Why US Mistrust Pak Spy Agency

In 2003 or 2004 , Pakistani intelligence agents trailed a suspected militant courier to a house in the picturesque hill town of Abbottabad in northern Pakistan. There, the agents determined that the courier would make contact with one of the world's most wanted men, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who had succeeded September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Muhammad as al Qaeda operations chief a few months earlier. Agents from Pakistan's powerful and mysterious Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known as the ISI, raided a house but failed to find al-Libbi, a senior Pakistani intelligence official told Reuters this week. Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf later wrote in his memoirs that an interrogation of the courier revealed that al-Libbi used three houses in Abbottabad, which sits some 50 km (30 miles) northeast of Islamabad. The intelligence official said that one of those houses may have been in the same compound where on May 1 US special forces killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. It's a good story. But is it true? Pakistan's foreign ministry this week used the earlier operation as evidence of Pakistan's commitment to the fight against terrorism. You see, Islamabad seemed to be pointing out, we were nabbing bad guys seven years ago in the very neighborhood where you got bin Laden. But US Department of Defense satellite photos show that in 2004 the site where bin Laden was found this week was nothing but an empty field. A US official briefed on the bin Laden operation told Reuters he had heard nothing to indicate there had been an earlier Pakistani raid. There are other reasons to puzzle. Pakistan's foreign ministry says that Abbottabad, home to several military installations, has been under surveillance since 2003. If that's true, then why didn't the ISI uncover bin Laden, who US officials say has been living with his family and entourage in a well-guarded compound for years? The answer to that question goes to the heart of the troubled relationship between Pakistan and the United States. Washington has long believed that Islamabad, and especially the ISI, play a double game on terrorism, saying one thing but doing another. MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE Since 9 /11 the United States has relied on Pakistan's military to fight al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the mountainous badlands along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. President George W Bush forged a close personal relationship with military leader Musharraf. But US officials have also grown frustrated with Pakistan. While Islamabad has been instrumental in catching second-tier and lower ranked al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, and several operatives identified as al Qaeda "number threes" have either been captured or killed, the topmost leaders - bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy Ayman al Zawahiri -- have consistently eluded capture. The ISI, which backed the Taliban when the group came to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990 s, seemed to turn a blind eye -- or perhaps even helped -- as Taliban and al-Qaeda members fled into Pakistan during the US invasion of Afghanistan after 9 /11 , according to US officials. Washington also believes the agency protected Abdul Qadeer Khan, lionized as the "father" of Pakistan's bomb, who was arrested in 2004 for selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. And when Kashmiri militants attacked the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008 , killing 166 people, New Delhi accused the ISI of controlling and coordinating the strikes. A key militant suspect captured by the Americans later told investigators that ISI officers had helped plan and finance the attack. Pakistan denies any active ISI connection to the Mumbai attacks and often points to the hundreds of troops killed in action against militants as proof of its commitment to fighting terrorism. But over the past few years Washington has grown increasingly suspicious-and ready to criticize Pakistan. The U.S. military used association with the spy agency as one of the issues they would question Guantanamo Bay prisoners about to see if they had links to militants, according to WikiLeaks documents made available last month to the New York Times. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last July that she believed that Pakistani officials knew where bin Laden was holed up. On a visit to Pakistan just days before the Abbottabad raid, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused the ISI of maintaining links with the Taliban. As the CIA gathered enough evidence to make the case that bin Laden was in Abbottabad, US intel chiefs decided that Pakistan should be kept in the dark. When US Navy Seals roped down from helicopters into the compound where bin Laden was hiding, US officials insist, Pakistan's military and intel bosses were blissfully unaware of what was happening in the middle of their country. Some suspect Pakistan knew more than it's letting on. But the Pakistani intelligence official, who asked to remain anonymous so that he could speak candidly, told Reuters that the Americans had acted alone and without any Pakistani assistance or permission. The reality is Washington long ago learned to play its own double game. It works with Islamabad when it can and uses Pakistani assets when it's useful but is ever more careful about revealing what it's up to. "On the one hand, you can't not deal with the ISI... There definitely is the cooperation between the two agencies in terms of personnel working on joint projects and the day-to-day intelligence sharing," says Kamran Bokhari, Middle East and South Asia director for global intelligence firm STRATFOR. But " there is this perception on the part of the American officials working with their counterparts in the ISI, there is the likelihood that some of these people might be working with the other side. Or somehow the information we're sharing could leak out... It's the issue of perception and suspicion." The killing of bin Laden exposes just how dysfunctional the relationship has become. The fact that bin Laden seems to have lived for years in a town an hour's drive from Islamabad has US congressmen demanding to know why Washington is paying $1 billion a year in aid to Pakistan. Many of the hardest questions are directed at the ISI. Did it know bin Laden was there? Was it helping him? Is it rotten to the core or is it just a few sympathizers? What's clear is that the spy agency America must work within one of the world's most volatile and dangerous regions remains an enigma to outsiders. GENERAL PASHA ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha visited Washington on April 11 , just weeks before bin Laden was killed. Pasha, 59 , became ISI chief in September 2008 , two months before the Mumbai attacks. Before his promotion, he was in charge of military operations against Islamic militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. He is considered close to Pakistan military chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, himself a long-time ISI chief. A slight man who wastes neither words nor movements, Pasha speaks softly and is able to project bland anonymity even as he sizes up his companions and surroundings. In an off-the-record interview with Reuters last year, he spoke deliberately and quietly but seemed to enjoy verbal sparring. There was none of the bombast many Pakistani officials put on. Pasha, seen by US officials as something of a right-wing nationalist, and CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was in the final stages of planning the raid on Osama's compound, had plenty to talk about in Washington. Joint intelligence operations have been plagued by disputes, most notably the case of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore in January. Davis was released from jail earlier this year after the victims' families were paid "blood money" by the United States, a custom sanctioned under Islam and common in Pakistan. Then there are the Mumbai attacks. Pasha and other alleged ISI officers were named as defendants in a US lawsuit filed late last year by families of Americans killed in the attacks. The lawsuit contends that the ISI men were involved with Lashkar-e- Taiba, an anti-India militant group, in planning and orchestrating the attacks. An Indian government report seen by Reuters states that David Headley, a Pakistani-American militant who was allied with Lashkar-e-Taiba and who was arrested in the United States last year, told Indian interrogators while under FBI supervision that ISI officers had been involved in plotting the attack and paid him $25 ,000 to help fund it. Pakistan's government said it will " strongly contest" the case and shortly after the lawsuit was filed Pakistani media named the undercover head of the CIA's Islamabad station, forcing him to leave the country. TECHNIQUE OF WAR The ISI's ties to Islamist militancy are very much by design. The Pakistan Army's humiliating surrender to India in Dhaka in 1971 led to the carving up of the country into two parts, one West Pakistan and the other Bangladesh. The defeat had two major effects: it convinced the Pakistan military that it could not beat its larger neighbor through conventional means alone, a realization that gave birth to its use of Islamist militant groups as proxies to try to bleed India; and it forced successive Pakistani governments to turn to Islam as a means of uniting the territory it had left. These shifts, well underway when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 , suited the United States at first. Working with its Saudi Arabian ally, Washington plowed money and weapons into the jihad against the Soviets and turned a blind eye to the excesses of Pakistan's military ruler, General Zia ul-Haq, who had seized power in 1977 and hanged former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979. Many Pakistanis blame the current problems in Pakistan in part on Washington's penchant for supporting military rulers. It did the same in 2001 when it threw it its lot with Musharraf following the attacks on New York and Washington. By then, the rebellion in Indian Kashmir had been going since 1989 , and US officials back in 2001 made little secret that they knew the army was training, arming and funding militants to fight there. That attitude changed after India and Pakistan nearly went to war following the December 2001 attack on India's parliament, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan- based militant groups -- a charge Islamabad denied. Musharraf began to rein in the Kashmiri militant groups, restricting their activity across the Line of Control which divides the Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir. But he was juggling the two challenges which continue to defy his successor as head of the army, General Ashfaq Kayani -- reining in the militant groups enough to prevent an international backlash on Pakistan, while giving them enough space to operate to avoid domestic fall-out at home. The ISI has never really tried to hide the fact that it sees terrorism as part of its arsenal. When Guantanamo interrogation documents appearing to label the Pakistani security agency as an entity supporting terrorism were published recently, a former ISI head, Lt. General Asad Durrani, wrote that terrorism "is a technique of war, and therefore an instrument of policy." Critics believe that elements of the ISI -- perhaps an old guard that learned the Islamization lessons of General Zia ul-Haq a little too well -- maintain an influence within the organization. "It is no secret that Pakistan's army and foreign intelligence service, the Inter- Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, actively cultivated a vast array of Islamist militants - both local and foreign, from the early 1980 s until at least the events of September 11 , 2001 - as instruments of foreign policy," STRATFOR wrote in an analysis posted on its website this week. LIST OF GRIEVANCES That legacy is at the heart of Washington's growing mistrust of the ISI. Take the agency's ties to the powerful Afghan militant group headed by Jalaluddin Haqqani, which has inflicted heavy casualties on U.S. forces in the region. "We sometimes say: You are controlling -- you, Pasha -- you're controlling Haqqani," one US official said, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity. "Well, Pasha will come back and say ... 'No, we are in contact with them.' Well, what does that really mean?" "I don't know but I'd like our experts to sit down and work out: Is this something where he is trying ( to), as he would put it, know more about what a terrorist group in his country is doing. Or as we would put it, to manipulate these people as the forward soldiers of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan." When US Joint Chiefs head Admiral Mike Mullen visited Islamabad last month he was just as blunt. "Haqqani is supporting, funding, training fighters that are killing Americans and killing coalition partners. And I have a sacred obligation to do all I can to make sure that doesn't happen," Mullen told a Pakistani newspaper. "So that's at the core -- it's not the only thing -- but that's at the core that I think is the most difficult part of the relationship." Just across the border in Afghanistan, Major General John Campbell reaches into a bag and pulls out a thick stack of cards with the names and photos of coalition forces killed in the nearly year- long period since he's been on the job. Many of the men in the photos were killed by Haqqani fighters. "I carry these around so I never forget their sacrifice," Campbell said, speaking to a small group of reporters at US Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province. "There are guys in Pakistan that have sanctuary that are coming across the border and killing Americans... we gotta engage the Pakistanis to do something about that," he said. Campbell calls the Haqqani network the most lethal threat to Afghanistan, where US forces are entrenched in a near decade-old war. "The Haqqani piece, it's sort of like a Mafia-syndicate. And I don't know at what level they're tied into the ISI -- I don't. But there's places ... that you just see that there's collusion up and down the border," he said. DRONE WARS Another contentious subject discussed on Pasha's trip to Washington was the use of missile- firing drones to attack suspected militant camps on Pakistani territory. Once Obama moved into the White House, the drone program begun by the Bush Administration not only continued, but according to several officials, increased. Sometimes drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan took place several times in a single week. US officials, as well as counter- terrorism officials from European countries with a history of Islamic militant activity, said that they had no doubt that the drone campaign was seriously damaging the ability of al Qaeda's central operation, as well as affiliated groups like the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, to continue to use Pakistan as a safe haven. But the increasingly obvious use of drones made it far more difficult for either the CIA or its erstwhile Pakistani partners, ISI, to pretend that the operation was secret and that Pakistani officials were unaware of it. Since last October, the tacit cooperation between the CIA and ISI which had helped protect and even nurture the CIA's drone program, began to fray, and came close to breaking point. Before Pasha visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, last month, Pakistani intelligence sources leaked ferocious complaints about the CIA in general and the drone program in particular, suggesting that the agency, its operatives and its operations inside Pakistan were out of control and that if necessary, Pakistan would take forcible steps to curb them -- including stopping drone attacks and limiting the presence of CIA operatives in Pakistan. When Pasha arrived at CIA HQ, U.S. officials said, the demands leaked by the Pakistanis to the media were much scaled down, with Pasha asking Panetta that the US give Pakistan more notice about drone operations, supply Pakistan with its own fleet of drones (a proposal which the United States had agreed to but which had subsequently stalled) and that the agency would curb the numbers of its personnel in Pakistan. US officials said that the Obama administration agreed to at least some measure of greater notification to the Pakistani authorities about CIA activities, though insisted any concessions were quite limited. Just weeks later, Obama failed to notify Pakistan in advance about the biggest U.S. counter-terrorist operation in living memory, conducted on Pakistani soil. LEARNING FROM HISTORY It was different the first time US forces went after bin Laden. Washington's first attempt to kill the al Qaeda leader came in August 1998. President Bill Clinton launched 66 cruise missiles from the Arabian Sea at camps in Khost in eastern Afghanistan to kill the group's top brass in retaliation for the suicide bombings on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The CIA had received word that al Qaeda's leadership was due to meet. But Bin Laden canceled the meeting and several US officials said at the time they believed the ISI had tipped him off. The US military informed their Pakistani counterparts about 90 minutes before the missiles entered Pakistan's airspace, just in case they mistook them for an Indian attack. Then US Secretary of State William Cohen came to suspect bin Laden escaped because he was tipped off. Four days before the operation, the State Department issued a public warning about a " very serious threat" and ordered hundreds of nonessential US personnel and dependents out of Pakistan. Some US officials said the Taliban could have passed the word to bin Laden on an ISI tip. Other former officials have disputed the notion of a security breach, saying bin Laden had plenty of notice that the United States intended to retaliate following the bombings in Africa. WHAT'S NEXT? Now that the US has finally killed bin Laden, what will change? The Pakistani intelligence official acknowledged that bin Laden's presence in Pakistan will cause more problems with the United States. "It looks bad," he said. "It's pretty embarrassing." But he denied that Pakistan had been hiding bin Laden, and noted that the CIA had struggled to find bin Laden for years as well. Perhaps. But the last few days are unlikely to convince the CIA and other US agencies to trust their Pakistani counterparts with any kind of secrets or partnership. Recent personnel changes at the top of the Obama Administration also do not bode well for salvaging the relationship. Panetta, a former Congressman and senior White House official, is a political operator who officials say at least got on cordially, if not well, with ISI chief Pasha. But Panetta is being reassigned to take over from Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. His replacement at the CIA will be General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. military operations in neighboring Afghanistan. The biggest issue on Petraeus's agenda will be dealing with Pakistan's ISI. The US general's relationship with Pakistani Army chief of Staff Kayani, Pasha's immediate superior, is publicly perceived to be so unfriendly that it has become a topic of discussion on Pakistani TV talk shows. "I think it is going to be a very strained and difficult relationship," said Bruce Riedel, a former adviser to Obama on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He characterized the attitude on both sides as "mutual distrust." After a decade of American involvement in Afghanistan, experts say that Petraeus and Pakistani intelligence officials know each other well enough not to like each other.

India's Bloodless War Against Bangladesh

Unlike the past wars, being fought through the traditional armies with tanks and machine guns, the arena of war has changed, encompassing all the spheres. In the modern era, electronics have made it difficult for the military to serve as the automatic dominant sphere in every war, covering all the land, sea and space domains. Now, war with non-lethal weapons can be more harmful in damaging the interest of a rival country or enemy.It will be conducted in non- war spheres, entailing non-military means and tactics as part of the new warfare. New technology is being utilized by the new warriors to carry out all forms of financial, network and media attacks. Most of these attacks are of non-military-types, yet they can be completely viewed as equal to warfare actions. In other words, bloody warfare has been replaced by bloodless warfare as much as possible. Judging in these terms, India's plan for the construction of the Tipaimukh Dam, built on the river Barak is part of its most dangerous scheme of bloodless warfare, being conducted against Bangladesh in order to further harm all political, economic, financial and social spheres of that small country. India had already started it bloodless war against Bangladesh when the latter had refused to serve as satellite state of New Delhi which had played a key role in the dismemberment of Pakistan. For this purpose, India constructed the Farakka dam on the Indian side of the Ganges River to stop flow of water to Bangladesh. Despite the protest of Dhaka, Indian rulers used various delaying tactics to resolve the issue of Farakka dam. In this respect, Indo- Bangladesh Joint Rivers Commission (JRC) met many a times to settle the issue, but could not produce any positive results. In April, 1975 , India assured that it would not operate feeder canal until a final agreement was reached between New Delhi and Dhaka on the sharing of Ganges water. Bangladesh was assured of getting 40 ,000 cusecs during the dry season. After the assassination of Sheik Mujib on August 15 , 1975 , by availing the political unrest in Bangladesh, India violated the agreement (MOU) by stealing and diverting the full capacity of 40 , 000 cusecs of water. The matter was brought to the attention of UN General Assembly, which on November 26 , 1976 adopted a consensus, directing the parties to arrive at a fair and expeditious settlement. On November 5 , 1977 the Ganges Waters Agreement was signed, assuring 34 ,500 cusecs for Bangladesh. But the JRC statistics shows very clearly that Bangladesh did not get her due share during the subsequent years. After Sheikh Hasina was elected Prime Minister, she visited India and signed a treaty with her counterpart Deve Gowda on December 12 , 1996. The treaty stipulated that below a certain flow rate, India and Bangladesh will each share half of the water. But New Delhi has continued violating the treaty by using more water of the river at the cost of Bangladesh. The JRC report of March 9 , 2009 revealed that from 1999 to 2009 , India intermittently reduced the water flow to Bangladesh. A study conducted in the United States by Bridge and Husain, have identified Farakka as the root cause behind arsenic poisoning with groundwater in Bangladesh. A report of 2004 stated that over 80 rivers of Bangladesh dried up during last three decades due to the construction of the Farakka barrage by India. Some environmentalists have termed Farakka Barrage as the greatest man-made economic disaster of our time. However, people of Bangladesh have been facing disastrous effects of the Farakka Barrage such as frequent flooding due to changes in the natural flow of the Ganges; river transportation problems during dry season; increased salinity threatening crops, animal life, drinking water and industrial activities; reduction in agricultural products and conversion of the fertile agricultural land in wasteland due to shortage of water. While researchers have already been describing Farakka dam as the last of criminal calamity imposed by India on Dhaka, the proposed construction of Tipaimukh Dam in the neighboring Manipur state will prove as another Indian water-bomb on Bangladesh, giving a wake up call to the people in connection with its prospective dangers. The Tipaimukh, a multipurpose hydel project on the Barak river is located about 200 km upstream of the border of Bangladesh, and where it is, recently, under attack in Bangladesh by opposition parties, students and environmental groups who have been protesting by saying that it could cause desertification, entailing other adverse effects like Farakka dam. On December 16 , 2006 , India's Union minister for industries laid the foundation stone of the Tipaimukh project. According to a source of the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation (NEEPCO), the work in January of 2007 mainly dealt with underground drilling at the reservoir site of the project. The Brahmaputra Board, a wing of the Union water resources ministry, drilled those sites in 1997. This year, New Delhi is fully prepared to start building this dam by setting aside its impact on Bangladesh, while neglecting protests in this regard. In July, this year, a 10- member all- party delegation of parliamentarians from Bangladesh reached Tipaimukh and studied the project site. Meanwhile, in New Delhi, Bandladesh's delegation led by Abdur Razzaq, chairman of the standing committee of the parliament water resources held a meeting with Indian Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde who told the former that the Tipaimukh “project is not an irrigation project or a water diversion scheme, it is a hydel project and in no way will harm Bangladesh’s interest.� But in fact, just like the Farakka dam, Indian leaders have been verbally satisfying Dhaka by totally ignoring the drastic effects. Some reports suggests that in connivance with the central authorities, the state government of Manipur kept all the documents relating to the Tipaimukh project in secrecy due to the reaction of Bangladesh. In this regard, even the proposed dam is unpopular in the Manipur State where it is being constructed. Barak river has been the source of livelihood for the Hmar people for the last many years and will affect the source of their livelihood once the Tipaimukh dam is erected. Hmar Students’ Union has strongly warned the authority against initiating any work without prior consent of the people of the areas to be affected by the dam. Nonetheless, villagers are feeling fear of losing their dwelling places along with their living ways�submerging some of the villages into the water. Citizens' Concern on Dam and Development (CCDD) has also warned the Indian authorities that if the construction of the dam is taken up without the consent of the people to be affected, they, with the support of other like- minded people, will block its construction under any circumstances. Besides, damaging bilateral ties between the two neighboring countries, this new dam will especially target millions of Bangladeshis, snatching away their means of livelihood, forcing them to become internally displaced persons, and thereby worsening Bangladesh’s overall economy. No doubt, it will result in political, financial and social implications. In the modern era of technological innovations, Indian such a criminal act by the construction of the dam will amount to the consequences of a full-scale war, though bloodless in nature, but will make Bangladesh vulnerable to unemployment, shortage of products, reduction of resources, thirst, starvation and deaths including a number of inter-related problems of grave nature. Bangladeshi people have already suffered miserably from the Farakka Barrage and cannot afford to see another one built to threaten them. In light of New Delhi's previous records of dishonoring agreements on Farakka dam, Bangladesh, cannot trust on any new promise. If India wants to meet energy needs of its people, it can better do so through its several nuclear power plants. As a matter of fact, India seems determined to erect Tipaimukh dam as part of its bloodless war against Bangladesh in order to affect millions of people adversely, and to destroy Bangladesh’s infrastructure without the use of a single bullet. Best option for Dhaka is to cope this new style war of New Delhi through its own tactics of modern warfare. In this respect, demonstrations inside Bangladesh, contacts of their opposition leaders with the affected communities of Manipur, particularly abroad, organising protests in the US and Europe in cooperation with the environmentalists are essential for the survival of the country. All these efforts are likely to succeed with the help of media which has become an important tool of warfare, and can also be employed for defensive purposes. Such a reaction is necessary for Bangladesh to eliminate Indian bloodless war trap, forcing New Delhi to abandon the project

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."