**Pakistan had ‘major failures’ during OBL incident
**
More than two years after a raid by US forces on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Al Jazeera on Monday released a leaked report by the subsequent Pakistani commission formed to probe the matter.
The independent commission’s report had not been released to the public. It bore a scathing assessment of the Pakistani government and the security structures. The report was buried by the government and never made public, until Al Jazeera got hold of it and released it online.
Findings of the Report
The Commission’s 336 page report is scathing, holding both the government and the military responsible for ‘gross incompetence’, leading to ‘collective failures’ that allowed Bin Laden to escape detection, and the United States to perpetrate ‘an act of war’.
The Commission found that there had been a complete collapse of governance and law enforcement - a situation it termed ‘Government Implosion Syndrome’, both in the lack of intelligence on Bin Laden’s nine-year residence in Pakistan, and in the response to the US raid that killed him. It finds that ‘culpable negligence and incompetence at almost all levels of government can more or less be conclusively established’.
On the presence of a CIA network in Pakistan tracking down Bin Laden, without the Pakistani establishment’s knowledge, the Commission finds “this [was] a case of nothing less than a collective and sustained dereliction of duty by the political, military and intelligence leadership of the country”.
“It is official or unofficial defence policy not to attempt to defend the country if threatened, or even attacked by a military superpower like the US?” the Commission asks of several top military officers.
“From a Pakistani strategic doctrine point of view,” the report notes, while issuing findings on how the military had wholly focused its “peacetime deployment” of defence capabilities on the border with India, “the world stood still for almost a decade.”
The report states that “the inability to spot the low flying helicopters over Abbottabad cantonment was a major failure.”
In concluding its report, the Commission finds that the country’s “political, military intelligence and bureaucratic leadership cannot be absolved of their responsibility for the state of governance, policy planning and policy implementation that eventually rendered this national failure almost inevitable”, and calls on the country’s leadership to formally apologise to the people of Pakistan for “their dereliction of duty”.
2011 Raid
US special forces launched a raid deep into Pakistani territory on May 1, 2011 to capture or kill al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
Page 197 of the report, which contains part of the testimony of Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then director of the ISI, was missing from all copies of the report that Al Jazeera obtained from multiple sources, the news channel stated.
Full Commission Report
As far as I remember, neither anyone took responsibility of the failure, nor anyone bothered to step down on this colossal failure. The then-defence minister Ahmed Mukhtar was in the US at the time of the raid and his first reaction had come only after a month of the raid. We also remember the twitchy reaction of the Foreign Office and how Zardari and Gillani quickly congratulated Obama for a successful breach of Pakistan’s sovereignty.
The military establishment was equally clueless of the incident. Yet everyone thought that the ship of the country will sink instantly if they took the responsibility and quit their jobs in utter shame.
And finally, what was the purpose of this whole exercise of setting up the commission if its findings were to be blocked?
