Does anyone swallow the Pakistani government’s claim that Osama bin Laden lived in that Abbottabad villa for at least six years without anyone getting wind?
As it happens, I know Abbottabad rather well, having visited it on several occasions since 1971.
Situated in the lower recesses of the Pakistani uplands, the small town was used for centuries to keep a watch on the Khyber Pass. The British, who liked to recruit soldiers from the nearby Pathan and Punjab regions, built a garrison town there — and then a military school to train Pathan and Punjabi non-commissioned officers, the backbone of the colonial army. (A fictionalized version of the town appears in Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim.”)
With independence, the school became a full-fledged military college, the Pakistani West Point. In 1962, the dictator Muhammad Ayub Khan simply confiscated all land in and around Abbottabad on behalf of the army. Part of the land was distributed among senior army officers, who built sumptuous villas to benefit from the area’s superb climate and magical environment.
Today, anybody who’s somebody in the Pakistani high command owns a villa there — including Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, head of the Pakistani armed forces. Like former President Pervez Musharraf, Kayani graduated from the town’s military academy, just 200 yards from bin Laden’s villa.
Far from living in a cave, bin Laden chose to live in the nicest place in Pakistan. There, he had the added advantage of being protected by his friends in the Pakistani military intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, while being just an hour’s drive from the capital Islamabad. Bin Laden and the ISI go back a long away — to 1982, in fact.
A Baluch who isn’t familiar with Pushtun and Punjabi languages, President Assaf Ali Zardari might not have known about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. But it is hard to believe that the army didn’t know. In Abbottabad, a town cordoned off by army checkpoints, almost everyone is a soldier or related to a soldier.
President Obama might pretend that the Pakistanis didn’t know that bin Laden had been a “guest” in the heart of their army for six years. In private, however, Obama would do well to tell the Pakistanis to let the FBI have a look at the ISI’s address book — which would tell Washington where other al Qaeda and Taliban bad guys are.
To start with, we have Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s No. 2. I wouldn’t be surprised if he, too, had been living close to the Pakistani West Point.
Then we have Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s commander-of-the-faithful. He is unlikely to be in Abbottabad. But what about Quetta, the capital of the Wild West province of Baluchistan? Over the last 10 years, Omar has presided over several sessions of the Taliban’s secret leadership, generally known as the Quetta Council.
Another Afghan “hard case,” Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is also believed to have taken up residence in Quetta.
The Haqqani brothers, Jalaleddin and Serajeddin, head another network at odds with the Kabul government — and they have worked with the ISI since 1980. The siblings own several businesses and properties in Abu Dhabi but are assumed to be living in Pakistan, probably in or around Peshawar.
All in all, a dozen “hard cases” keep the big pot of Afghanistan, and the smaller pot of al Qaeda, on the boil with a mixture of terrorism and propaganda. Without at least tacit support from the ISI, none of them would last a week.
But why is Pakistan behaving in this way? Well, that’s another story.