Leaked Bin Laden report raises awkward questions about Pakistani security apparatus

[Valin]

Globe & Mail:

 

Bizarre details aside that Osama bin Laden wore a cowboy hat to evade detection from U.S. satellites while walking in his compound and that he narrowly escaped capture when his car was pulled over for speeding the real force of the Abbottabad commission report is in its blunt critique of the Pakistani government and military establishment.

AFFAN CHOWDHRY

Jul. 09 2013

 

The investigation, which was commissioned by the previous Pakistani government and completed more than six months ago, is scathing in its criticism of how the worlds most-wanted fugitive was able to evade detection for nine years in Pakistan.

 

On Tuesday morning just 12 hours after the leaked 337-page report was published online by Al Jazeera English Pakistani news organizations and TV channels focused on allegations of ineptitude.

 

Ordinary Pakistanis, who have long-complained about incompetence within government and the military, will find the report by retired Pakistani judge Javed Iqbal unusually candid.

Its breathtakingly depressing, said Mosharraf Zaidi, political columnist and former foreign policy adviser to the foreign minister in the previous government.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Past as prologue: The Bin Laden dossier

Long-suppressed report finds Pakistani government was negligent, inefficient, and incompetent in the bin Laden affair.

Robert Grenier

7/9/13

 

If there were one, simple conclusion to be drawn from the report of the Pakistani commission established to investigate Operation Neptune Spear - the US raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011 - it would be that there are times when things are precisely as they appear. The long-suppressed Abbottabad Commission report has now emerged to provide a timely reminder of a truism which this author learned long ago through hard experience: When seeking to explain negative events, and given a choice between some grand conspiracy and simple incompetence, bet on incompetence every time.

 

Who would have guessed? Surely, few either in the US or Pakistan were prepared to believe that Osama bin Laden, easily the most wanted man in the world, could have lived for years with multiple wives and many children in the heart of a military town in Pakistan's settled areas, a mere kilometre from Pakistan's Military Academy, without anyone in Pakistani officialdom any the wiser.

 

And yet that is precisely what the Commission found. It is one of the great ironies of this affair that had the planners of the US raid had more faith in the passivity and incompetence of their Pakistani counterparts, they might have been willing to bring the Pakistanis at least partly into confidence and sought their assistance in raiding the compound in question, thus avoiding a huge public embarrassment for the Pakistanis. But the Americans had no such confidence: Faced with the clear risk of official Pakistani complicity in hiding bin Laden, they had no choice but to move against him unilaterally.

 

(Snip)

 

[Valin]