Spearhead Analysis
President Obama said, “I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside Pakistan…Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan…
After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done.
But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding”.
President Obama’s statement makes it quite clear that the operation that killed Osama was a US operation authorised by the US President on the basis of intelligence developed by the US. Pakistan’s help is acknowledged but probably only in the context that Pakistan had granted US the access that gave it the capability to do all that it did.
The Corbett Report raises another question. Many leaders and media channels have pronounced his death on different occasions and the report cites many instances as early as Fox News in 2001 to Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf in 2002 etc. “In May 2009, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari confirmed that his “counterparts in the American intelligence agencies” hadn’t heard anything from Bin Laden in seven years and confirmed “I don’t think he’s alive.” Now in 2011, President Obama has added himself to the mix of people in positions of authority who have pronounced Osama Bin Laden dead. Some might charge that none of the previous reports had any credibility, but as it is now emerging that Osama’s body was buried at sea less than 12 hours after his death with no opportunity for any independent corroboration of his identity”.
Notwithstanding the doubt created by the Corbett Report the world has accepted that this ninth report of Osama’s death is authentic and credible. No doubt there is evidence available to confirm the disposal of his remains and that this will eventually surface if required. The question that is really the elephant in the room is whether Pakistan knew of Osama’s hideout and had not disclosed it or whether his discovery and elimination by the US on Pakistani soil was a complete surprise to them. An article by Steve Coll states that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this; it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case.
If one were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, one would be tempted to call a grand jury. Who owned the land on which the house was constructed? How was the land acquired, and from whom? Who designed the house, which seems to have been purpose-built to secure bin Laden? Who was the general contractor? Who installed the security systems? Who worked there? Are there witnesses who will now testify as to who visited the house, how often, and for what purpose?
The US Counter Terrorism Chief John Brennan has refused to rule out official Pakistan backing for Osama bin Laden and has said that Islamabad was only told of the raid that killed the Al-Qaeda leader after US forces had left Pakistani airspace; “we are looking right now at how he was able to hold out there for so long and whether or not there was any type of support system within Pakistan that allowed him to stay there”. It is in Pakistan’s interest that these matters be cleared up.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the entire episode is the impact that this will have on US-Pakistan relations. This could be an opportunity to put the relationship on a positive track by addressing each others concerns. For the US this implies looking beyond the transactional relationship that addresses immediate US interests of with drawing US/ISAF troops from Afghanistan. For Pakistan it means getting out of the past mindset and looking at this situation as an opportunity to forge a new relationship with India and Afghanistan keeping in view the economic benefits of cooperation and an end to conflict. Right now Pakistan sees an India-US- Afghan government alliance that is hostile to it and an internal environment that has multiple security, economic and political issues.
No doubt there will be repercussions from the Osama killing in the region and elsewhere because of Al-Qaeda’s wide dispersal world wide but beyond that is the potential of the new Pakistan-Afghanistan initiative for peace, the composite dialogue between India and Pakistan and the progress in the joint pipeline project through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Spearhead Research is a private centre for research and consultancy on security, headed by Jehangir Karamat. Spearhead analyses are the result of a collaborative effort and not attributable to a single individual.
