If Bin Laden's precise location can be found, then Obama would get in touch with Musharraf to take Bin Laden out. If Musharraf takes more than three minutes, President Obama would take Bin Laden out unilaterally. That is what he said.
Obama knows Musharraf will cooperate. But if he does not, which presidential candidate in her or his right mind would want the US to stand idly by respecting Pakistan's sovereignty? There will be a missile strike and that particular cave will be turned into rubble.
If you understand how autocratic organizations like the Al Qaeda work - they don't hold internal elections - you will understand how fundamentally important it is to take the top guy out. Look at what happened to the Shining Path in Peru after its top guy Gonzalo was captured: it withered away like magic.
The US intelligence agencies have been making a grave mistake in outsourcing the hunt for Bin Laden to Pakistan. Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, described as a state inside a state, is supremely infiltrated by Islamist radicals. That is why when Bill Clinton struck Bin Laden when he was in Afghanistan, Bin Laden had already shifted. Because Bill Clinton made the mistake of first telling Pakistan that he was going to hit Bin Laden because Bin Laden had been located. That information got passed onto Bin Laden. Some top dude in the ISI passed that info to Bin Laden.
Why would you want to repeat that mistake?
That is short term. But in the long term we are looking at a scenario of saying Musharraf has to go, the Saudi king has to go, Mubarak has to go, Gaddafi has to go. Hello democracy.
Image via WikipediaThe Pakistani state does not operate like the American state. You must have seen movies where the CIA engages in activities that the Congress knows nothing about. Take that up several notches, and you have the Pakistani ISI. It is so obvious to me that elements of the ISI created the safe house where Bin Laden lived for years. That is tantamount to complicity.
The cause for democracy across the Muslim world is also to do with bringing the Pakistani army, and the Pakistani ISI firmly under the Pakistani parliament.
Abbottabad is essentially a military-cantonment city in Pakistan, in the hills to the north of the capital of Islamabad, in an area where much of the land is controlled or owned by the Pakistani Army and retired Army officers....... The city is most notable for housing the Pakistan Military Academy, the Pakistani Army’s premier training college, equivalent to West Point. Looking at maps and satellite photos on the Web last night, I saw the wide expanse of the Academy not far from where the million-dollar, heavily secured mansion where bin Laden lived was constructed in 2005....... The maps I looked at had sections of land nearby marked off as “restricted areas,” indicating that they were under military control. It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without its coming to the attention of anyone in the Pakistani Army..... bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control...... Who owned the land on which the house was constructed? How was the land acquired, and from whom? Who designed the house, which seems to have been purpose-built to secure bin Laden? Who was the general contractor? Who installed the security systems? Who worked there? Are there witnesses who will now testify as to who visited the house, how often, and for what purpose? ...... some countries, like some investment banks, do pose systemic risks so great that they are too big to fail, and Pakistan is currently the A.I.G. of nation-states. But that should not stop American prosecutors from following the law here as they would whenever any mass killer’s hideout is discovered ...... Mullah Omar and Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, probably also enjoy refuge in Pakistan. The location of Mullah Omar, in particular, is believed by American officials to be well known to some Pakistani military and intelligence officers; Omar, too, they believe, is effectively under Pakistani state control. ....... When I visited Yemen in 2007, to conduct research on the bin Laden family, Yemeni journalists told me that his youngest wife had returned home and was living in the region either of Tai’zz or of Ibb, significant cities to the south of Sanaa, the capital. It seems that she may have found her way to Pakistan to live with her husband. ....... Bin Laden was a gentle and strong communicator, if somewhat incoherent in his thinking. Zawahiri is dogmatic and argumentative, and has a history of alienating colleagues....... As they reset their work, the analysts studied other long-term international fugitive hunts that had ended successfully, such as the operations that led to the death of the Medellín Cartel leader Pablo Escobar, in 1993. The analysts asked, Where did the breakthroughs in these other hunts come from? What were the clues that made the difference and how were the clues discovered? They tried to identify “signatures” of Osama bin Laden’s life style that might lead to such a clue: prescription medications that he might purchase, hobbies or other habits of shopping or movement that might give him away....... the breakthrough started several years back from detainee interrogations
Keeping Bin Laden safe and alive was essential to getting billions in military aid from the United States. Follow the money. It is as if the mansion was constructed specifically for Bin Laden in 2005. Who did it? If the then military dictator of Pakistan did not know, who knew? Are they still in positions of power inside Pakistan?
Ever since 9/11—indeed, even before—Pakistan’s military and intelligence services have played a high-stakes double game. They’ve supported American efforts to kill and capture Al Qaeda fighters, and they have been lavished with billions of American dollars in return. At the same time, elements of those same military and intelligence services, particularly those inside Inter-Service Intelligence, or the I.S.I., have provided support for America’s enemies, namely the Taliban and its lethal off-shoot, the Haqqani network. American officials are fully aware of the double-game, and to say it frustrates them would be an understatement. For a decade, Pakistan’s role has been one of the great unmovable paradoxes of America’s war...... the fact that Osama was hiding in an urban area raises many obvious questions, like who was taking care of him, and how. Abbottabad is only thirty miles from the Pakistani capital, and it is home to a Pakistani military base, a military academy, and many retired Pakistani officers. Conspiracy theories abound in Pakistan; since 9/11, the most common has been that Bin Laden was being sheltered by the I.S.I. ...... relations between the United States and Pakistan are the worst they have been in years, largely because American officials are running out of patience with the double game ....... Mullen took the unusual step of publicly accusing the Pakistani military of supporting the Haqqani network, the virulent wing of the Taliban that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in eastern Afghanistan. The Haqqani network, based in North Waziristan on the Afghan border, maintains the closest ties to Al Qaeda among Afghan guerrilla groups, and, until recently, was the principal place where American intelligence was looking for Osama
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeAug 08, 2007: What Obama Said On Pakistan
