How they see us: Embarrassing bin Laden details

last updated 8 January 2015

The caves were a red herring, said the Karachi Dawn. It turns out that Osama bin Laden didn’t hide for long in the mountains of Afghanistan. After being routed from Tora Bora in 2001, the al Qaida leader made his way to Pakistan, and stayed here until he was killed last year by U.S. Navy SEALs. We know this from the testimony of his youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah. She told Pakistani interrogators that she and bin Laden first went to a Pakistani border town, then moved around frequently in South Waziristan. In 2004, they stayed in Shangla for a few months, then moved to Haripur, before finally, in 2005, settling in Abbottabad, a town just 30 miles from Islamabad that is home to a large military base. How could the world’s most-wanted terrorist move from city to city in Pakistan? “Who facilitated his movement and his rest stops?” General Pervez Musharraf, who was president for most of that time, always insisted bin Laden was not in Pakistan. Did he really believe that? Were the civilian and military intelligence services both so supremely incompetent that they didn’t notice the many moves of the bin Laden entourage? That would be an inexcusable oversight. But “if the failure had more to do with complicity than incompetence, it becomes even more important to discover how and why our institutions were penetrated.”

Either way, these revelations are “a huge embarrassment,” said The News. And there could well be more to come. A court ruled this week that the bin Laden widows and children are to be deported back to their countries of origin, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Since both of those states are U.S. allies, the women “could find themselves closely questioned by proxies, if not the Americans themselves.” What other details might they reveal about their lives in Pakistan, such as who knew they were here? “Because it is simply inconceivable that they lived in a hermetically sealed bubble for the best part of a decade.” It’s highly possible that the widows will “embarrass us further when they land in CIA hands.”

Yet the government doesn’t seem remotely interested in getting to the bottom of this monumental intelligence failure, said The Express Tribune. By the end, the Abbottabad compound was a very crowded place. Bin Laden lived there with three of his wives, eight of his children (including two born in Pakistan), and five of his grandchildren. His Pakistani couriers also lived on the premises with their wives and kids. But rather than identifying and punishing the people who allowed the Abbottabad compound to flourish, the government is busying itself investigating American violations of Pakistan’s sovereignty. It seems incapable, or unwilling, to recognize a politically inconvenient truth: that “Osama’s relatively comfortable sojourn in Pakistan represents a far greater violation of our own sovereignty than the Navy SEALs raid that killed him.”