posted on May, 5 2011 @ 05:09 AM
Pakistan was simply a harbor for terrorists due to their political fear of of tribal pressures. Pakistan was the only country in the world to
recognize the Taliban as a ruling entity. The Kashmir dispute is one of the world's oldest and most actively militarized disputes. Foreign travel in
the open country in Pakistan is akin to travel in Afghanistan where ambushes have little discern of who would be raided or killed outside of their own
little tribes.
Many of us didn’t believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave
somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border. An extremely big man, 6-foot 4-inches tall in a country where the average male height is around 5-foot
8, wandering around unnoticed for ten years while half the satellites above the earth were looking for him? It didn’t make sense. Bin Laden was born
filthy rich and died in a rich man’s house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications. The U.S. administration confesses it was
“shocked” by the elaborate nature of the compound.
In the aftermath of the raid on Abbottabad, all the big questions need to be answered by Pakistan. The old flim-flam (“Who, us? We knew nothing!”)
just isn’t going to wash, must not be allowed to wash by countries such as the United States that have persisted in treating Pakistan as an ally
even though they have long known about the Pakistani double game—its support, for example, for the Haqqani network that has killed hundreds of
Americans in Afghanistan
This time the facts speak too loudly to be hushed up. Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, was found living at the end of a dirt road 800
yards from the Abbottabad military academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, in a military cantonment where soldiers are on every
street corner, just about 80 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad. This extremely large house had neither a telephone nor an Internet
connection. And in spite of this we are supposed to believe that Pakistan didn’t know he was there, and that the Pakistani intelligence, and/or
military, and/or civilian authorities did nothing to facilitate his presence in Abbottabad, while he ran al Qaeda, with couriers coming and going, for
over five years?
India, as always Pakistan’s unhealthy obsession, is the reason for the double game. Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in
Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile
countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India’s supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.
For a long time now America has been tolerating the Pakistani double game in the knowledge that it needs Pakistani support in its Afghan enterprise,
and in the hope that Pakistan’s leaders will understand that they are miscalculating badly, that the jihadists want their jobs. Pakistan, with its
nuclear weapons, is a far greater prize than poor Afghanistan, and the generals and spymasters who are playing al Qaeda’s game today may, if the
worst were to happen, become the extremists’ victims tomorrow.
There is not very much evidence that the Pakistani power elite is likely to come to its senses any time soon. Osama bin Laden’s compound provides
further proof of Pakistan’s dangerous folly. This much is obvious.