Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani says
he wants to minimize U.S. military presence in Pakistan.
(Photo: Pakistan Leaders On-Line)
Around 30 seconds after the news was leaked about the killing of Osama bin Laden just ahead of President Obama's Sunday night announcement, the Twitterati were WTFing about Pakistan. How could a guy with a $25 million price on his head, the most notorious fugitive on the planet, manage to settle down in an affluent suburb within walking distance of Pakistan's West Point without anybody in the government knowing about it, or condoning it, or helping to make him comfortable and secure? Since then, the questioning has ramped up. But the administration, from John Brennan to Jay Carney to Leon Panetta, has been extremely cautious in its remarks, only
offering various versions of it's-a-complicated-relationship and we're-looking-into-it.
Today at the Aspen Institute, Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, gave us a bit more of the same, saying:
U.S. government officials are talking with the Pakistanis to try to understand “what they knew and what they didn’t know” with regard to Osama bin Laden hiding in plain sight at a one-acre compound about 35 miles north of the capital city of Islamabad.
“We have no definitive evidence at this point that they knew if Osama bin Laden was at this compound,” she said. ...
“[The killing of bin Laden] has demonstrated U.S. resolve, it has demonstrated U.S. capability, and I think that puts us in a very strong position both to pressure the al-Qaida network further, but also to incentivize further cooperation with our counterterrorism partners—not only Pakistan, but around the world,” Flournoy said. “This is a real moment of opportunity for us in making further gains against al-Qaida.”
According to the Associated Press, Flournoy said Pakistan must take "very concrete and visible steps to show their cooperation as a counterterrorism partner, because I do think that Congress will have to be convinced to sustain both civilian and military assistance to Pakistan."
That will probably take some doing. Both Democrats and Republicans are split on the issue. One problem, as investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and others have pointed out, is that walking away from Pakistan means walking away from Afghanistan. The key overland supply route for U.S. and other NATO troops in Afghanistan starts in the port city of Karachi. Given public exhaustion with the decade-old war in Afghanistan as well as various signals from Washington that the insertion of tens of thousands of troops begun in March 2009 might be reversed at a quicker pace than Gen. David Petraeus was hinting at just a few weeks ago, perhaps this particular element of the U.S.-Pakistan connection will no longer be an issue.
Pulling Afghanistan out of the equation wouldn't stop the need for the United States to be closely (militarily) involved with Pakistan, according to ultrahawk John Bolton, who—like many other neo-conservatives whose discredited and dangerous foreign policy views ought long ago to have been composted—has been getting the media's attentive assistance recently in offering more bad advice. Clearly telegraphing what the remnants of the Project for a New American Century will soon be saying in force, Bolton told Greta van Susteren Wednesday night that Pakistan is more important than Afghanistan.
Serious concerns certainly exist. But how did things get that way? Besides refusing to acknowledge Pakistan's long-term efforts to build its own nuclear arsenal, the U.S. took a very long time after the evidence was obvious to break A.Q. Khan's black-market nuclear-proliferation operation. In addition to Pakistan's nukes, there is its Inter-Services Intelligence operation, which has a long-standing connection with the CIA. Together they trained the Shah of Iran's dreaded Savak in the 1970s, and together they assisted the Afghan mujahideen in the Soviet war of the 1980s. Nobody questions that some radicals high in the ISI have close ties to the Taliban, which emerged out of the mujahideen once Moscow called its troops home. Moreover, ISI and the Pakistani military are joined at the elbow.
But there are countervailing currents as well. And that may explain some of the murky and contradictory details still coming to light about what happened Sunday. Although the administration says Pakistan was not told of the raid on Abbottabad in advance, the electricity to that area conveniently went off beforehand and came back on 15 minutes later. That could easily have been accomplished by well-bribed technicians on the ground who would have needed to know nothing about the mission for which they were providing cover. Or orders for a shut-off may have come from higher-up. Then there's the fact that the area near the hideout is filled with Pakistani military officers and cadets who might have signaled an alert, yet no Pakistani helicopters, soldiers or police arrived to contest what the SEAL team was doing for 40 minutes. And when the team left with Osama bin Laden's corpse, nobody from the U.S.-supplied Pakistani air force pursued them.
It takes no conspiracy-mongering to raise an eyebrow over such unlikely coincidences. It strains credulity to say no Pakistanis on the ground knew anything in advance. But it is impossible to know who those hypothetical persons might have been. And just as impossible to know whether somebody high up in the Pakistani military, or the ISI, knew for years where bin Laden was hiding or helped him do so. That's a question that may never be answered.
For its part, as Marian Wang at ProPublica reports, Pakistan has made desultory pledges to investigate how bin Laden could have hidden in plain sight, but some remarks from high officials about the raid have been more sharp-edged.
There was a bit of that today when Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani told a conference in Rawalpindi that U.S. military presence in the country would be minimized and "vowed to review relations if Pakistan's sovereignty is breached again":
Kayani made it very clear that any similar action, violating Pakistan's sovereignty, "will warrant a review on the level of military /intelligence cooperation with the US," Online added. ...
As regards the possibility of "similar hostile action against our strategic assets", the report said, the forum reaffirmed that, unlike an undefended civilian compound, "our strategic assets are well protected and an elaborate defensive mechanism is in place".
Taking a serious note of the assertions of the Indian military leadership about their capability to conduct similar operations, the conference "made it very clear that any misadventure of this kind will be responded to very strongly", Online reported.
While admitting own shortcomings in developing intelligence on the presence of bin Laden in Pakistan, the conference highlighted that the achievements of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), against Al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates in Pakistan, have no parallel.
Whether the general's comments are serious or just part of some complicated you-broke-our-sovereignty-wink-wink-nod-nod dance is anyone's guess.