Wikileaks : What PAK Leaders Told U.S About OSAMA

As the debate rages over how much Pakistan knew about Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts, a series of cables show how its leaders repeatedly told the US that while they wanted to help find the terrorist, they didn't know where he was. ( Watch ) Across the world, questions are being raised - most pointedly in America - about how the world's most-wanted man was eventually hunted down to a house a stone's throw from Pakistan's military academy. "This is going to be a time of real pressure" on Pakistan "to basically prove to us that they didn't know that bin Laden was there," said Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman on Tuesday morning. The Pakistan cables reflect the repeated denials by Pakistan about housing Osama and America's increasing wariness with those explanations.   A distrust that is obvious before Pakistani Army Chief Ashfaq Kayani's week-long visit to America in February 2009. On February 19 , US Ambassador Anne Patterson wrote to Washington, insisting "US needs to lay down a clear marker that Pakistan's army/ ISI must stop over or tacit support for militant proxies such as the Haqqani network... and the Lashkar-e-Taiba." Ambassador Anne Patterson went on to say, "The single- biggest message Kayani should hear in Washington is that this support must end." Ms Patterson also offered this advice, "We should praise Kayani's support for the civilian democratic government in Islamabad, re- iterate the long-term US commitment to support Pakistan."  She also stressed, " We should press for Pakistani prosecution of the Mumbai suspects." (Read: Pakistan cable on Kayani visit to Washington) General Kayani also made it clear to the US that his army was doing its best to locate Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is  now expected to take over as the leader of Al- Qaeda. In a meeting on January 9 , 2008 , the Pakistani Army Chief met with Joseph Lieberman. The Senator asked about the search for Osama and al-Zawahiri. Ambassador Anne Patterson's cable states "It was unjust to criticise Pakistan for not locating these men, asserted  Kayani, and he would place Pakistan's track record in pursuing and capturing Al-Qaeda operatives up against any other country's. " (Read: Pakistan cable on Lieberman-Kayani meeting)   But in April 2007 , then President Musharraf is reported as acknowledging that Osama may be in Pakistan. A cable dated April 10 , 2007 , from the embassy's Charge d'Affaires Peter Bodde reports on a meeting between Senator John McCain and Mr Musharraf. The President allegedly said that he believed Osama and Ayman al Zawahiri - the man who many believe will replace Osama as the head of Al-Qaeda - were " hiding in Bajaur agency. Since it was in Afghan militant leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's territory and bordered Afghanistan's Kunar province. Mr Musharraf said that the landscape in videos of the two men looked similar to Bajaur, and the area provided "high mountains... and an absence of US troops in neighbouring Kunar." (Read: Pakistan cable on Musharraf meeting with John McCain, Richard Renzi) A year later, the Prime Minister of Pakistan contradicted General Musharraf. On April 17 , 2008 , a cable refers to a meeting between Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and Michael Capuano, William Pascrell and Frank LoBiondo. Mr Gilani was asked where he believed Osama was hiding. The cable says the Prime Minister replied, "The intelligence agencies have no idea, but he' s not in Pakistan". (Read: Pakistan cable on US Representatives' visit to Islamabad) A point Mr Gilani made again a few weeks later with visiting Senators Carl Levin and Robert Casey. On May 25 2008 , Senator Levin asked if the Pakistani government knew where Osama was. Mr Gilani and his Defence Minister, Kamran Rasool, stressed that while they didn't know Osama' s coordinates, they were doing their best to cooperate in the hunt for the Al-Qaeda leader. Mr Rasool cited an incident where the US had sent a photo to Pakistan of a man it thought may have been Osama. Mr Rasool said his country's forces had followed the person who did not turn out to be bin Laden. "The point, noted Rasool, was that Pakistan had acted swiftly when given information by the US," recalls a cable dated June 6 , 2008. (Read: Pakistan cable on Gilani's meeting with US Senators Levin and Casey) In November 2008 , a cable reports on a meeting between America's top-most general, David Petraeus and President Asif Zardari, who said that Pakistani forces had not spotted Osama. On November 3 , referring to the war on terror, Mr Zardari assured the General, "We intend to finish the job, defeat is not an option." The cable states, " Zardari said he would not mind paying the price for high-value targets but it did not appear Osama had been in our sights lately. " (Read: Pakistan cable on Petraeus' meeting with Zardari) The General highlighted that he had specially chosen Pakistan as his first foreign stop after taking over as head of the US Central Command. The Pakistani President said he needed to create a middle class to fight extremism. "The Taliban," he said, "can outpay my soldiers," the cable states.

Was He Betrayed? Ofcourse Pakistan Knew Bin Ladens Hiding Place All Along : Robert Fisk

A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday. And then the world went mad.

Fresh from providing us with a copy of his birth certificate, the American President turned up in the middle of the night to provide us with a live-time death certificate for Osama bin Laden, killed in a town named after a major in the army of the old British Empire. A single shot to the head, we were told. But the body's secret flight to Afghanistan, an equally secret burial at sea? The weird and creepy disposal of the body – no shrines, please – was almost as creepy as the man and his vicious organisation.

The Americans were drunk with joy. David Cameron thought it "a massive step forward". India described it as a "victorious milestone". "A resounding triumph," Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu boasted. But after 3,000 American dead on 9/11, countless more in the Middle East, up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and 10 years trying to find Bin Laden, pray let us have no more "resounding triumphs". Revenge attacks? Perhaps they will come, by the little groupuscules in the West, who have no direct contact with al-Qa'ida. Be sure, someone is already dreaming up a "Brigade of the Martyr Osama bin Laden". Maybe in Afghanistan, among the Taliban.

But the mass revolutions in the Arab world over the past four months mean that al-Qa'ida was already politically dead. Bin Laden told the world – indeed, he told me personally – that he wanted to destroy the pro-Western regimes in the Arab world, the dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new Islamic Caliphate. But these past few months, millions of Arab Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn't get rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn't want a caliph.

I met the man three times and have only one question left unasked: what did he think as he watched those revolutions unfold this year – under the flags of nations rather than Islam, Christians and Muslims together, the kind of people his own al-Qa'ida men were happy to butcher?

In his own eyes, his achievement was the creation of al-Qa'ida, the institution which had no card-carrying membership. You just woke up in the morning, wanted to be in al-Qa'ida – and you were. He was the founder. But he was never a hands-on warrior. There was no computer in his cave, no phone calls to set bombs off. While the Arab dictators ruled uncontested with our support, they largely avoided condemning American policy; only Bin Laden said these things. Arabs never wanted to fly planes into tall buildings, but they did admire a man who said what they wanted to say. But now, increasingly, they can say these things. They don't need Bin Laden. He had become a nonentity.

But talking of caves, Bin Laden's demise does bring Pakistan into grim focus. For months, President Ali Zardari has been telling us that Bin Laden was living in a cave in Afghanistan. Now it turns out he was living in a mansion in Pakistan. Betrayed? Of course he was. By the Pakistan military or the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence? Quite possibly both. Pakistan knew where he was.

Not only was Abbottabad the home of the country's military college – the town was founded by Major James Abbott of the British Army in 1853 – but it is headquarters of Pakistan's Northern Army Corps' 2nd Division. Scarcely a year ago, I sought an interview with another "most wanted man" – the leader of the group believed responsible for the Mumbai massacres. I found him in the Pakistani city of Lahore – guarded by uniformed Pakistani policemen holding machine guns. 

Of course, there is one more obvious question unanswered: couldn't they have captured Bin Laden? Didn't the CIA or the Navy Seals or the US Special Forces or whatever American outfit killed him have the means to throw a net over the tiger? "Justice," Barack Obama called his death. In the old days, of course, "justice" meant due process, a court, a hearing, a defence, a trial. Like the sons of Saddam, Bin Laden was gunned down. Sure, he never wanted to be taken alive – and there were buckets of blood in the room in which he died.

But a court would have worried more people than Bin Laden. After all, he might have talked about his contacts with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or about his cosy meetings in Islamabad with Prince Turki, Saudi Arabia's head of intelligence. Just as Saddam – who was tried for the murder of a mere 153 people rather than thousands of gassed Kurds – was hanged before he had the chance to tell us about the gas components that came from America, his friendship with Donald Rumsfeld, the US military assistance he received when he invaded Iran in 1980.

Oddly, he was not the "most wanted man" for the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. He gained his Wild West status by al-Qa'ida's earlier attacks on the US embassies in Africa and the attack on the US barracks in Dhahran. He was always waiting for Cruise missiles – so was I when I met him. He had waited for death before, in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001 when his bodyguards refused to let him stand and fight and forced him to walk over the mountains to Pakistan. Some of his time he would spend in Karachi – he was obsessed with Karachi; he even, weirdly, gave me photographs of pro-Bin Laden graffiti on the walls of the former Pakistani capital and praised the city's imams.

His relations with other Muslims were mysterious; when I met him in Afghanistan, he initially feared the Taliban, refusing to let me travel to Jalalabad at night from his training camp – he handed me over to his al-Qa'ida lieutenants to protect me on the journey next day. His followers hated all Shia Muslims as heretics and all dictators as infidels – though he was prepared to cooperate with Iraq's ex-Baathists against the country's American occupiers, and said so in an audiotape which the CIA typically ignored. He never praised Hamas and was scarcely worthy of their "holy warrior" definition yesterday which played – as usual – straight into Israel's hands.

In the years after 2001, I maintained a faint indirect communication with Bin Laden, once meeting one of his trusted al-Qa'ida associates at a secret location in Pakistan. I wrote out a list of 12 questions, the first of which was obvious: what kind of victory could he claim when his actions resulted in the US occupation of two Muslim countries? There was no reply for weeks. Then one weekend, waiting to give a lecture in Saint Louis in the US, I was told that Al Jazeera had produced a new audiotape from Bin Laden. And one by one – without mentioning me – he answered my 12 questions. And yes, he wanted the Americans to come to the Muslim world – so he could destroy them.

When Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, I wrote a long article in The Independent, pleading with Bin Laden to try to save his life. Pearl and his wife had looked after me when I was beaten on the Afghan border in 2001; he even gave me the contents of his contacts book. Much later, I was told that Bin Laden had read my report with sadness. But Pearl had already been murdered. Or so he said.

Yet Bin Laden's own obsessions blighted even his family. One wife left him, two more appeared to have been killed in Sunday's American attack. I met one of his sons, Omar, in Afghanistan with his father in 1994. He was a handsome little boy and I asked him if he was happy. He said "yes" in English. But last year, he published a book called Living Bin Laden and – recalling how his father killed his beloved dogs in a chemical warfare experiment – described him as an "evil man". In his book, he too remembered our meeting; and concluded that he should have told me that no, he was not a happy child.

By midday yesterday, I had three phone calls from Arabs, all certain that it was Bin Laden's double who was killed by the Americans – just as I know many Iraqis who still believe that Saddam's sons were not killed in 2003, nor Saddam really hanged. In due course, al-Qa'ida will tell us. Of course, if we are all wrong and it was a double, we're going to be treated to yet another videotape from the real Bin Laden – and President Barack Obama will lose the next election.

OSAMA'S Death Raises Questions

In Kabul, the news of Osama bin Laden's death has, more than anything, brought questions. Questions about what the end of al-Qaeda's leader means to the ongoing war and the Taliban's launch of a new fighting season. But most importantly, it has raised resounding questions about the nature of Pakistan's cooperation in the "war on terror". "They didn't find Osama in Logar, they didn't find him in Kandahar," declared Afghan president Hamid Karzai. "They didn’t find him in Badakhsahn, in Kabul or in Parwan. They found him in Abbotabad, in Pakistan," he said. Although president Karzai made sure he included a word of appreciation for the sacrifices of NATO and the United States, the frustration in his tone was clear. " NATO and the world did not hear our call for ten years," he said. "We burned and burned. Osama was killed in Abbotabad." The town of Abbotabad, where Mr bin Laden was killed, is home to Pakistan's military academy. According to Hassan Abbas, professor of South Asian politics and security at Columbia University who lived there in the early 1980 s, there is a security zone of about 5 km around the academy, where surveillance is high. "The house was only about two miles from the military academy, clearly within the security radius," Mr Abbas told Al Jazeera. In recent times, military installations in particular have been the target of frequent attacks by insurgents and terrorist groups. "This should have been more reason for increasing security around the military academy, and the house should have been checked, given the high walls and barbed wire," said Mr Abbas. Afghan-Pakistan relations In his reaction to the death, Karzai - and his government - has made sure to stress the proximity of the town to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. The tone in his speech yesterday was reminiscent of the early years of the "war on terror", when the Karzai government assiduously criticised the Pakistani military establishment - particularly the ISI - for not doing enough to go after al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Frustrated and exhausted by the fact that his allies could not assert enough pressure on Pakistan, Karzai reconsidered his approach in recent years. He stopped publicly criticising Pakistan and instead tried reaching out to them in the hope of finding a regional solution to the war. Yesterday, while Karzai spoke of the Pakistani people's suffering due to terrorism, there was nothing in his speech about the Pakistani government. Instead, he used the opportunity to recall his old message that had not received the attention he might have wanted it to. "I hope that, from now on, the United States and the West take what the people of Afghanistan say as a truth," he declared. Ali Ahmad Jalali, former interior minister in Karzai's cabinet, said the killing of Osama was "a wake up call" to Pakistan. "The proximity of the house to Islamabad shows that Pakistan can do much more in this war," he said. Challenges remain Some analysts believe that the nature of Osama's killing provides an ample opportunity to shift the focus once again to Pakistan.  It is time that Pakistan's "state- sponsored terrorism", as one analyst put it, is dealt with more decisively, they say. "We should utilise this momentous achievement to address the remaining challenges," Dr Davood Moradian, former senior policy adviser to the Afghan foreign minister, told Al Jazeera. "To this end, the ISI must be declared a terrorist entity." While his conclusion might seem extreme, he and many others point to the threat that a nuclear-armed Pakistan presents when its intelligence agency has been reluctant in going after terrorist groups. "We eliminated the most important and symbolic person in the phenomenon of terrorism," says Mr Moradian, "but the three important factors are still out there: the ideology, the infrastructure and the conducive environment." He believes that, unless the international community deals with ISI's relationship with groups such as al-Qaeda, the threat will remain. "If not, the international community will have to come back next time, as was the case in 2001. " However, it is unlikely that the Karzai government will dramatically change its current relationship with Pakistan, which has been a major factor in their formula for reconciling with the Taliban. "His death might bring a wave of revenge attacks on Afghans and security might deteriorate," says Hawal Alam Nooristani, a member of the High Council for Peace, the group designated to explore talks with the Taliban. "But what this proved was that Pakistan’s two- faced politics has yet to end." The impact of the death on the war Many in Afghanistan believe that the killing of Osama, though a huge morale booster for NATO and its allies, will not have much impact on the on going war in the country. In recent years, bin Laden had been mostly preoccupied with avoiding capture. In the process, much of the work had been delegated to his subordinates. "This is a psychological victory," says former minister Jalali, "but operationally, it will not have much impact. Al Qaeda is more decentralised and Osama really wasn't in charge recently," he says. Others point to the fact that, in recent years, al-Qaeda has played a small role in Afghanistan and local armed groups have dominated the insurgency. "That the leadership of al-Qaeda is in Pakistan is only half of the reality," says Dr Mahiudeen Mahdi, a member of the Afghan parliament from the northern province of Baghlan. "The daily threat inside Afghanistan has almost always been from the Afghan Taliban." Sanjar Sohail, publisher of the prominent daily newspaper 8- Subh, agrees that Osama's death will have an important "psychological impact" on al-Qaeda and groups who follow their ideology. But Sohail is concerned that the dramatic death will fast-track a hasty withdrawal out of Afghanistan. "Already, there are calls from Iran and Pakistan that the United Sates has no excuse to be in Afghanistan anymore," says Mr. Sohail. "Also, president Karzai's comments indicate that he is not interested in continuing this fight in Afghanistan." The death of Osama comes at a time when the Afghan government has intensified its efforts for reconciliation with the Taliban. Some believe that this presents an opportunity for the Taliban to distance themselves from al-Qaeda on the basis that their relationship was with Osama bin Laden and not al-Qaeda's ideology. President Karzai, by virtue of calling on the Taliban a further time in the same speech that he announced the death of Osama, has shown the government's interest in tapping this opportunity. Whether some Taliban will take that up or not, only time will tell. "I guess the Taliban are now trying to figure out how to position themselves," says Martine van Bijlert, the co-director of Afghanistan Analysts Network. " They will want to use the mobilising potential of bin Laden's death, but they will also want to leave their position vis-a-vis al- Qaeda sufficiently ambiguous to keep all future options open." Sohail thinks that the Taliban might begin presenting "green lights" to keep the government interested. "They will want a gradual desensitisation of their image in the public perception by 2014 ," which is the scheduled date for NATO withdrawal. But in the short term, the death of Osama is unlikely to affect the intensity of the war in Afghanistan. "I suspect that the violence this summer will continue at a similar pace as might have been expected before bin Laden's death," says Alex Strick van Linschoten, co- author of An Enemy We Created, the forthcoming book on the Taliban's ties with al-Qaeda. He has lived in Kandahar for the past few years. "It is perhaps significant, though, in offering Obama a chance to recalibrate US operations inside Afghanistan." Mr Mahdi, however, is concerned about how Karzai might use this in his "desperate" efforts to reconcile with the Taliban. "Karzai has been trying to promote the idea that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are separate entities," he says. "I am afraid this presents his government with an opportunity to hide the Taliban from the world view." 

Who Protected Laden?

We just learned at 11 :30 pm EDT on Sunday (May 1) in America via Internet and TV that a special American team had gone to Abbottabad, which is located in the Hazara district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as Northwest Frontier Province) in Pakistan, to execute a daring mission. The city of Abbottabad is located about 90 miles to the north from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. The intelligence officials now say that Osama bin Laden was living in a mansion in Abbottabad for months; therefore, the al-Qaeda chief chose to live in a crowded city in Pakistan. Now it appears that Osama bin Laden lived in a city rather than in an obscure place perhaps for medical reason. The American intelligence knew all along that the al-Qaeda chief was living inside Pakistan. The US intelligence knew that bin Laden had been living in a mansion in Abbottabad since August 2010. A careful military plan was drawn and finally on May 1 , 2011 a special military team executed a plan to capture or kill bin Laden. No mention of Pakistani military assisting the US team was made by President Obama who addressed the nation at about 11 : 45 EDT. Therefore, it appears that the entire operation was planned and executed by American military with no assistance from the Pakistan's military. It was mentioned in the media that not a single person from the American team was killed in the operation. The purpose of this article is not to give a glowing encomium to American team that killed al- Qaeda chief but to raise the point - - who really protected Osama bin Laden in Pakistan all these years? The US intelligence had the information that in the aftermath of 9 /11 , particularly in December 2001 , Osama bin Laden and his entourage moved to Pakistan by crossing the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This information was also known to many in the intelligence communities throughout Europe and North America. During the presidential election contest in US in 2008 , Obama made a pledge to US voters that if he were elected to the highest office in the land, he would hunt Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. It seems as if his prediction came true. The Pakistani authorities played a vicious game in the aftermath of al-Qaeda led attack in New York in September 2001. General Pervez Musharraf was the military president of Pakistan at the time. He was able to convince Bush that America needs Pakistan to hunt down Mr. Osama bin Laden. However, there was a catch. America had to shell out billions of dollars to Pakistan for hunting Osama bin Laden and Taliban leaders who were ensconced in the NWFP area. Pakistani military and intelligence would catch lower-level al-Qaeda operatives from time to time and also hand over lower-ranking Taliban leaders to show that they mean business. A regime change took place in Pakistan in August 2008 with the removal of Gen. Musharraf from power but that hardly changed the tactics of Pakistani military. They claimed that the Pakistani military were hunting down al-Qaeda leaders in such oddball place as Gilgit and Waziristan. There was no hope of catching Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second man in command, anytime soon. Life was going as usual in Pakistan where a weak civilian government was running the show outwardly but the real power belonged to Pakistan's military. US authorities finally realised that Pakistani government was playing a vicious game in Afghanistan. They extracted billions of aid money since 2001 all in the name of catching the masterminds of 9 / 11 terror attack. Finally, US took the charge of hunting al-Qaeda top bosses inside Pakistan. As per President Obama, US authorities in recent days knew where Mr. Osama bin Laden took refuge inside Pakistan. They finally moved on May 1 , 2011 and killed the al-Qaeda chief after a gun battle. In Pakistan the military and its intelligence branch, ISI, know everything. Therefore, they must have had real time intelligence on Osama bin Laden. Moreover, the al-Qaeda chief chose to live in a mansion in a crowded city whose population is about 100 ,000. Since Mr. bin Laden holed up in this mansion for at least six months, would anyone believe that Pakistani police, ISI, and the military not know who lived in that mansion? Furthermore, the al-Qaeda chief maintained his own security force inside the mansion. The mere human activities inside the compound should give enough hints that a powerful person was residing in the big house. Still then, the Pakistani authorities were not perturbed about the occupants of this mansion. In conclusion, the Pakistani authorities, in particular ISI and the military, had the full knowledge of Osama bin Laden's whereabouts all these years. It is an open question whether they have protected Mr. Laden and his bodyguards or not. They say that in Pakistan not a single leaf moves without being watched by the military intelligence. Therefore, Mr. Laden's itinerant journey inside Pakistan was closely monitored by Pakistani military. Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, the inside story should come out.

After Osama : Stop Feeding The Beast

After years of former Pakistani military dictator General Musharraf assuring the world that bin Laden was either dead or in Afghanistan, he was found and dispatched by US special forces in the town of Abbottabad, a mere 30 miles – 50 km – as the crow flies from the capital Islamabad. Abbottabad is a colonial era army " cantonment" or garrison town and home to the Pakistan Military Academy PMA Kakul, less than two miles from the compound in question. To put it in perspective, it is like capturing Carlos the Jackal just down the road from West Point or Sandhurst. The notion that Pakistan's all pervasive Army-controlled Inter- Services Intelligence was unaware of bin Laden's presence beggars belief.   Although Bush-era National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley feigned total surprise about the location and its implications in an on-air interview after the news broke, WikiLeaks, as well as other sources such as investigative journalist Bob Woodward's most recent book, tell a very different story. By 2008 , the United States political and military leadership had lost all remnants of faith in the trustworthiness of the Pakistani military and its intelligence wing, the ISI, internally acknowledging that it consistently "hunted with the hounds and ran with the hares" , including the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqanis, and the Lashkar-e-Taiba – and was involved in planning terrorist attacks from Kabul to Mumbai. Pakistani intelligence has had a close relationship with bin Laden since the early 1980 s, when he acted as a courier, transferring funds from Saudi intelligence and its establishment to the Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami to support the anti-Soviet jihad. It is no surprise that bin Laden chose to relocate to eastern Afghanistan, an area within Pakistan's sphere of influence, in 1996 – after he was expelled from Sudan under US pressure. Of course, the relationship has never been smooth – Pakistan's opportunism alienated al-Qaeda just as much as such behaviour alienated the United States – but also made it just as indispensable. Funded by the US taxpayer Despite this, the United States continued to funnel billions to the Pakistani armed forces in sophisticated weapons and cash – most recently a $2 billion package announced in October 2010 under the State Department’s Foreign Military Finance Program. The US is paying, not only for the use of Pakistan as a logistical corridor to its troops in Afghanistan, but for the privilege of conducting an increasingly aggressive covert counter-terrorism campaign on Pakistani soil – often against the Pakistani government's client groups. Analysis by SISMEC, the New America Foundation and others showed a massive increase in drone strikes in the tribal area of North Waziristan after the summer of 2008 , largely aimed at pro-ISI groups such as the Haqqani network. Most recently, US security contractor Raymond Davis was held in Pakistan for almost two months ( 17 January to March 16 , 2011)  after fatally shooting two alleged ISI agents, when he was believed to be surveilling the LeT in Lahore. As for Davis' claim that he thought he was being robbed, well that one's for the birds. The Davis saga came at the same time that the Obama administration was reportedly finalising plans for the killing of Osama bin Laden, a coincidence that we are sure we will be hearing more about. America's first attempt to kill Osama bin Laden came 13 years ago in August 1998 , when president Bill Clinton launched " Operation Infinite Reach" in retaliation for the suicide bombings that devastated US embassies in Nairobi and Daressalam. Sixty six cruise missiles were launched from the Arabian Sea at camps in eastern Afghanistan to kill Al Qaeda's senior leadership who were due to meet in a shura council. Pakistan's military leadership was informed by US counterparts shortly before the missiles entered their airspace, just in case they mistook it for an Indian attack ( India and Pakistan had just tested nuclear weapons earlier in May). Shortly after, bin Laden cancelled his planned meeting. Many US officials believe the Pakistani Army and the ISI tipped bin Laden off. Covert operations It is this long and frustrating history that explains why the US chose to conduct this mission covertly and unilaterally. In spite of face-saving Pakistani claims of joint execution, it was conducted in much the same way the US might have in a semi- hostile country, such as Syria in October 2008 , rather than its proclaimed "frontline ally" in what used to be called the "war on terror". It seems that Pakistani authorities had no clear idea of what was going on until it was all over, and a US helicopter bearing the SEAL team and bin Laden’s body touched down at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. There is an inevitable question about timing. Why on earth did it take the US so long to succeed? The standard, official defence was that this was a rugged area, filled with implacably hostile tribesmen. Today, questions are being finally asked about the Pakistani Army's complicity. The truth is deeper, and more unpleasant, and has much to do with the ways in which dictators around the world manipulate US policy with embarrassing ease. For almost seven years after 9 /11 , General Musharraf, a warmonger who seized power in a coup in 1999 , assured Bush that he was the only man who could hold back the violent fundamentalists and prevent them from seizing control of Pakistan's government and its nuclear weapons. The US should not push too hard, but rather leave Musharraf to crush the extremists. The reality was that the Pakistani government deliberately supported the takeover of extremist parties – such as the Islamist MMA alliance in 2003 – and facilitated the comeback of the Taliban, all the while profiting handsomely from generous US aid and the lifting of nuclear sanctions. This was despite the fact that democratically elected governments in both Afghanistan ( Karzai's 2004 election was accepted as free and fair) and India complained vociferously of the Pakistani military's support of extremist groups in both their countries. Eventually a newly amalgamated Pakistani Taliban turned on their former patrons in the government. Despite this, Pakistan continued to support the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani group, and the LeT, and the political leadership in the US continued to enrich a militarist dictatorship that fanned the flames of extremism at the cost of thousands of Asian and American lives. A new approach Since Bush's final year in power, freed from the baleful influence of Donald Rumsfeld, the US has taken a much firmer line with Pakistan's military – calling its bluff by acting more directly against extremists, and demanding ever greater accountability (for example the Kerry-Lugar bill) for the billions in assistance poured into Pakistan. However these measures were totally inadequate for the stew of militarism, illiteracy, and bad governance. The Arab Spring has eroded many of the conventional assumptions about the relationship between dictators, Islamists and the West. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, we heard dictators playing the Islamist card for three decades – "support us unless you want the terrorists to win". The reality has been quite different. Dictators from Musharraf to Mubarak have relied on terrorists and extremists to bring in the US aid they so desperately need to survive. In the case of the Pakistani Army, they have been only too happy to feed the hand that bites them. Musharraf, having worn out the patience of both the Pakistani public and his US patrons was finally forced out in August 2008. He has been replaced with a weak civilian government that has served as little more than a useful facade for an army that remains addicted to both jihad and US money. It is a stark warning of what the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt can turn in to unless people remain vigilant. Today, the US continues to lavishly fund the Pakistani military, while using drones and secret soldiers such as Raymond Davis to attack the extremist forces that the same regime supports. It is up to the US to stop feeding the beast.