After a predictable wave of jingoistic euphoria, the death of Osama bin Laden has raised some troubling questions about Pakistan and discredited a lot of the previous conventional wisdom about his whereabouts. To summarize what we know:
- Bin Laden was not constantly on the move, but had stayed in his final location for several years.
- He was not in tribal areas near the Afghan border, but deep within Pakistan, not far from the capital.
- He was in fact still operationally involved with al-Qaeda. He was by no means so preoccupied with evading detection that he could not continue to act as leader.
Regarding the U.S. operation against Bin Laden, it should be clear this was a “kill” mission from the beginning, as the original plan was to destroy the compound with a missile attack. It is hardly credible that trained SEALs would take a head shot to incapacitate an unarmed man if “capture” was a primary objective, rather than a contingency. The U.S. probably wants to minimize blowback by downplaying the cold-blooded nature of the assassination. Most noteworthy is how Obama’s bold disregard for Pakistani sovereignty (as promised in 2007) is praised even by liberals, as his predecessor Bush succeeded in raising American tolerance of overt imperial posturing. The world is our playground, so it seems.
What of the Pakistanis? It is clear by now that, contrary to Sec. Clinton’s initial attempt to emphasize the cooperation of Pakistan, this had been an exclusively American operation for almost a year. The Pakistanis had no knowledge of CIA surveillance in Abbottabad, and they were given no advance notice of the SEAL operation. In fact, the only reason they found out at all was because one of the helicopters crashed. Even then, the SEALs were on the way back to Afghanistan by the time planes were able to scramble. No magical radar-evading or radar-jamming technology was needed, as the helicopters were shaped to leave almost no radar image if they fly low enough, and they could not be sighted visually at night.
Bin Laden certainly had a support network in Pakistan, and it is credible that this included current or former members of the Pakistani military and intelligence service, which are known to contain radical Islamic sympathizers. Still, the high command is of more moderate, secular leanings, which means there was certainly a major intelligence failure on some level if the leadership was unaware of Bin Laden’s presence. The sometimes clumsy surveillance methods of Pakistani intelligence are well attested. Still, the required level of incompetence is not so great as one might think, considering that fortified compounds are commonplace in that part of Pakistan, and that the Americans entertained doubts about the compound for nine months before deciding there was enough evidence to act. The only reason they even found the compound was because they knew the identity and location of Bin Laden’s courier, who took great precaution not to leave an electronic trail to the hideout. Any official Pakistani support received must have been at a low level, judging from the negligible number of armed guards.
As for the civilian government, there is little reason to doubt that Zardari had no knowledge of any coverup, but he is a relatively weak leader in a country dominated by its military establishment. More than three years after the assassination of his wife lifted him to the leadership of his party on a surge of sympathy, the current president has sought to distance himself from his corrupt past, which earned him the nickname of “Mr. Ten Percent,” only to find a more dangerous situation in Pakistan, where top-level terrorists can operate with near impunity, under the noses of the military and security establishment. He is in the difficult situation of simultaneously claiming ignorance and competence.
The U.S., for its part, may be losing its propaganda touch, judging from its weak attempts to spin the released Bin Laden videos. “He dyed his beard and watched himself on television? How vain!” (Either that or he was trying to remove time indicators from his videos and learn what information the press had on him.) “He wore a blanket because he was cold? How frail!” If this is really the best they can do, then there is not much left of the American propaganda machine that Goebbels so admired. Still, even in their prime, Americans have had little of that Roman virtue of recognizing valor in an adversary (apart from the Civil War, where the enemies were Americans). If all our enemies must be cowardly and weak, it is remarkable that we expect to be praised for our victories.