By Peter Goodspeed - from the National Post
The death of the al-Qaeda leader has left a trail of diplomatic destruction in Pakistan
Spluttering with indignation and embarrassment, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is trying to change the topic.
Faced with a crescendo of criticism, at home and abroad, over the May 2 U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan, Mr. Gilani and his government have rejected all suggestions Pakistan played a dangerous and duplicitous game by protecting him.
The Prime Minister even told Time magazine he doubts U.S. claims bin Laden was in Pakistan for five or six years.
“Terrorists don’t normally stay in one place for more than 15 days,” he said, before shifting the discussion to Pakistan’s disappointment at a widening “trust deficit” that now dominates relations with the United States.
“Naturally, we wondered why [the U.S.] went unilaterally,” Mr. Gilani said. “If we’re fighting a war together, we have to work together. Even if there was credible and actionable information, then we should have done it jointly.”
The fact the world’s most wanted man, a terrorist mastermind who was supposed to be on the run, was living comfortably with three wives and 17 of his children in a custom-built fortress a few hundred metres from the gates of Pakistan’s top military academy has raised serious questions over the role of the country’s security services in protecting and supporting him.
“It is inconceivable that Osama could have lived so many years without a support system,” said John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism chief.
Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, pulled no punches when he told reporters: “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the target.”
And Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the U.S. Senate’s Intelligence Committee, suggested suspending billions of dollars of U.S. aid to Pakistan.
“Either we are going to be allies in fighting terror, or the relationship makes less and less sense to me…. To enable him to live in Pakistan, in a military community, for six years, I just don’t believe it was done without some form of complicity,” she said.
Inside Pakistan, Mr. Gilani’s government and the country’s military and intelligence services are being doubly pilloried for failing to find bin Laden and not preventing or even detecting the U.S. helicopter raid that penetrated the country’s air defences and flew unmolested to a target 60 kilometres from the nation’s capital.
“If we didn’t know, we are a failed state; if we did know, we are a rogue state,” columnist Cyril Almeida wrote in the newspaper Dawn. “But does anybody believe that we didn’t know?”
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