Key to Osama bin Laden hunt remains locked up
Pakistan holding doctor who helped find terrorist
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Shakil Afridi has languished in jail for years — since 2011, when the Pakistani doctor used a vaccination scam in a bid to identify Osama bin Laden’s home, aiding U.S. Navy SEALs who tracked and killed the al-Qaida leader.
Americans might wonder how Pakistan could imprison a man who helped track down the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Pakistanis are apt to ask a different question: how could the U.S. betray its trust and cheapen its sovereignty with a secret nighttime raid that shamed the military and its intelligence agencies?
“The Shakil Afridi saga is the perfect metaphor for U.S.-Pakistan relations” — a tangle of mistrust and miscommunication that threatens to jeopardize key counterterrorism efforts, said Michael Kugelman, Asia program deputy director at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
The U.S. believes its financial support entitles it to Pakistan’s backing in its efforts to defeat the Taliban — as a candidate, Donald Trump pledged to free Afridi, telling Fox News in April 2016 he would get him out of prison in “two minutes. Because we give a lot of aid to Pakistan.”
But Pakistan is resentful of what it sees as U.S. interference in its affairs.
Mohammed Amir Rana, director of the independent Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies in Islamabad, said the trust deficit between the two nations is an old story that won’t be rewritten until Pakistan and the U.S. revise their expectations of each other, recognize their divergent security concerns and plot an Afghan war strategy other than the current one which is to both kill and talk to the Taliban.
Afridi hasn’t seen his lawyer since 2012; his wife and children are his only visitors. For two years his file “disappeared,” delaying an appeal that still hasn’t proceeded. The courts say a prosecutor is unavailable, said his lawyer, Qamar Nadeem Afridi.
“Everyone is afraid to even talk about him, to mention his name,” and not without reason, said Nadeem, also a cousin. In his office, the wind whistles through a clumsily covered window shattered by a bullet. On another window, clear tape covers a second bullet hole. Both are from a shooting several years ago in which no suspects have been named.
Another of Afridi’s lawyers was gunned down outside his Peshawar home and a Peshawar jail deputy superintendent, who had advocated on Afridi’s behalf, also was killed, said Nadeem.
Afridi used a fake hepatitis vaccination effort to try to get DNA samples from bin Laden’s family as a means of pinpointing his location. But he hasn’t been charged in connection with the bin Laden operation.
He was accused under tribal law, alleging he aided and facilitated militants in the nearby Khyber tribal region, said Nadeem. Even the Taliban scoffed at the charge that was filed to make use of Pakistan’s antiquated tribal system, which allows closed courts, doesn’t require defendants to be in court, and limits the number of appeals, he said.