I'll skip past the point that Senator John McCain once agreed with Pakistan on this, for McCain has had the grace to praise President Obama.
It is hard for me to look at the events of the last few days and not hear echoes of Operation Thunderbolt. The echoes I hear are that the nation where the operation took place was, then and now, playing both sides of the game.
Maybe bin Ladin and his people had such good operational security that they were able to hide there, unseen by the Pakistanis. It's probably certain that, if bin Ladin ever left his compound, that he did so under the cover of night. He did have a large bounty on his head and all it would have taken was one person to see him and make a call.
The thing is, Pakistan's ISI doesn't strike me as being terribly incompetent, especially at the internal security function. Maybe they truly didn't know he was there. But they did know that bin Ladin was someplace inside Pakistan. I just think that somebody had to have known something. A million dollar plus mansion goes up with walls as high as a prison's, topped with razor wire, and nobody notices? Nobody took note that the largest house in the neighborhood didn't have phone service? Nobody said anything about the weirdos in the big house who burned their garbage?
That the ISI didn't know strains credulity, given that they have had both the Taliban and al Qaeda under their thumbs. Which is why it is highly unlikely that our government is going to care terribly much about Pakistani outrage.
I sure don't.
Reading the official Pakistani response, it seems rather more muted than the "outraged" response that the Western media is reporting. It appears more along the lines of, "Okay, we understand why you took this unauthorized unilateral action for this one very high value target, but please don't make a habit of it, kthnx?" That part was only one small part of their official note. They spend a whole lot more time saying that they knew nothing about Osama bin Laden's presence there in the shadow of their military academy, coming off looking a lot like Sgt. Shultz in the process. And probably half of the diplomatic note is them sucking up blatantly to the United States, "look, see, we've helped you a lot in other stuff, like this and that and the other, please don't hold this against us, okay?".
ReplyDeleteIn other words, if you read the actual diplomatic note as released by the Foreign Ministry, the Pakistani complaint is rather muted and more along the lines of "we know nothing, we're your good friends and have helped you a lot, and, uhm, by the way, please don't do that again?" rather than the expression of outrage being reported by the Western media. Reading it makes me smile at all the tap-dancing that the Pakistani government is doing on that narrow line between the U.S. being mad at them and their own population being mad at them. Their Machiavellian maneuvering has bit them in the ass big time and they're squirming like a little kid under the eye of a stern principal back in the day (the kind of principal who had a big paddle -- yes, I go that far back :).
-- Badtux the Read-the-original-source Penguin
I'd compare this op more to the Son Tay raid in North Vietnam, Nov 1970.
ReplyDeleteBut Son Tay wasn't in a third country. And when they got there, there was nobody there.
ReplyDeleteStill, similar levels of preparedness.
So we found proof he was in Pakistan and the Pakis said OK you can go get him. We won't stop you if you kill him because dead men tell no tales. Now everybody is making the requisite noises about what happened but everybody got what they wanted from a difficult position. Business as usual is right over the horizon.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think he was bribing someone in the Pakistani government to let him stay there. When we found out, the Pakistanis tossed him out of the sled and tried to act innocent about it.
ReplyDeleteJust my opinion.