As if we didn’t already know.
Pakistan has charged the doctor who helped the CIA locate Osama Bin Laden with high treason and sentenced him to 33 years gaol. To add to the travesty, he was tried in a tribal court in Bin Laden sympathetic north western Pakistan, despite his actions taking place in an entirely different province in north eastern Pakistan.
His real “crime” of course was to expose the abject duplicity of the Pakistani government and military, by helping to reveal that Bin Laden had been hiding for some time in Abbottabad, a city of 300,000 people, only 50 km from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. No sensible person would believe that Bin Laden and his sizeable entourage could have remained in such a location without the knowledge and support of some high ranking Pakistani military and intelligence personnel and possibly also government ministers.
Even now, the Pakistanis muster the predictable outrage at the “invasion of their sovereignty”, but at least most of their decision makers knew full well that they deserved it. There was no way the Americans could ever have shared intelligence in such an operation, given the clear evidence of Pakistani complicity in hiding Bin Laden. If you harbour our enemies, you can stick your “sovereignty” up your greasy arses.
The fact that the exposure of Bin Laden and his Pakistani support base resulted not in a clean out of Islamist radicals from the military and intelligence agencies by shocked and embarrassed, more moderate, secular forces, but instead resulted in the persecution of the man who helped expose him indicates Pakistan is an enemy of the West from top to bottom. It may have some modern, secular voices who to some degree share common, liberal goals with the West, but there just aren’t enough of them and they don’t have sufficient power. Often the ones who are in power are indolent and corrupt, par for the course in Pakistan.
The Americans and particularly the CIA, have been idiots in the way they have handled the doctor. This is too often the case with foreign US intelligence contacts: they burn them. Who will work for you if you don’t look after them when there’s trouble?
Why tell everyone the doctor helped you? Why not just say the CIA posed as a UN health bureau conducting hepatitis B vaccinations and the local medical staff didn’t know anything about it? They just thought they were vaccinating Pakistani children. Couldn’t you idiots work out that there would be substantial blowback on the doctor and his family in this corrupt, shame based culture?
The CIA should have predicted a significant probability of punishment for the doctor and spirited him out of Pakistan as quickly as possible, giving him asylum in the US, if he wanted it. Instead, they’ve ignored him and now they’ll fuck around with some ineffective diplomacy, then forget him in six months.
Nice working with you to catch your #1 enemy, dickheads! I’m sure recruiting operatives will be so much easier in future.
As for the Pakistanis, the only language which produced any meaningful co-operation from them was: "Be prepared to go back to the stone age".
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