Why the U.S. Acted Alone

[WestVirginiaRebel]

The Daily Beast:

Islamabad’s Al Qaeda allies complicated the hunt for Public Enemy No. 1. Christopher Dickey on how the U.S. went over the heads of bin Laden's Pakistan protectors. Plus, full coverage of bin Laden’s death.

Osama bin Laden’s cave turned out to be a mansion. The desolate mountains where he was hiding proved, in the end, to be the pleasant little hill town of Abbottabad, nearly 80 miles from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. He’s been holed up, and on Sunday was at last gunned down, in the biggest house around. He lived with relatives and an entourage behind high walls topped with barbed wire, in a community that’s also home to several Pakistani army units. A military academy is just a few hundred yards down the road.

“There aren’t that many six-foot-plus Arabs walking around that town,” says M.J. Gohel of the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London. “Even if you buy a donkey there it creates a stir. So how could the Pakistani military not know about it?”

We shouldn’t be surprised. Several of the top Al Qaeda bad guys now at Guantánamo were captured deep inside Pakistani territory. And more often than not, they’d been living quite comfortably. “They’re not being caught in some haystack on the border,” Gohel told me back in 2004. Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda’s gatekeeper for new recruits and a planner of terrorist operations, got nailed in Faisalabad in 2002; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11, was dragged out of bed in the garrison city of Rawalpindi in 2003; Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, since convicted by a U.S. court for his role in the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Africa and now serving a life sentence in the United States, was grabbed in Gujrat in 2004. In fact, this is not news to U.S. intelligence officials. The overt and covert war along Pakistan's northwest frontier is important for Afghanistan and American soldiers there. Some mid-level Al Qaeda commanders reportedly have been killed by drone attacks there. But for years, American analysts have suspected that Bin Laden enjoyed the same kind of comforts as his colleagues had had deep in Pakistan's cities thanks to protection from parts of the Pakistani government and its Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, the infamous ISI. American operatives privately voiced suspicions that Bin Laden’s protectors either sympathized with him or saw him as the ultimate bargaining chip, or both.
________

Well, now we don't need their "Help" anymore...