The news that Osama bin Laden was living in an upscale urban neighborhood in Pakistan rather than hiding out in a cave on the Afghanistan border gives credence to what many observers have been saying for years…that he was receiving support from elements within the Pakistani military and/or Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

 

Only a few days ago, WikiLeaks released State Department documents that revealed that the administration of President George W. Bush considered the ISI a terrorist organization. Interrogators at Guantánamo were instructed to consider a prisoner’s link to ISI to be confirmation of association with terrorism.

 

Last year, five families of those killed or injured in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks sued in American court, claiming that ISI operatives helped carry out the assaults that left 166 people dead and more than 300 wounded.

 

Suspicions about the ISI are nothing new. With a network said to include 10,000 soldiers, spies and intelligence officers, as well as an unknown number of informers and “assets,” the ISI has gained a reputation as “a kingdom within a state” that has long supported the Taliban.

 

One incident prior to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks illustrates why U.S. forces would have been reluctant to share details of their attack on bin Laden. In the summer of 2001, Egyptian intelligence officers had tracked down Ahmed Khadr, a close associate of Osama bin Laden and the suspected mastermind of the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad that killed 19 people. Khadr was hiding in a safe house in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar when Egyptian forces surrounded the building. Lacking the authority to arrest Khadr, they notified General Mahmood Ahmad, the chief of the ISI, so that he could send his men in to capture Khsdr. Instead, that night a car with diplomatic plates arrived at the Peshawar house, and the Egyptian intelligence officers watched while Taliban militants jumped out, grabbed Khadr, brought him back to the car and then drove him across the border into Afghanistan and beyond the Egyptians’ reach. 

 

The compound in Abbottabad where Osama bin Laden was “hiding” was just a half mile from the Pakistan Military Academy—Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. Speaking at the academy on April 23, Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a former director of the ISI, boasted that the “terrorist backbone has been broken.” It would appear that as he spoke these words, the world’s most wanted terrorist was living a three-minute jog away. Kayani’s comments were supposed to be a defense of Pakistan’s commitment to fighting terrorism three days after U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen had criticized the ISI’s ties to the Haqqani terrorist network.

 

Either Kayani was incredibly naïve and his anti-terrorist troops appallingly incompetent, or else he hoped to use empty words to cover up his involvement with the terrorist in his neighborhood.

-David Wallechinsky

 

Bush Administration Considered Pakistan’s Spy Agency a Terrorist Organization (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)