THE ‘KHANS’ NOBODY KNEW
Peter Oborne
The Telegraph, May 4, 2011
Nobody could fault them. The Khans were good neighbours, always polite, and more than a cut above the rest. They spoke perfect Pashtu—the language of Pakistan’s unruly tribal areas—in a cultivated, urban accent. They were careful to pay their bills on time and popular with local shopkeepers.
Women and children came and went, travelling mostly in a red Suzuki van. The family were well off, telling locals that they had made their money trading gold. Certainly, they were reclusive. The imposing house in Abbottabad had high walls and was fortified by barbed wire. They never handed out their phone numbers. There were no telephones in the house, and no Internet. The house did not have satellite TV—an obligatory feature of any house of any size in Pakistan. The Khans even burned their own rubbish, leaving no traces of what they had consumed.
When children playing cricket knocked balls into their compound they were never allowed in to find them. Instead the Khans would pay them 100 rupees as compensation.
But nobody made anything of it. Neighbours simply assumed that the head of the household, who called himself Arshad Khan, had, like many other Pakistan businessmen, made some powerful enemies on his road to riches.
Now they know that the secret the “Khans” were hiding was Osama bin Laden, and “Mr Khan” was in all likelihood one of his most trusted couriers, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.…
Surveying the scene, it is impossible to understand how the mysterious and aloof Khan family eluded the security experts of the Pakistan army and intelligence services.… Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan, even disclosed that he jogged regularly past the compound whenever he visited Abbottabad.…
It is likely that, inadvertently or by design, it was the Khans who betrayed bin Laden. The U.S. claimed that the couriers were spotted on one of their trips and followed. But many in Abbottabad have a different theory.
Many I spoke to believed that the feared ISI—the intelligence arm of the Pakistan state—must have known that the Khans’ safe house harboured the world’s most wanted man. In the end bin Laden may have been turned in [as part of] a grand bargain between America and Pakistan.…
THE TWO FACES OF PAKISTAN
Michael Hirsh
National Journal, May 5, 2011
“We are with you unstintingly.” Those were the words that then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said to the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, just after 9/11. Musharraf’s promise proved to be largely a lie—but not entirely untrue. Ever since then, whether the Pakistani regime was autocratic or democratic, Islamabad has played a well-thought-out double game with the United States that’s involved handing over some jihadis and protecting others for Pakistan’s own purposes.
And what of the biggest quarry of all—Osama bin Laden? Is there some way of explaining how the al-Qaida leader could spend the last six years ensconced in a large and obtrusive villa in Abbottabad, surrounded by the Pakistani military, without anyone in Pakistani officialdom knowing about it?
No, there probably isn’t—and in many ways it’s unsurprising that if the Pakistani authorities knew bin Laden was there, his whereabouts might have been, shall we say, closely held. CIA officials have known for years that when it came to the really big game, such as bin Laden, Pakistani authorities were unlikely to be cooperative: They feared that backlash from the Muslim world and their own society would be too great if they were seen as playing stooges to the Americans and violating Pashtun tribal loyalties.
“My bet is they knew he was there,” Chamberlin [said recently]. “The fear of backlash is part of it. And Pashtun culture is you don’t give up people who’ve helped you, and he goes back to 1980s,” when the mujahideen movement bin Laden was a part of served both U.S. and Pakistani interests against the Soviets.
Pakistan occupies a unique position in American foreign policy. “Any other country, we’d be calling them a state sponsor of terrorism,” said a former senior U.S. diplomat. “It’s inconceivable that we give $3 billion a year to a country that would harbor Osama bin Laden.”
Why does Washington do this—and why is Washington virtually certain to continue providing aid to Pakistan despite the hue and cry in Congress over the bin Laden news? Because Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country that is still mainly secular. Washington has little choice but to support those secular strains and tamp down the Islamist ones, and it can’t do this without the help of the Pakistani government, military, and intelligence apparatus, though it is shot through with Islamist sympathizers.
Critics such as Gary Schroen, the former CIA station chief in neighboring Afghanistan, have noted the Pakistani pattern of giving up second-rate Taliban or al-Qaida leaders only to ameliorate American mistrust, then retreating. To maintain his power, Musharraf cut deals with the religious parties that gave extremists succor, in particular the coalition called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA, or United Action Committee). In the last decade it was Pakistan’s rogue chief nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan (who is still under government protection)—not Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Kim Jong Il—who was the most dangerous liaison to would-be nuclear terrorists.
At the same time the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus has grown more cooperative in certain areas as they have become convinced the jihadists they once nurtured as an Islamist counterweight to their fearsome rival, India, have also turned against them. Pakistan helped capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational kingpin of 9/11, in 2003, and in the years since it has turned over other leading al-Qaida figures. This was partly the result of foolish overreaching by the extremists. As Taliban forces moved into Swat Valley they sought to impose harsh Islamic law and sowed indiscriminate violence that left a bitter taste, prompting support when Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kayani directed a successful offensive there. Ironically, Pakistani authorities grew so consumed by their own homegrown threats that they may have paid less attention to al-Qaida figures such as bin Laden in their midst.…
All of which helps to explain why President Obama’s counterterrorism coordinator, John Brennan, declared on Monday: “Pakistan has been responsible for capturing and killing more terrorists inside of Pakistan than any country, and it’s by a wide margin. And there have been many, many brave Pakistani soldiers, security officials, as well as citizens, who have given their lives because of the terrorism scourge in that country.”
One big clue into understanding Pakistan’s double game can be found in the scholarly work of the country’s current ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani. In 2005, when he was still considered a dissident to Musharraf’s regime, Haqqani published a book, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, which said radical Islamists would always have a safe haven inside the country as long as military strongmen ran Islamabad. Haqqani argued that Pakistani leaders going back to the nation’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Pakistani generals have constantly used the unifying principle of Islam and the perceived threat from Hindu India to build a national identity. This helps explain everything from the military’s decades-old effort to build up an Islamist insurgency in disputed Kashmir to Islamabad’s successful strategy of aiding and building up the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan during the 1990s.
But it has proved to be something of a Faustian bargain. Many jihadists the Pakistanis once considered “theirs” have since aligned themselves with the Taliban or al-Qaida, and even launched plots against Kayani and other Pakistani officials. Because the Pakistani military’s main strategic imperative continues to be building counterweights to India—including Islamist insurgents—only democracy “can gradually wean the country from Islamic extremism,” Haqqani wrote.
Haqqani’s thesis is still untested, to a degree. While Musharraf has been ousted and Pakistan is nominally democratic under President Asif Ali Zardari—the husband of assassinated Pakistan Peoples Party leader Benazir Bhutto—the country is still effectively ruled by the military. And the Pakistani military’s interests haven’t changed.
OSAMA BIN LADEN AND DANGEROUS DOUBLE GAMES
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
Pajamas Media, May 3, 2011
Americans have had a rude awakening. The military’s liquidation of Osama bin Laden a few days ago in a million-dollar, heavily secured compound close by a Pakistani military academy has brought home to many what had previously been understood by only a few: One of the nations officially deemed a key ally in the so-called “War on Terror” has been playing us for fools.
It is called a double game and here’s how you play it: First, you cooperate in some respects with the United States in countering the “terrorists” the Americans seek to capture, kill, or at least neutralize. In return, you get paid handsomely for it—in the case of Pakistan, that translates into an annual U.S. allotment of some $3 billion and access to American intelligence, weapons, and political support. In parallel, however, you systematically sabotage the whole effort by cooperating extensively with our enemies, some of whom you support, more or less directly.
Pakistan happens to be a particularly egregious example of the phenomenon. For decades, Pakistani officials—notably in Islamabad’s intelligence agency, the ISI—have been tied to and supportive of Islamists at home and in neighboring nations. Without such assistance, the international campaign led by the United States aimed at liberating and securing Afghanistan would likely have been considerably more successful and vastly less costly.
Bin Laden’s hiding-in-plain-sight lair 35 miles from the Pakistani capital has become the most glaring example of an endemic problem: the safe havens and other forms of protection Pakistan has afforded to those seeking to murder Americans. Denials, such as that of the Pakistani president in Monday’s Washington Post, are, to put it charitably, unpersuasive.
To varying degrees, U.S. allies elsewhere in the so-called “Muslim world” have also engaged in double games with us. For example, the Saudis have helped counter al-Qaeda inside their kingdom, even as they fund its operations and those of others, like the Muslim Brotherhood, who share the violent jihadists’ goal of imposing the politico-military-legal program known as shariah under a global ruler, the caliph.
Similarly, throughout his 30-year rule, Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak maintained a cold peace with Israel and “cooperated” by sharing terrorism-related intelligence, for which his country received lavish U.S. funding and advanced armaments. Yet, he also allowed his state-controlled media, mosques, and educational system to fan rabid anti-Semitism and anti-Western sentiment. Thanks in part to this indoctrination, Egypt’s “awakening” is likely to translate into an open-ended nightmare, as the Brotherhood parlays such popular attitudes into an electoral mandate and then begins enforcing shariah.
Unfortunately, the dangers associated with relying upon such manifestly unreliable “allies” are greatly compounded by official Washington’s own version of the double game. At the same time successive administrations have waged what President Obama called Sunday “the war against al-Qaeda,” cabinet officers, law enforcement personnel, military leaders, and intelligence operatives have systematically engaged in “outreach” to the Muslim-American community via known U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood front organizations. In so doing, these groups have been legitimated, enabled to engage in successful influence operations, and emboldened in their bid to achieve the same end-state to which al-Qaeda and other violent jihadists aspire: our submission to shariah.
Now, we know (from, among other sources, evidence entered into evidence uncontested in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism conspiracy trial in Texas) that the Brotherhood in the United States has as its mission “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Accordingly, after the first round of prosecutions in that case were successfully concluded, the U.S. attorney in Dallas sought permission from the Justice Department to indict several senior Muslim Brotherhood figures who had been previously listed as unindicted co-conspirators.
Washington’s version of the double game is evident in the Justice Department’s rejection of that request. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged that his department had taken that step, but claimed that he was simply following the lead of the Bush administration before him. The fact that the Bush team was also guilty of playing the double game is no excuse. That is especially the case since, as former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy has decisively explained, in the aftermath of the convictions of the first five Holy Land defendants, the case for charging Omar Ahmed of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other alleged co-conspirators is considerably stronger today than it was back in 2004.
Abraham Lincoln famously observed that “a house divided cannot stand.” The same can be said of a government or nation that seeks simultaneously to defeat an enemy and assist it. The United States cannot safely rely on other nations who behave in that fashion. And it certainly cannot continue to behave that way itself.
TRUST PAKISTAN AT YOUR OWN RISK
Matt Gurney
National Post, May 5, 2011
The more we learn about the events that led up to the death of Osama bin Laden, the more frightening it becomes to recall Pakistan is a nuclear power.
That bin Laden was found living in relative luxury a stone’s throw from the Pakistani military’s elite training academy, in a garrison town no less, forces the West to reconsider whether we have any friends inside the Pakistani government and security apparatus at all.
Typically, the military has been considered the most reliable, pro-Western element of the Pakistani power structure, in contrast with the thoroughly Islamist and pro-Taliban intelligence services and the weak civilian government trapped in between.
We know better now. It is not believable that the world’s most-wanted man could live in the heart of a military town, only 1,000 metres from the Kakul academy (Pakistan’s West Point), for years without being detected.
Pakistan obviously cannot admit to outright complicity in bin Laden’s 10-year flight from justice, but its only other defence is to claim its military—a valued cultural institution—is incompetent, and the troops given the job of securing the country’s borders had no idea what was in their backyard.
In its embarrassment, it has opted for silence, or to pointing out no one else outside Pakistan knew where he was, either.
Whether the Pakistani military is disloyal or inept, neither option is good for the West. In recent years, major activity has been noted at many of the country’s nuclear weapons facilities, as it is believed to be enlarging and modernizing its stockpile of nuclear warheads.
Estimates about the size of its arsenal put it at doubling to 100-200 bombs. The bombs themselves are, thanks to modernization, becoming smaller and more powerful. It is likely Pakistani nuclear weapons are now capable of achieving yields in the hundreds of kilotons—many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, and certainly capable of hollowing out any major city.
Pakistan has repeatedly tried to reassure the world its arsenal is safe and secure.
A 2008 U.S. congressional report noted the weapons are stored in secure underground facilities, unassembled and separate from their launchers. While that might sound comforting, the fact remains the security of these weapons rests in the hands of those who somehow missed bin Laden’s mansion just down the street from their training facility and who get their information from the same intelligence services that consider the Taliban a strategic asset, not an enemy.
It’s hard for the Pakistanis to ask for our trust when the only way to avoid admitting guilt is to play dumb.
It is obvious why Pakistan feels it needs nuclear weapons—only through their power can they hope to stave off an attack by the much more economically and militarily powerful Indians. They will never give them up. But the risk posed by leaving the ultimate weapon in such obviously unreliable hands cannot be overstated.
For the sake of the world’s safety, we must hope the United States keeps a close eye on where these weapons are stored and is prepared to do what’s necessary to prevent them from ever falling into the wrong hands…those who would avenge bin Laden or strike out at those who have humiliated the country before the world.
