NYer: What Pakistan Knew about Bin Laden

What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden
Posted by Dexter Filkins

Now that Osama is dead, the most intriguing question is this: Did any Pakistani officials help hide him?

We’re entitled to ask. Ever since 9/11—indeed, even before—Pakistan’s military and intelligence services have played a high-stakes double game. They’ve supported American efforts to kill and capture Al Qaeda fighters, and they have been lavished with billions of American dollars in return. At the same time, elements of those same military and intelligence services, particularly those inside Inter-Service Intelligence, or the I.S.I., have provided support for America’s enemies, namely the Taliban and its lethal off-shoot, the Haqqani network. American officials are fully aware of the double-game, and to say it frustrates them would be an understatement. For a decade, Pakistan’s role has been one of the great unmovable paradoxes of America’s war.

Could Pakistani officials have helped hide Osama? The most obvious fact of Osama’s hideaway is that it was in a densely populated area, many miles from the Afghan border region that for years had been the focus of the hunt. This, by itself, is not remarkable: Since 2001, most of the senior leaders of Al Qaeda captured in Pakistan have been nabbed in cities: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi, Ramsi bin Al-Shib in Karachi, Abu Zubaida in Faisalabad.

There is no evidence that any of the above men were sheltered by Pakistani officials. Indeed, since 2001, the double-game has usually worked like this: While Pakistani officials may covertly support the Taliban, they have bought cover for themselves by coöperating with the United States against Al Qaeda.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/05/what-pakistan-knew-about-osama-bin-laden.html#ixzz30YPBxbHX

He really knows his stuff.

Was it on purpose, or "just" criminal negligence? There's no question they had more than adequate warning, but did not act responsibly. The 9/11 Commission skipped over that part, intentionally.

It seems to me that some of the "support" they've provided for the Taliban(s) and others is like a pay off so they will operate somewhere else and, take the brunt in Kashmir.

Saudis agreed to provide funding for the covert operations that were forbidden the official CIA after the Church Committee exposed some of "the family jewels". In exchange for petrodollars, Bush's rump CIA looked the over way as the Saudis (through their proxies) developed the Islamic Atomic Bomb, their own global paramilitary capabilities (soon morphed into Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda), and after 1991, Saudi incursions into the oil-rich region of the former southern Soviet Union. See, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/280 Joe Trento has also written much about this.

The Pakistanis are pawns (who for decades were given huge amounts of money and latitude to carry out proxy operations). Follow the money. The parties responsible for 9/11 (I mean that in the sense of having culpability) are mostly Right-wing Americans in the intelligence community and their Saudi patrons. Who wags the tail?

The question here is, did someone miss a payment, or did someone match a payment, or was the pressure of incursion on sovereignty from the air sufficient to compel disgorgement of the prey....