbornness is a luxury it can’t afford.