Why They Killed Osama bin Laden Now

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By Nitin Pai [Yahoo News]


You might remember a Shekhar Suman gag on Zee TV's Movers and Shakers several years ago: An angry George W Bush announces that the United States will bomb the place where Osama bin Laden is found to be hiding.

Hearing this, Vajpayee looks under his bed, pauses, and with a characteristic flick of his wrist says: "Thank God! He isn't here!"

Over in Rawalpindi, General Musharraf looks under his bed, sighs in relief, and says: "Thank God! He is still here!"

Shekhar Suman, more than most Western analysts, got the plot right. Keeping Osama bin Laden out of Washington's hands was vital in order to prevent having to publicly deal with revelations of how the Pakistani military-jihadi complex not only was connected with al-Qaeda, but might also have been involved in the conspiracy behind the 9/11 attacks.

Moreover, when the Pakistani military leadership was getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars per year to hunt bin Laden down, it made little sense to give him up quickly. As early as October 2001, a month after 9/11, wags in Islamabad coined the phrase "al-Faida" (the profit) in anticipation of the rewards Pakistan would reap for joining the war on terror that it had played a part in creating. Pakistan was in an international doghouse at that time. Its economy was crumbling under the weight of sections imposed by the international community for having carried out nuclear tests in 1998. Its government, then under General Musharraf's military dictatorship, was seen as odious, not least for supporting the original Taliban regime in Kabul. It was barely surviving on Saudi largesse until September 2001, when General Musharraf's ditching of one set of allies for another changed his country's fortunes -- from being nearly toast, Pakistan was the toast.

Just how much was the al-Faida worth? According to data compiled by K Alan Kronstadt, of the US Congressional Research Service, between 2002 and 2010, US direct overt aid and military reimbursements to Pakistan amounted to $19.6 billion, of which $13.3 billion was for security-related heads. Obviously, if there is "direct, overt" aid, there is likely to be "indirect, covert" aid. There is also the money from other countries and loans from the IMF. Because the military-jihadi complex dominates the Pakistani political economy, it is the primary beneficiary of this largesse. Between 2002 and 2008, my estimate suggests that the business of shipping US and NATO containers from Karachi to Kabul alone made $500m per year for the military establishment and $300m per year for the militant groups. Why would they want the gravy train to stop?

They wouldn't, but the Obama administration had other ideas. It made three changes that caused the Pakistani military establishment to redo its sums. First, the Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation made it harder for the military to capture the funds. It also came with more strings attached. Second, the Obama administration increased the number of drone strikes against targets in Pakistan, while increasing pressure on the Pakistani army to go after the taliban groups in its tribal areas. Finally, by indicating a timeline for withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, Washington triggered the endgame.

With the Obama adminstration taking a harder line on the Pakistani army, the al-Faida from the war against al-Qaeda began to be less attractive. At the same time, with a US withdrawal in sight, Afghanistan began to look more attractive as a prize. For General Kayani to stand a chance for claiming this prize, it is necessary for President Obama to prevail over other members of his administration and get US troops out earlier.

Playing the bin Laden card is a brilliant way to achieve this outcome. Although US officials claim they did it without Pakistan's knowledge or permission, it is hard to believe he could be found without the Pakistani military establishment permitting it.

Either way, bin Laden's elimination provides the right political cover for President Obama to declare victory and order his troops out of Afghanistan. Once withdrawal starts, President Obama will be politically dependent on General Kayani to ensure that it takes place in a manner that doesn't damage his re-election prospects. Expect the latter to use the leverage to ensure that the military-jihadi complex gets its proxies into the government in Kabul.

As I wrote on my blog yesterday, "the United States is unlikely to punish Pakistan for the decade of duplicity, subterfuge and violence that consumed innumerable lives and astounding amounts of money." President Obama will not ask why Osama bin Laden was living it up in Abbottabad, a bus stop away from the Pakistan Military Academy, and not in a cave somewhere in Waziristan. You won't find Washington too interested in confronting General Kayani on when bin Laden moved in there and why his presence went undetected for so long.

Rather, Washington will seek plausible reassurances that after it leaves, Afghanistan will not play host to terrorists targeting the United States. It will place some anti-Taliban and anti-Pakistan Afghans into positions of power in Kabul to balance Pakistan's proxies. It might retain some troops and drones in Afghanistan just in case it needs to use a stick. That apart, it will accede to Pakistani demands that Kabul be made over to a pro-Pakistani regime.

In time, the Pakistani military-jihadi complex will seek to reconquer Afghanistan (called "gaining strategic depth") with China's support or connivance.

We are staring at a return of the 1990s. This is a bad outcome for Afghans, Pakistanis and Indians. The military-jihadi complex will gain in strength. Pakistan's civilian government will be more powerless. It will only be a facade with which to seek foreign assistance. It will also be the whipping boy, blamed for the worsening state of Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of triumphant militants will need to be given new targets. Compared to the early 1990s, it is far more difficult today---strategically and operationally---to push them across into India. Yet, the interests of the military-jihadi complex and the absence of a miracle job-machine will pose a serious threat to India's national security. We may be, at best, two summers away from an escalation of the proxy war in Kashmir and elsewhere.


Nitin Pai is founder & fellow for geopolitics at the Takshashila Institution and editor of Pragati - The Indian National Interest Review, a publication on strategic affairs, public policy and governance. He blogs at The Acorn and is active on Twitter too.


CIA head admits no live video footage of the raid



Osama bin Laden dead: Blackout during raid on bin Laden compound

The head of the CIA admitted yesterday that there was no live video footage of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound as further doubts emerged about the US version of events.

Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, revealed there was a 25 minute blackout during which the live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the US special forces was cut off.

A photograph released by the White House appeared to show the President and his aides in the situation room watching the action as it unfolded. In fact they had little knowledge of what was happening in the compound. More

When the Lie Becomes the Truth... The US government’s bin Laden story was so poorly crafted that it did not last 48 hours before being fundamentally altered. Indeed, the new story put out on Tuesday by White House press secretary Jay Carney bears little resemblance to the original Sunday evening story. The fierce firefight did not occur. Osama bin Laden did not hide behind a woman. Indeed, bin Laden, Carney said, “was not armed.” The firefight story was instantly suspicious as not a single SEAL got a scratch, despite being up against al Qaeda, described by former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld as ‘the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43817 Every original story detail has been changed. It wasn’t bin Laden’s wife who was murdered by the Navy SEALs , but the wife of an aide. It wasn’t bin Laden’s son, Khalid, who was murdered by the Navy SEALs, but son Hamza. Carney blamed the changed story on “the fog of war.” But there was no firefight, so where did the “fog of war” come from? The White House has also had to abandon the story that President Obama and his national security team watched tensely as events unfolded in real time (despite the White House having released photos of the team watching tensely), with the operation conveyed into the White House by cameras on the SEALs helmets. If Obama was watching the event as it happened, he would have noticed, one would hope, that there was no firefight and, thus, would not have told the public that bin Laden was killed in a firefight. Another reason the story had to be abandoned is that if the event was captured on video, every news service in the world would be asking for the video, but if the event was orchestrated theater, there would be no video. No explanation has been provided for why an unarmed bin Laden, in the absence of a firefight, was murdered by the SEALs with a shot to the head. For those who believe the government’s story that “we got bin Laden,” the operation can only appear as the most botched operation in history. What kind of incompetence does it require to senselessly and needlessly kill the most valuable intelligence asset on the planet? According to the US government, the terrorist movements of the world operated through bin Laden, “the mastermind.” Thanks to a trigger-happy stupid SEAL, a bullet destroyed the most valuable terrorist information on the planet. Perhaps the SEAL was thinking that he could put a notch on his gun and brag for the rest of his life about being the macho tough guy who killed Osama bin Laden, the most dangerous man on the planet, who outwitted the US and its European and Israeli allies and inflicted humiliation on the “world’s only superpower” on 9/11. When such a foundational story as the demise of bin Laden cannot last 48 hours without acknowledged “discrepancies” that require fundamental alternations to the story, there are grounds for suspicion in addition to the suspicions arising from the absence of a dead body, from the absence of any evidence that bin Laden was killed in the raid or that a raid even took place. The entire episode could just be another event like the August 4, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin event that never happened but succeeded in launching open warfare against North Vietnam at a huge cost to Americans and Vietnamese and enormous profits to the military/security complex. There is no doubt that the US is sufficiently incompetent to have needlessly killed bin Laden instead of capturing him. But who can believe that the US would quickly dispose of the evidence that bin Laden had been terminated? The government’s story is not believable that the government dumped the proof of its success into the ocean, but has some photos that might be released, someday. As one reader put it in an email to me: “What is really alarming is the increasingly arrogant sloppiness of these lies, as though the government has become so profoundly confident of their ability to deceive people that they make virtually no effort to even appear credible.” Governments have known from the beginning of time that they can always deceive citizens and subjects by playing the patriot card. “Remember the Maine,” the “Gulf of Tonkin,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “the Reichstag fire”--the staged events and bogus evidence are endless. If Americans knew any history, they would not be so gullible. The real question before us is: What agenda or agendas is the “death of bin Laden” designed to further? There are many answers to this question. Many have noticed that Obama was facing re-election with poor approval ratings. Is anyone surprised that the New York Times/CBS Poll finds a strong rise in Obama’s poll numbers after the bin Laden raid? As the New York Times reported, “the glow of national pride” rose “above partisan politics, as support for the president rose significantly among both Republicans and independents. In all, 57 percent said they now approved of the president’s job performance, up from 46 percent.” In Washington-think, a 24% rise in approval rating justifies a staged event. Another possibility is that Obama realized that the the budget deficit and the dollar’s rescue from collapse require the end of the expensive Afghan war and occupation and spillover war into Pakistan. As the purpose of the war was to get bin Laden, success in this objective allows the US to withdraw without loss of face, thus making it possible to reduce the US budget deficit by several hundred billion dollars annually--an easy way to have a major spending cut. If this is the agenda, then more power to it. However, if this was Obama’s agenda, the military/security complex has quickly moved against it. CIA director Leon Panetta opened the door to false flag attacks to keep the war going by declaring that al Qaeda would avenge bin Laden’s killing. Secretary of State Clinton declared that success in killing bin Laden justified more war and more success. Homeland Security declared that the killing of bin Laden would motivate “homegrown violent extremists” into making terrorist attacks. “Homegrown violent extremists” is an undefined term, but this newly created bogyman seems to include environmentalists and war protesters. Like “suspect,” the term will include anyone the government wants to pick up. Various parts of the government quickly seized on the success in killing bin Laden to defend and advance their own agendas, such as torture. Americans were told that bin Laden was found as a result of information gleaned from torturing detainees held in Eastern European CIA secret prisons years ago. This listing of possible agendas and add-on agendas is far from complete, but for those capable of skepticism and independent thought, it can serve as a starting point. The agendas behind the theater will reveal themselves as time goes on. All you have to do is to pay attention and to realize that most of what you hear from the mainstream media is designed to advance the agendas. SKEPTICISM: The Agendas Behind the Bin Laden News Event A sample of the real Al-Qaeda: Members of the British SAS caught and arrested by Basra police in Iraq for planing to detonate explosives in a public area dressed as Arabs.

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