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Osama bin Laden has exposed Pakistan’s duplicity on fight against terrorism
Everybody has the fundamental right to champion the cause of his or her religion and fight against any injustice or harm caused to his or her beliefs and community. However, that being said, the method chosen by Osama Bin Laden for this purpose, can not be supported by any sane person since thousands of innocent people have suffered the consequences of the violent and cruel means adopted by him and his supporters.
It is however ironical that it is the United States of America which has hunted down and killed the world's most wanted terrorist and 9/11 attack perpetrator Osama Bin Laden in the wee hours of the 2nd of May 2011 at his hideout. American Navy Seals stormed a compound in suburban Abbottabad in Pakistan, about 50 miles north of the capital Islamabad, and gunned down 54 year old Osama Bin Laden after a firefight in an operation that took just 40 minutes to execute but four years to fructify. President Barack Obama and his senior colleagues including Secretary of State Hilary Clinton watched the operation thousands of miles away sitting in his office. It was so meticulously planned and executed that the Pakistan authorities had no clue about it until it was officially announced by the USA.
After identifying Bin Laden through photos and videos and collecting DNA and other evidence, they spirited the body of the Al Qaeda leader out of Pakistan and, in a perplexing move, later dumped him into the sea. USA officials later said that they were conforming to Islamic tenets to bury the dead within 24 hours, but the real purpose of the sea burial was evidently aimed at denying any possible shrine being established for the Al Qaeda leader. Bin Laden was a Saudi national, but the Saudi monarchy reportedly refused to accept his body. The location of the dumping was not identified. The Obama Administration rightly kept Pakistan out of the loop. The fact remains that Osama has a sympathetic base in the Army, among the political class and several clerics in the theocratic state. If Islamabad was kept in the loop about the mission, it might have been leaked to help the dreaded terrorist.
The US informed the government in Islamabad about the operation and its purpose only after it was completed. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have acknowledged broad intelligence cooperation from Pakistan but did not attribute any operational help from their so called ally and did not even thank Pakistan where Laden had been living comfortably under the nose of the Pakistan Army. It is rightly asserted by political analysts that suspicion is deep in Washington that Pakistan's military intelligence establishment was sheltering Bin Laden because of his location in a massive compound in a cantonment close to the prominent Kakul Military Academy. Questions are also being asked whether the compound was provided to Bin Laden by the dreaded ISI and was being used by him as a safe house.
President Obama and other officials of the US had dispatched a small all-American team involving Navy Seals in two helicopters to take part in the swift operation in the dead of night. Remarkably, the US team did not suffer any casualties.
Bin Laden reportedly put up a fight and used one of his several wives to shield himself unsuccessfully, but he was shot in the right eye. Two couriers, through whom he was traced, his eldest son, and an unidentified woman, were killed in the firefight. It is also a tragedy that Saudi Arabia and some other countries have refused his burial on their soil and also refused to accept his body. The operation also highlights that Pakistan is truly at the epicenter of global terrorism, as correctly said by Heritage Foundation’s Expert and former CIA analyst Lisa Curtis. “The fact that the world's most wanted terrorist was captured in a major Pakistani city should silence those Pakistanis who rejected the idea of Bin Laden being in the country as a western conspiracy.”
Indian Union Home Minister P Chidambaram has rightly commented that the presence of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan and his gunning down by the a specialized team deputed by the USA in its territory have exposed Pakistan’s duplicity of fighting the war against terrorism and has strongly pointed to the world that deadly terrorists find safe haven in that country. There is a grave charge against Pakistan that it has become a promoter of international terrorism and it is answerable to the international community on its stand on the barbarity.
P.K. Chakravarty
