Pakistan Before and After Osama

Imtiaz Gul

Description

Explicating the pre- and post-Bin Laden Pakistan, Imtiaz Gul relooks at questions plaguing the nation: Why and how this country became home to the world’s most wanted terrorist? Bin Laden’s escape from the Tora Bora Mountains in Eastern Afghanistan in December 2001 to his last hideout in Abbottabad, and to find answers to the dozens of questions surrounding his stay in Pakistan as well as the US blitz raid in the wee hours of 2 May 2011. Had the world’s most wanted person at all been living in Pakistan for all those years, how did he manage to stay undetected, together with his big family, including an eight-month-old son? Who from within the security establishment provided the safety network to the family? What stakes did the Pakistan Army and the ISI have at all – if they were complicit – in protecting him? Why did Bin Laden fascinate certain people and groups within Pakistan?
Pakistan: Before and After Osama is an attempt to analyze present-day Pakistan in the light of two narratives – one stitched together in Washington and the other woven in Pakistan – about the checkered history of its relations with Pakistan and its involvement in the region, and how differences over how to tackle Al Qaeda and its local affiliates continue to sour and strain the ties between the two long-time ‘allies’.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Al Qaeda
• Pakistán
• América
• Afganistán
• Pentagon
• Military
• Security
• Terrorism
• Osama bin Laden
• Jihad
• Tora Bora
• Al-Qaida
• Army
• Asian
• Attack
• World
• Abbottabad
• ISI
• Pakistan
• Mountain
• India
• Terrorist
• America
• Opération
• Death
• Oussama ben Laden
• Washington
• Afghanistan

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 08 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351940289
• Langue: English

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Imtiaz Gul


Lotus Collection
© Imtiaz Gul, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in 2012
The Lotus Collection An imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd M-75, Greater Kailash II Market, New Delhi 110 048 Phone: ++91 (011) 4068 2000 Fax: ++91 (011) 2921 7185 E-mail: [e-mail] Website: www.rolibooks.com Also at Bangalore, Chennai, & Mumbai
Cover: Ritika Rai Layout: Sanjeev Mathpal Production: Shaji Sahadevan
ISBN: 978-81-7436-909-3

I dedicate this book to the loving and living memory of my great father Khaista Gul. Preoccupation with this book kept me from spending more time with him in his last days.

Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. The Raid: Operation Neptune’s Spear
2.Reactions: Outrage and Embarrassment
3.From Tora Bora to Abbottabad
4.Making of Osama bin Laden: Journey from Riyadh to Abbottabad
5.Impact on Pakistan: Radicals Within
6.Bin Laden’s ‘Jihad’: America’s War on Terror
7.Bin Laden Galvanizes Af-Pak: Jihad turns into Terror
8.Rocky Pakistan-US Relations: Enveloped in Mutual Mistrust and Need
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Preface
A round 07:45 in the morning of 2 May 2011 two consecutive calls on my cellphone pulled me out of bed.
‘Osama has been found and killed in Abbottabad,’ said the caller, my younger brother. This electrifying revelation worked more than what the early morning coffee does to you. Taken over by a strong feeling of shock and shame, I recalled what observation Amrullah Saleh, the former chief of Afghan intelligence – National Directorate of Security (NDS), had made at a conference organized by the Jamestown Foundation in Washington on 13 December 2010.
‘Unless all these boys [OBL, Mulla Omar, Hekmatyar] are pulled out of the basements of their hideouts in Pakistan, there will be no peace in Afghanistan, nor will the violence come down,’ Saleh had thundered in a gathering of almost 350 people at the National Press Club, where I was also to read a paper on the troubles in the border regions.
Saleh repeated those words immediately after Operation Neptune’s Spear and claimed his people had traced Osama bin Laden back in 2007.
‘I was pretty sure he was in the settled areas of Pakistan because in 2005 it was still very easy to infiltrate the tribal areas, and we had massive numbers of informants there,’ he said. ‘They could find any Arab but not Bin Laden. Our intelligence became more precise in 2007 when we believed he was hiding in Mansehra, a town a short distance from Abbottabad where the NDS had identified two al-Qaida safe houses,’ Saleh said. 1
Saleh also sent former President Pervez Musharraf in a fit of rage when told Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan. ‘Am I the President of the Republic of Banana?’ Saleh recalled Musharraf reacting. Saleh adds, ‘Then he turned to President Karzai and said, “Why have you brought this Panjshiri guy to teach me intelligence?”’ The spat happened during a meeting between Afghani President Hamid Karzai and Musharraf, Saleh had told us during the Jamestown Foundation conference. 2
Saleh, an ethnic Tajik from the Panjshir valley, northern Afghanistan, is known for his penchant for Pakistan-bashing, and this was one of the reasons why Karzai removed him from the NDS in summer 2010. His occasional public outbursts against Pakistan made it impossible for the two countries to even speak of ‘intelligence sharing’ and thus was seen as the major hurdle in the way of better bilateral relations.
And now, on 2 May 2011, with the discovery of Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted and dangerous man in Abbottabad, Pakistan’s equivalent of the US West Point Academy named after Maj. Abbott, people like Karzai and Saleh felt vindicated.
I had lived in the town in the early 1980s, and have since been visiting friends there. In fact, we visited a special Pakistan Independence Day ceremony at the Pakistan Military Academy on 14 August 2010 when the Pakistan Chief of Army Staff (CoAS) Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani had addressed cadets in the presence of several hundred guests. A year later on 23 April to be precise, we were among a number of journalists and writers invited again to witness a graduation ceremony, where Gen. Kayani gave a passionate speech while addressing fresh graduates of the academy. ‘Our security forces have broken the back of terrorists and the nation will soon prevail over the menace,’ Kayani promised. The general also asserted that the Pakistan army was completely aware of internal and external threats to the country. Ironically, none of us would have imagined that Osama bin Laden and his family lived within 2 kilometres of the academy, and probably listening to Kayani’s speech, which was resounding across the valley because of multiple loudspeakers placed around the parade ground.
This proximity to the academy, as well as the Pakistani government’s expression of ignorance about the US commando raid on the Bin Laden compound, therefore invited unprecedented jeer and flak from all and sundry. ‘This is the mother of all embarrassments, showing us either to be incompetent – it can’t get any worse than this, Osama living in a sprawling compound a short walk from that nursery school of the army, the Pakistan Military Academy and, if we are to believe this, our ever-vigilant eyes and ears knowing nothing about it – or, heaven forbid, complicit,’ Ayaz Ameer, one of the most prolific writers and critics of the armed forces, wrote in his column. 3
Most observers described the killing of Bin Laden in a dramatic, Rambo-reminiscent thriller as Pakistan’s worst intelligence and security debacle since the fall of Dhaka in 1971, when former East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Never before did Pakistan cut such a sorry figure and its military leadership looked so incompetent and stupid, and helpless at the same time, reeling under the burden of shame and embarrassment indeed.
The entire episode kicked up a new storm, centred on demands for resignations of the top civilian and army leadership including President Asif Ali Zardari, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the then head of the mighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Many ridiculed the army for incompetence, and chided Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani as ‘impotent and toothless’.
There seemed no end to criticism and within days even perennial critics of the army such as Kamran Shafi noticed the need to advise sanity amid the chorus of demands that both the army and the ISI chiefs be dismissed forthwith.
Pasha and Kayani, instead of being asked to resign, should be asked to clean up the mess created by their predecessors and nourished by themselves... demolish the “strategic depth” nonsense; revert the army to training; stop baking bread and making pastries in officers messes; close the shaadi-ghars [wedding halls] operating out of officers’ clubs; stop the use of officers’ messes as restaurants selling burgers and tikkas to all and sundry; make the CSDs defence-specific, not general merchants to all; stop the business of real-estate de