[The prime minister’s statement was expected to give an accounting of what Pakistan knew about the Qaeda leader’s presence in Pakistan, but instead centered on how the raid by the United States was a breach of Pakistani sovereignty. He warned that a repeat of such a raid to capture other high profile terrorists could be met with “full force.”]
By Jane Perlez
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| Pakistan PM Yousaf Gilani a BBC video here |
The prime minister’s statement was expected to give an accounting of what Pakistan knew about the Qaeda leader’s presence in Pakistan, but instead centered on how the raid by the United States was a breach of Pakistani sovereignty. He warned that a repeat of such a raid to capture other high profile terrorists could be met with “full force.”
Mr. Gilani repeated his assertion that Bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan was an intelligence failure of the “whole world,” and said a senior army general would conduct an inquiry into the Bin Laden raid, but he gave no timeline of when that inquiry would be completed or who would participate in it.
In response to statements by officials in the Obama administration that elements in the Pakistani spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, knew about Bin Laden’s hiding place, and may have supported him, Mr. Gilani said it was “disingenuous” for anyone to blame the ISI or the army to be “in cahoots” with Bin Laden.
The head of the spy agency, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, and the chief of the army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, have been described by Pakistani officials as seething with anger over the American raid, and the failure of the Obama administration to inform Pakistan in advance.
In apparent retaliation, the ISI appeared to have told a conservative daily newspaper, The Nation, the name of the C.I.A. station chief who is posted at the American Embassy in Islamabad. A misspelled version of the station chief’s name appeared in the Saturday edition of The Nation.
Last December, the prior C.I.A. station chief had to leave Pakistan after he was publicly identified in a legal complaint sent to the Pakistani police by the family of victims of the American drone campaign. The station chief received death threats after his identity was exposed. At the time, the Obama administration said it believed that the ISI had deliberately made the name public.
The new station chief was responsible for directing a large part of the operation that killed Bin Laden, including supervision of a C.I.A. safe house from which operatives spied on the compound where Bin Laden lived for five years. There was no expectation that he would leave Pakistan, American officials said.
Mr. Gilani gave a spirited defense of the ISI, an agency run by the military that his civilian government tried to take over after coming to power in 2008 but failed to do so.
He described the agency as a “national asset” that had done more than any other intelligence agency in the world to take on al Qaeda.
“No other country in the world and no other security agency has done so much to interdict Al Qaeda than the ISI and our armed forces,” he said. But Mr. Gilani did not explain how Al Qaeda’s leader managed to remain sequestered for five years in the garrison city of Abbottabad, about 75 miles by road from the national capital.
Mr. Gilani’s account of the history of Al Qaeda essentially blamed the United States for allowing Islamic militants to take hold in Pakistan.
“We didn’t invite Osama bin Laden to Pakistan or Afghanistan,” he said.
The United States, he said, had encouraged the Islamic militants that fought against the Soviet Union to disperse into Pakistan after that war was over in the late 1980s. Similarly, he said, the bombings of Al Qaeda militants at Tora Bora after 9/11 “resulted in the dispersal of Al Qaeda.” “We had cautioned international forces on a flawed military campaign.”
After the live broadcast of the speech, a leading Pakistani journalist, Mohammed Ziauddin, said the Prime Minister had failed to answer critical questions.
“People have to be told the real facts, they can’t be glossed over,” said Mr. Ziauddin, the executive editor of the Express Tribune.
In unusually blunt statements, some politicians and journalists have called for a full public inquiry and have suggested that “heads should roll.” But the prime minister’s address fell short of both demands.
A close military aide to General Kayani, Lt. Gen. Javed Iqbal, who is the adjutant general of the army, would conduct the inquiry, Mr. Gilani said.
A joint session of Parliament on May 13 would be given a briefing by the military, he said.
OBAMA AND AIDES INCREASE PRESSURE ON PAKISTAN
[The revelation that bin Laden had been hiding in a heavily populated area with strong military ties has strained relations between the United States and Pakistan, with a growing number of officials in Washington questioning the Pakistani government’s credibility as a reliable ally against terrorism. Last week, some American officials expressed frustration with Pakistani military and intelligence officials for their refusal over the years to identify members of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, who were believed to have close ties to Bin Laden, and in particular, its S directorate, which has worked closely with militants since their fight against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan.]
By Dan Bilefsky
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Activists of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan staged a protest in Islamabad on Sunday against the killing of Osama bin Laden. |
The White House national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, called Sunday for Pakistan to grant the United States access to Osama bin Laden’s three widows, who are in Pakistani custody following the secret American raid that killed the Qaeda leader last week. In addition to possibly learning more about Al Qaeda, American officials hope the women could help answer whether any Pakistani government or security officials were complicit in hiding Bin Laden.
Mr. Donilon called the volume of data and intelligence confiscated during the raid the “equivalent to a small college library.” He also acknowledged that President Obama had received “divided counsel” over whether to carry out the mission — using the phrase on Fox and ABC.
“At the end of the day, we ask our president to make the decision,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
President Obama similarly addressed U.S. ties to Pakistan, saying officials “think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan.
“But we don't know who or what that support network was,” he said in remarks to be broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate.”
Mr. Donilon, in his series of appearances on the Sunday talk shows, underscored the delicate tightrope the Obama administration has been walking with Pakistan. While praising Pakistan for its role in fighting terrorism, Mr. Donilon called for an investigation into how Bin Laden had been concealed in the northwestern city of Abbottabad, just 35 miles from Islamabad, the country’s capital.
“That needs to be investigated, and the Pakistanis are investigating,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And, indeed, this has been, obviously, a very big set of questions in their country about what happened and how this came about.”
Pakistan took custody of Bin Laden’s family after the May 2 raid of his hide-out, in which the Qaeda leader and four others were killed. But the Foreign Ministry has thus far not given the C.I.A. access to the wives, according to The Associated Press.
The revelation that bin Laden had been hiding in a heavily populated area with strong military ties has strained relations between the United States and Pakistan, with a growing number of officials in Washington questioning the Pakistani government’s credibility as a reliable ally against terrorism. Last week, some American officials expressed frustration with Pakistani military and intelligence officials for their refusal over the years to identify members of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, who were believed to have close ties to Bin Laden, and in particular, its S directorate, which has worked closely with militants since their fight against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan.
Some in the Pakistani military, meanwhile, have criticized the breach by the United States of Pakistan’s airspace during the mission. Mr. Donilon told CNN that Washington had seen no evidence that the Pakistani government, military or intelligence community had abetted Bin Laden’s concealment. Pakistan, he insisted, has been an important ally, noting that “more terrorists and extremists have been captured or killed in Pakistan’s soil than any other place in the world.”
But he did not rule out that the United States might proceed with another mission in Pakistan without notifying that country’s officials.
Asked on ABC’s “This Week With Christiane Amanpour” whether the United States would inform Pakistan if it decided to target Aymen al-Zawahri, the Egyptian surgeon considered the second in command in Al Qaeda, Mr. Donilon said it would depend on “the specifics of the operation.”
“This really wasn’t a matter of trusting or not trusting; it was a matter of operational security,” he said, referring to the secrecy surrounding the raid and the decision not to inform the Pakistani government.
But he called for Pakistani officials to provide the Obama administration with additional intelligence it might have gathered from the compound, while also granting access to Bin Laden’s three wives. While he declined to comment on the specifics of the raid, Mr. Donilon said that the world view was that the raid was justified. “The messages that have come back to us from around the world, and I study this fairly closely, is that this was a just action, that in fact this was a just action against a man who had committed murder, not just in the United States but around the world.”
Mr. Donilon said that the White House had put together a special task force to comb through the data and that it would work under Mr. Obama’s direction to pursue any leads the information yielded.
“The C.I.A. is describing it to us as the size of a small college library," he said in an interview with ABC News’ “This Week With Christiane Amanpour.” He would not say whether the data indicated any imminent threats to the United States.
Mr. Donilon said that Mr. Obama had received divided counsel ahead of the raid and had shown decisiveness under pressure.
“I wouldn’t call it dissension. I would call it a divided counsel — that people had, were in favor of, different options,” he said on ABC. He said that Mr. Obama had chaired five National Security Council meetings in six weeks before making his decision to raid the compound.
