What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden

[Ape Man]

Did not see this posted yet. Was interested in what people think. Seems plausible but on the other hand sourcing seems awful thin. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/ma...bin-laden.html

[Flagg]

Originally Posted by Brush Okie

This statement sums it al up right here IMHO



OBL was living right in the same neighborhood of the military elite and they knew nothing? Bullshit. ISI was hiding him.

Imagine the Soviets finding Hitler living a stone's throw from West Point Military Academy in 1955.

I reckon it's a pretty good article, but it failed to include even a mention of the Kunduz Airlift in November 2001.

Here's my question:

Why now?

She had the story in 2007(Pakistan harbouring and supporting the Afghan insurgency) and 2012(Pakistan harbouring and supporting OBL).

Why did it take 7+ years and 2+ years to go to print?

[kgoerz]

For 12 months there was a Marine team working/living out of a house. Just a few blocks from Osama's house, freaking hilarious.

[The Reaper]

They knew.

ISI knows pretty much everything happening in Pakistan, and most of it doesn't happen without their approval, tacit or otherwise.

TR

[Go Devil]

Originally Posted by Brush Okie

A full YEAR BEFORE they got him I had an Afgan tell me that it was known that ISI was hiding him somewhere in that area. My question was why did it take us so long to get him.

Follow the money.

[Airbornelawyer]

It is not simply about money.

Pakistan is an artificial state, carved out of British India as a homeland for Muslims. It was made up of a large number of ethnic groups who often do not get along - Sinds, Punjabis, Pushtuns, Baluchis, Mohajirs (Muslim refugees from other parts of India) and, until Bangladesh's independence, Bengalis. As in many artificial multiethnic states carved out of former European colonies, the military, and in Pakistan's case, the ISI, sees itself as the only true protector of the national identity, the only institution above parochial interests. And in Pakistan, Islam is the only common factor among the different ethnicities, so the ISI takes the Islamic part of Islamic Republic of Pakistan seriously.

When we were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, the ISI constantly undermined our efforts to provide support to those mujahideen who were most effective in fighting the Soviets. Instead, the ISI undermined royalist mujahideen parties who supported the former king, and other parties who were more Afghan nationalist than Islamist. The ISI even undermined Islamist parties whose base was among Afghanistans's Tajik population, as they feared the country might split, leaving a rump Pushtun nationalist state which could threaten Pakistan's own borders by pushing for a Greater Pushtunistan.

So the ISI funneled the bulk of aid to the mujahideen into the hands of their protege, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a violent and opportunistic man (as a young engineering student in Kabul, he was a Marxist before becoming an Islamist, and got his start as an Islamist by throwing acid in the faces of female students). But despite all the aid, Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami was never the most effective in the field, and even quickly split as Maulawi Mohammed Younus Khalis took his own fighters out of Hekmatyar's control, forming a second Hezb-e Islami. The Arab volunteers that came to fight affiliated with some of the mujahideen parties, including Hekmatyar's Hezb and the Saudi-funded Ittehad-e Islami of current Afghan presidential candidate Abd-ur-Rab-ur-Rasul Sayyaf. I should note, BTW, that I spent several years in the late 1980s involved with the war in Afghanistan, and never heard of Bin Laden until much later, as he was never an important player in that war. For that matter, neither was Hamid Karzai.

By the time the Communist regime in Kabul collapsed, and the mujahideen fell into infighting, the ISI had created another group they thought would be more ideologically pure and easier to control. These were Afghan refugees, young students from Islamist schools in the refugee camps in Pakistan, who had spent practically their whole adolescent and young adult lives undergoing Islamist indoctrination. As most of you know, they took their name from the Pashto word for "students" - Taliban.

It is not just money or a marriage of convenience. Al-Qa'ida, the Taliban and the ISI share a common ideology, and while the ISI is more focused locally, it also stretches its tendrils into its neighbors - not just Afghanistan, but also India and Iran. Al-Qai'da itself was specifically created to provide coordination and support to disparate Islamist movements who shared its ideology. It was to be the heart of a hydra whose heads were local terrorist groups in the Philippines, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, the Middle East, North and East Africa, the Sahel, and elsewhere. Which is why it always annoyed me when people, especially in the US media, would try to distinguish between groups like Al-Qa'ida in Iraq and the "real" Al-Qa'ida, as they were fundamentally missing the point about what Al-Qa'ida was meant to be.

Our intelligence agencies and political elites have been mostly turning a blind eye to the ISI and the Pakistani armed forces - which operate as a virtual state within a state - for thirty-odd years, well before 2007.

[twistedsquid]

Pakistan knew EVERYTHING about Bin Laden. However, they're unstable and have the bomb. So the U.S will pander to them.

[Dusty]

Conjecture based on the incident is moot if it wasn't actually him.

[Flagg]

Looks like the NYT article by Gall is part of a coordinated PR campaign for a book launch.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/i...w/32545791.cms

She mentions the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

Still waiting to see if she covers the Kunduz Airlift.

[Team Sergeant]

Hopefully someday America will realize that Pakistan, like Iran, is in fact an enemy of the United States.