In an address to Parliament, Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on Monday defended Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, and indirectly criticised the US for Osama bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan.
Mr Gilani’s statement was expected to give an accounting of what Pakistan knew about the Qaeda leader’s presence in Pakistan, but instead centred on how the raid by the US 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”.
The sparring over the investigation about Bin Laden’s support structure threatens to go to the heart of what top American intelligence officials now routinely call the “double game” played by Pakistan. US President Barack Obama alluded to that on 60 Minutes on Sunday evening, saying, “We think that there had to be some sort of support network for Bin Laden inside of Pakistan.” President Obama added: “But we don’t know who or what that support network was. 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.” President Obama’s national security adviser had demanded Sunday that Pakistan let American investigators interview Bin Laden’s three widows, adding new pressure in a relationship now fraught over how Bin Laden could have been hiding near Islamabad for years before he was killed by commandos last week.
Both the adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and Mr Obama, in separate taped interviews, were careful not to accuse the top leadership of Pakistan of knowledge of Bin Laden’s whereabouts in Abbottabad, a military town 35 miles from the country’s capital. They argued that the US still regards Pakistan as an essential partner in the American-led war on Islamic terrorism.
But in repeatedly describing the trove of data that a Navy Seal team seized after killing Bin Laden as large enough to fill a small college library, Mr Donilon seemed to be warning the Pakistanis that the US might soon have documentary evidence that could illuminate who, inside or outside their government, might have helped harbour Bin Laden.
The US government is demanding to know whether, and to what extent, Pakistani government, intelligence or military officials were complicit in hiding Bin Laden. His widows could be critical to that line of inquiry because they might have information about the comings and goings of people who were aiding him. “We have asked for access,” Mr Donilon said on the CNN programme State of the Union, “including three wives who they now have in custody from the compound, as well as additional materials that they took from the compound”.
The request had echoes of previous struggles with Islamabad, starting with the days right after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Then, the US insisted that Pakistan clearly choose sides and join the US in fighting Al Qaeda, and Pakistan formally broke ties with the Taliban government, which was still in power in Afghanistan. But ever since, Washington has frequently lost out in its efforts to seek information about the loyalties and actions of top Pakistani officials.
As one American official said after Mr Donilon spoke Sunday: “Our guess is that the wives knew just who was keeping Bin Laden alive for all these years.” He added later, “It’s the Khan case all over again (a reference to Pakistani atomic scientist A.Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation racket).” He insisted on anonymity as the US tries to ease Pakistan’s anger over Mr Obama’s decision to conduct the raid without telling Pakistani officials in advance, or seeking their involvement.
The debate inside the administration over how hard to press Pakistan for answers — and whether to make public any evidence the United States possesses — has revived the question of whether it is time to dispense with, or radically amend, the unspoken bargain between Islamabad and Washington.
For years, the terms of that deal were simple: for the sake of getting Pakistani assistance in hunting down Qaeda leaders, Washington funnelled billions of dollars to the Pakistani military. And it said next to nothing about its fears that fundamentalists were burrowed in Pakistan’s huge nuclear complex, or about the country’s race to expand its arsenal, one of the fastest-growing in the world, a build-up that American officials fear could put more nuclear material at risk of falling into the hands of terrorists.
But as Mr Donilon argued implicitly on Sunday, an alternative to that bargain could be even worse. Severing Pakistan’s funds could end the cooperation on counterterrorism — which still works fairly well in some of the tribal areas — and it would mean losing virtually all visibility into the worrisome nuclear arsenal.
“We have had difficulty with Pakistan, as I said, but we’ve also had to work very closely with Pakistan in our counterterror efforts,” Mr Donilon said. “More terrorists and extremists have been captured or killed in Pakistan than in any place in the world.”