Osama bin Laden operation ‘could not involve Pakistan’
FORMER US president Barack Obama said he had ruled out involving Pakistan in the raid on alQaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad because it was an “open secret” that certain elements inside Pakistan’s military, and especially its intelligence services, maintained links to the Taliban and perhaps even the terror group.
Giving a blow-by-blow account of the Abbottabad raid by US commandos that killed the world’s most wanted terrorist on May 2, 2011, in his latest book, A Promised Land, Obama said the topsecret operation was opposed by then defence secretary Robert Gates and former vice-president Joe Biden, who is now the US president-elect.
Obama described the various options of killing bin Laden once it became clear that the elusive al Qaeda chief was living in a “safe hideout” on the outskirts of a military cantonment in Abbottabad.
“Based on what I’d heard, I decided we had enough information to begin developing options for an attack on the compound. While the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) team continued to work on identifying the Pacer, I asked Tom Donilon (national security advisor) and John Brennan (deputy national security advisor) to explore what a raid would look like,” Obama wrote in his memoir.
The need for secrecy added to the challenge – “if even the slightest hint of our lead on bin Laden leaked, we knew our opportunity would be lost. As a result, only a handful of people across the entire federal government were read into the planning phase of the operation,” Obama said.
“We had one other constraint: whatever option we chose could not involve the Pakistanis. Although Pakistan’s government cooperated with us on a host of counterterrorism operations and provided a vital supply path for our forces in Afghanistan, it was an open secret that certain elements inside the country’s military, and especially its intelligence services, maintained links to the Taliban and perhaps even al-Qaeda, sometimes using them as strategic assets to ensure that the Afghan government remained weak and unable to align itself with Pakistan’s number one rival, India,” he said in the book.
“The fact that the Abbottabad compound was just a few miles from the Pakistan military’s equivalent of West Point only heightened the possibility that anything we told the Pakistanis could end up tipping off our target.
“Whatever we chose to do in Abbottabad, then, would involve violating the territory of a putative ally in the most egregious way possible, short of war – raising both the diplomatic stakes and the operational complexities.”
In the final stages, they were discussing two options. The first was to demolish it with an air strike. The second option was to authorise a special ops mission, in which a select team would covertly fly into Pakistan via helicopter, raid the compound, and get out before the Pakistani police or military had time to react.
Despite all the risks involved, Obama and his national security team opted for the second option, but not before multiple discussions and intensive planning.
The day before he gave the final approval for the raid, at a Situation Room meeting, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton said it was a 51-49 call. “Gates recom
mended against a raid, although he was open to considering the strike option,” he said.
“Joe (Biden) also weighed in against the raid, arguing that given the enormous consequences of failure, I should defer any decision until the intelligence community was more certain that bin Laden was in the compound.
“As had been true in every major decision I’d made as president, I appreciated Joe’s willingness to buck the prevailing mood and ask tough questions, often in the interest of giving me the space I needed for my own internal deliberations,” Obama wrote.
After the successful Abbottabad raid, Obama made a num
ber of calls domestically and internationally, the toughest of which he expected to be that with then Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari, he wrote.
“I expected my most difficult call to be with Pakistan’s beleaguered president, Asif Ali Zardari, who would surely face a backlash at home over our violation of Pakistani sovereignty.
“When I reached him, however, he expressed congratulations and support. ‘Whatever the fallout,’ he said, ‘it’s very good news.”
He showed genuine emotion, recalling how his wife, Benazir Bhutto, had been killed by extremists with reported ties to alQaeda,” Obama wrote.