BY UMAR FAROOQ
Pakistan’s leaked bin Laden report proves that the country’s vaunted spy agency is either shockingly inept or duplicitous. Or both.
"Everyone, including the United States, thought Osama bin Laden was no longer alive." That was the explanation senior Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officials gave when asked how the world's most-wanted man had eluded them for a decade. But members of a Pakistani government commission charged with investigating the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden didn't buy it, and they said so in a remarkably candid 336-page report published by Al Jazeera this week.
The report, written by a four-man panel that included a retired supreme court judge and general, paints an alarming picture of Pakistan's storied spy agency -- one that hints strongly that ISI is either shockingly inept or duplicitous, or both. The members of the commission were given sweeping authority, and they seem to have used it in a refreshingly thorough manner, summoning more than two hundred witnesses, including Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of ISI and one of the most powerful men in Pakistan.
The report -- which took nine months to produce and another 15 to be leaked -- goes well beyond examining bin Laden's presence in the country, questioning the wisdom of delegating Pakistan's entire counterterrorism effort to a single, secret, military agency that is too proud to share its burden with anyone else.
At a time when much of the domestic outrage over the raid centers around the Pakistani military's inability to defend against the American incursion, the commission turned the question on its head, saying the best defense would have been capturing al Qaeda's leader a long time ago.
Refusing to rule out "some degree of connivance inside or outside the government," the commission places the blame for failing to find bin Laden on the ISI. The agency's "naivete and its lack of commitment to eradicating organized extremism, ignorance and violence," the report says, "is the single biggest threat to Pakistan."
At times literary in its retelling, the report gives us the clearest picture so far of what life was like for the 9/11 mastermind in the years leading up to his spectacular demise. Bin Laden was found in an expansive three-story home -- complete with 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire -- situated less than a mile from Kakul, the country's top military academy.
The home's size and placement were not lost on the commission, which questioned why it never came under suspicion so close to the Kakul academy. Pakistan's top military officials, constant targets of al Qaeda and the Taliban, must have passed by the home on a regular basis. Surely, someone in charge of their security detail must have made a mental note to look into what paranoid Pakistani lived in that fortress.
The house had four separate electricity and gas connections, an illegal third story, and its walls were well beyond the maximum height allowed by the cantonment, the military housing scheme the house was situated in. The owners also never paid their taxes, and bin Laden's two handlers, brothers Ibrahim and Abrar, used fabricated identities. All of this should have raised red flags -- except that Pakistan is notorious for its failure to enforce the law.
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