Obama gets Osama and perhaps a re-election?

I am convinced this operation could never have begun if our intelligence agencies had not provided them a start.

It needed no less a personage than the US president to announce that, on his orders to “capture and kill” Osama, OBL had been killed. Read that carefully: He was to be captured and killed!

However, the real question that begs an answer is: What was he doing in Abbottabad? A small, primarily military community with their inevitable attendant security and intelligence agents, where newcomers stick out like sore thumbs and Osama was accompanied by a host of armed guards. Thus, the firefight which lasted over an hour and not, ‘less than 40 minutes’, as Obama claimed!

What is more, Abbottabad might be in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, but it is in Hazara, not in a Pashtun dominated area.

Osama, according to CIA reports, has been in hiding on either side of the Durand Line — in Tora Bora and, when he felt the need to shift, he could flit across to Waziristan/Khyber, but never ever to a settled area, so far inland that there was no possibility for escape, and right next to a military cantonment!

Furthermore, if US troops were indeed the only ones to carry out this attack and, to again quote a US spokesperson, “Pakistan military (merely) cooperated and provided invaluable intelligence”, the attacking troops knew exactly which house Osama and his guards were in!

In an earlier article on the ISI, I explained the difference between, and the significance of, HUMINT (human intelligence) and ELINT (electronic signals intelligence). While the US has the most sophisticated ELINT in the world and can track anybody, from and to anywhere, it needs to have a starting point. If the CIA needed to track me, the starting point is my home address, a few satellites are reprogrammed and presto! They’ve got me! However, if the starting point is an unknown cave in the 200-plus square miles of the caves of Tora Bora, ELINT is useless till HUMINT steps in to provide a starting point.

And if, as the US spokesman claims, they tracked Osama through someone who was his ‘most trusted courier’ and that this house where Osama was killed ‘was the courier’s house’, then where is the courier’s body? We now know that the house belonged to two brothers, Arshad and Chota Pathan. Where are their bodies? If the CIA tracked Osama by following one of them, at least that person should have been present to die alongside Osama!

So now we have two unanswered questions: Why was Osama risking his life in Abbottabad and how did the US track him to his exact location?

Since the answer to the second question is an obvious one, that somebody had to sell Osama out, this should also point towards a response to the first question. In my view, it was an entrapment in which one of his close and trusted friends sold him out and lured him to Abbottabad with assurances of him being safe. Perhaps for a meeting with someone; a meeting important enough for Osama to risk his life!

Far from believing, as most analysts imply, that our intelligence agencies failed, I am convinced this operation could never have begun if our intelligence agencies had not, at the very least, provided them a starting point for ELINT and, at best, negotiated the entire entrapment.

Nor do I believe that US Navy SEALs could have carried out this attack on their own. At the very least, our security forces would have surrounded the area for the protection of the SEALs carrying out the attack.

Most interestingly, his dead body was whisked away and “buried at sea so that no shrine could be built on his grave”, according to Obama. Nor was his dead body photographed. We are told that DNA tests prove it was Osama, but DNA tests need comparison with some organ, blood, semen, something! The videos flooding the internet are obvious fakes of a far younger, healthier Osama.

Dr Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of treasury during the Reagan administration, and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, in his article, “Osama’s second death” (May 2) is sceptical of this ‘farce’. Even to a believer, not photographing his dead body does raise questions. Either he was tortured and that evidence was destroyed by his swift ‘burial at sea’ or, like Roberts implied, it wasn’t him!

Obama’s rating has shot up by over 10 per cent since this announcement. It might well win him the next election, but there are far too many unanswered questions!

 

Published in The Express Tribune, May 4^th, 2011.