It’s unclear how much knowledge (if any) the Pakistani government had of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. But the initial reports are troubling, to say the least. Not only was the terror leader living at a conspicuous compound in a fairly populated suburb of Pakistan’s capital, but he was also right next door to the Pakistan Military Academy, the New York Times reports: [H]e was killed in Abbottabad, a city of about 500,000, in a large and highly secured compound that, a resident of the city said, sits virtually adjacent to the grounds of a military academy. In an ironic twist, the academy was visited just last month by the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, where he proclaimed that Pakistan had “cracked” the forces of terrorism, an assessment that was greeted with skepticism in Washington.
In addition to the military academy, the Times reports that numerous Pakistani forces and a unit of the Army Medical Corps are also based in the city.
At this point it is impossible to say whether the Pakistani military was shockingly clueless to the fact that the world’s most notorious terrorist was living in its midst, or whether there was something more sinister going. But we do know that the Obama administration, for whatever reason, declined to tell the Pakistani government about its raid on bin Laden’s compound until after the mission was accomplished.
“We shared our intelligence on this bin Laden compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” said a senior administration official during a briefing with reporters last night. “That was for one reason and one reason alone: We believed it was essential to the security of the operation and our personnel.”
The administration’s decision might be less of an issue if we hadn’t been giving Pakistan $1 billion a year since 9/11 for the specific purpose of helping us capture bin Laden. What exactly was the point of that if we couldn’t even trust the Pakistanis not to compromise the operation?
