[Dawn] IF the May 2, 2011 raid that killed the late Osama bin Laden... who is now sometimes referred to as
Mister Bones...
(OBL) was the lash that shredded our defence establishment's pride, then the leaked Abbottabad
... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden....
Commission report is the salt rubbed into those wounds.
I'd say "when all are guilty everybody is." Perhaps Pakistain should think about paying people from Estonia or the Czech Republic or Norway to come and govern them. They're incapable of governing themselves. And definitely fire all their military and hire Fiji Islanders or Samoans or somebody like that to handle their defense.
When I thought of writing about the report, I dreaded the prospect of ploughing through 337 pages of turgid bureaucratic prose. So I was pleasantly surprised by the uncluttered, succinct style and the clarity of the approach. The Commission is to be applauded for its hard work and diligence.
Writing about the American commando raid a couple of days after the event, I wrote: "The space between an admission of gross incompetence or of complicity in a major crime is full of humiliation and pain."
How much pain and humiliation? The report is full of collective breast-beating about the comprehensive political, intelligence and military failures that surrounded that shameful episode.
Witness after witness appearing before the Commission, from the director general of the ISI to the station house officer in Abbottabad, have lamented over the breakdown in governance.
In fact, the report uses a term I was unfamiliar with: Governance Implosion Syndrome (to characterise the catalogue of mistakes that prevented any agency from first detecting the presence of OBL in Pakistain for nearly 10 years, and then intercepting the American incursion that ended his life.
Apart from this litany of complaints about the collapse of the system, two other themes run through the report. One is the complete lack of coordination between military and civil agencies and departments. This is especially true of the ISI and the police: at OBL's house, the local cops were told to stay out while the ISI conducted the investigation. Thus, no FIR for the crime was registered.
The second is the shared anguish among all the witnesses from the armed forces, including the ISI, over what was perceived as an American betrayal. 'But we were allies!' they seem to wail in unison. However,
denial ain't just a river in Egypt...
going by the edgy relationship between the two countries, this is a bit naïve.
The members of the Commission have expressed surprise over the fact that OBL's house was built in contravention of various building regulations. They have also stated that the land was illegally bought against an ID card belonging to somebody else.
Clearly, these upright people have not had to deal with the lower echelons of the bureaucracy where everything can be fixed for money. In fact, half of the houses and high-rises in Pakistain do not comply with building regulations.
As I read on, I was often struck by the wide-ranging criticism of virtually every aspect of Pak society. From the "ruling elites and the rentier classes" to military-civil relations, there is little that does not come under the Commission's cosh.