MAY 13, 2015 Foreign Policy
As Islamabad’s ambassador to Washington, I had an
intimate view of the Pakistani response to the SEAL Team 6 operation. But I
still have a few unanswered questions.
With a litany of unproved claims, veteran investigative journalist
Seymour Hersh has revived discussion about the circumstances in which al Qaeda
leader Osama bin Laden was discovered and killed in May 2011 in the Pakistani
garrison city of Abbottabad.
Some of Hersh’s assertions in a 10,000-word London Review of Books article border on
fantasy. He claims that bin Laden lived under the protection of Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was given up for reward money by one of the
agency’s officers, and was eventually eliminated in a U.S. raid covertly backed
by Pakistan’s army commander and ISI chief.
According to Hersh, the Americans “blackmailed” Pakistan’s generals into
helping them kill bin Laden but then stabbed them in the back for political
reasons by denying them any credit for assisting in the raid by Navy SEALs.
Instead of blaming ISI for sheltering bin Laden in Pakistan (which Hersh claims
it did), he points the finger at the Obama administration for not acknowledging
ISI’s role in the U.S. operation that killed the terrorist mastermind.
With the exception of the possibility
of a Pakistani “walk in” selling information about bin Laden’s location, the other details of Hersh’s story simply do not add up.
Hersh
may have his unnamed sources, but he clearly does not know how Pakistan works.
Hersh may have his unnamed sources, but
he clearly does not know how Pakistan works. If the ISI had hidden bin Laden
for five years, it would not have cooperated in the U.S. operation to kill him
without demanding a serious quid pro quo.
Hersh
explains the Obama administration’s eagerness to claim sole credit for finding
and killing bin Laden in terms of domestic U.S. politics. But he offers no
explanation as to why, after covertly helping the Americans, Pakistan’s
generals would keep quiet about their role. The veteran reporter alludes to the
idea that this might have been because of bin Laden’s popularity among the
Pakistani public. But by 2011, bin Laden was no longer that popular — and in
any case Pakistan’s military leaders have consistently ignored public opinion
to ensure the flow of American aid. Hersh’s suggestion that Pakistan’s generals
covertly helped Americans eliminate bin Laden simply to maintain the flow of
U.S. dollars to the country — but kept it secret so as not to incur the wrath
of the Pakistani street — does not hold water.
For
several years before the bin Laden raid, Pakistan’s military and the ISI had
been criticized in the U.S. media and Congress for double-dealing in the fight
against terrorism. If the ISI had protected bin Laden (or held him prisoner)
for five years before being found out by the Americans, the United States would
have increased its leverage by going public with accusations of hiding bin
Laden. But there’s no evidence that Washington held Islamabad’s feet to the
fire.
If,
however, a backroom deal had been negotiated to secure Pakistani cooperation in
the raid on Abbottabad in return for U.S. silence, the ISI would have demanded
some glory for its cooperation. Facilitating the raid, as narrated by Hersh,
would have provided Pakistan’s military and ISI an opportunity to redeem
themselves in American eyes. Hersh wants us to believe an entirely improbably
scenario. According to him, Obama’s political requirements denied Pakistanis
any credit and senior generals in Islamabad simply accepted that without
pushing back.
Was the “walk-in” real?
To
this day, there is no solid evidence of Pakistanis at the highest level of
government knowing about bin Laden being in Pakistan — though there have been
widespread suspicions. If, after being tipped off by a rogue Pakistani
intelligence officer looking for personal reward, the United States planned a
raid with covert help from Pakistani intelligence, why didn’t the
cooperating Pakistani officials demand credit for assisting in targeting bin
Laden in order to mitigate the bad press for previously
protecting him? And what prevented the U.S. government from publicly
acknowledging that they knew bin Laden had been officially protected? Was the
need to keep the relationship with Islamabad on solid footing so important that
the Obama administration would risk telling a lie this massive?
Hersh’s story is based on the
fundamental premise that the U.S. government had bad intentions, including in
their interactions with the Pakistan Army and the ISI. In an interview with the Pakistani
newspaper Dawn,
Hersh defends Pakistan’s generals. “Pakistan has a good army,
not a bad army,” he declared, adding that the Obama administration’s cover
story made the Pakistan army look incompetent because it didn’t know that bin
Laden was residing in a garrison town just two miles from the country’s main
military academy. But he still does not offer an explanation for why the
Pakistan Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, and ISI head, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja
Pasha, went along with the cover story.
The only point in Hersh’s story that
seems plausible relates to the Pakistani officer who tipped off the Americans
about bin Laden’s location. Further reporting by AFP and a story by NBC affirm the role of a Pakistani
defector — though NBC later amended its story to clarify that while the
defector provided information, it didn’t lead to finding bin Laden. The rumor
that the CIA learned about bin Laden’s location through an ISI officer has been
around since the Abbottabad raid. But I’ve also heard another version of the
same story from Pakistani officials.
According to this version, the ISI
officer only facilitated the CIA’s on-ground operation in Abbottabad after the U.S. spy agency started planning an operation based on
intelligence obtained through other means. The CIA relocated the Pakistani
officer — not because he was the man who tipped them off on bin Laden’s
location — but because he acted without authority from his superiors in
enabling the CIA to conduct an operation on Pakistani soil.
The
NBC story also repeats the suspicion of U.S. officials — about Pakistani
complicity in hiding bin Laden — though, obviously, there isn’t enough evidence
for the U.S. government to formally and publicly make that charge. As a witness
to Pakistan’s response after the bin Laden raid I find it difficult to believe
Hersh’s conspiracy theory about so many people in both the U.S. and Pakistani
governments and militaries telling a big coordinated lie.
In the middle of a diplomatic dance
I
was serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States at the time of the
SEAL raid in Abbottabad. I was on my way to Islamabad via London and Dubai when
the operation took place; I first found out about it upon landing at Heathrow
airport in the early morning of May 2, 2011. My superiors in Islamabad
instructed me to turn around immediately. I was back in Washington by around 5
p.m. local time.
My
instructions were clear: to ensure that the U.S. government, Congress, and the
media did not blame Pakistan’s government, armed forces, or intelligence
services for allowing Osama bin Laden’s presence in the country, as that would
have been a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1267 and 1373. My
bosses, both civilian and military, were obviously concerned that Pakistan
would be taken to task. But nothing in the conduct of Generals Kayani and Pasha
(both of whom later forced me to resign as ambassador) hinted at their
collusion with the U.S. in the Abbottabad raid.
The
generals were embarrassed, both over bin Laden having being found in Pakistan
and the U.S. taking place raid without knowledge or approval.
The generals were embarrassed, both
over bin Laden having being found in Pakistan and the U.S. taking place raid
without knowledge or approval. They attributed their lack of
response to the incursion by U.S. helicopters from Afghanistan to the absence
of adequate radar coverage on the western border — a symptom of Pakistan’s view
of India as the only threat to its national security. Kayani and Pasha also
wanted to ensure that there would be no reprisals against Pakistan over
allegations of official complicity in hiding bin Laden.
A bevy of damage diplomacy followed. A
few days after the Abbottabad raid, then-chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee John Kerry visited Islamabad. Gen. Kayani was eager during
that visit for a statement by the U.S. senator emphasizing Pakistan’s position
as an American ally in the war against terrorism. Kerry agreed to the
reassuring language proposed by Kayani. The Kerry visit was followed by a visit
by Pasha to Washington during which he was keen to convince the CIA that the
ISI had no knowledge of bin Laden being in Pakistan. In a meeting with CIA
Director Leon Panetta, Pasha listed the CIA’s own failures over the years to
advance his argument that intelligence gathering is often imperfect and that
the enemy can hide within plain sight.
Notwithstanding my own disagreements
with Kayani and Pasha, I found no reason to believe that either general was
feigning ignorance or outrage while being secretly in league with the
Americans. The Foreign Office also asked me to protest the violation of
Pakistan’s sovereignty by U.S. forces in conducting the operation and to point
out how it violated the norms of international conduct between two sovereign
countries that were, at least officially, allies. I didn’t make much headway.
The U.S. officials I interacted with
were not only unwilling to apologize for violating Pakistani sovereignty but
demanded that Islamabad cooperate in giving Americans access to data and
persons found at the house in Abbottabad where the raid was conducted. They
also demanded the return of the wreckage of the stealth helicopter that had
been damaged and left behind during the operation. Pakistan handed over the
wreckage a few days later, though not without prodding by the Chairman of Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen.
Security Council cover
Immediately after the raid, the U.S.
government persuaded the president of the U.N. Security Council to issue a statement,
“welcoming [the] end of Osama bin Laden’s ability to perpetrate terrorist
acts.” Obama administration officials I spoke with pointed to UNSC resolutions
and this statement by the Security Council president to justify their
unilateral action in Abbottabad in disregard of Pakistani sovereignty.
Pakistan’s protests about violation of
its sovereignty and against the U.N. Security Council president’s statement
came within hours of the Abbottabad raid. Our side was stunned because it had
not been kept in the loop. At the United Nations, the Security Council
president was busy listing justifications under international law for the
violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. But none of these responses would have
occurred if, as Hersh says, the cover story about the unilateral raid had been
“manufactured” in the White House just two hours after the raid, in a cynical
ploy to help Obama’s re-election bid.
On the evening of May 2, I was interviewed on CNN. There I made what
remains a valid point: I said that it was obvious someone in Pakistan protected Osama bin Laden. The question was to
determine whether bin Laden’s support system lay “within the government and the
state of Pakistan or within the society of Pakistan.” I had asked for “a full
inquiry into finding out why our intelligence services were not able to track
him earlier.”
I never got an answer to my question.
Pakistan created a commission that conducted its hearings in a non-transparent
manner and declined to publish its findings. The Obama administration went back
to business-as-usual with Pakistan — without insisting or pushing Islamabad for
answers on the tough questions about bin Laden’s stay in Pakistan from 2006 to
2011. I understand how the failure of both Washington and Islamabad to disclose
a more complete understanding of what transpired in the years leading up to the
raid feeds conspiracy theories and the presumption that something is fishy.
But it is this failure — explaining bin
Laden’s presence in Pakistan, not the elaborate conspiracies Hersh alleges on
the say-so of a single retired U.S. counterterrorism official — which has been
a major disservice to truth.
Both the people of Pakistan and the
people of the United States would benefit from detailed answers to questions
about bin Laden’s support network in Pakistan. But don’t hold your breath. It
might not be in either Islamabad’s or Washington’s interest to wake sleeping
dogs.
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