Pakistan's Government Remains Defiant in Face of bin Laden Criticism

Anyone hoping to see Pakistan's civilian government hold the country's powerful military establishment to account over Osama bin Laden will have been disappointed by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's speech on May 9. Eight days after the raid that killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Gilani addressed his people for the first time since the attack. Speaking in Parliament, he hailed bin Laden's demise as "justice done" but fiercely defended Pakistan's army and its premier intelligence agency, the ISI, and warned Washington against any further such raids. Gilani derided any suggestions that Pakistan is not fully committed to fighting extremism — a fight that has cost the nation 30,000 civilians and 5,000 security personnel — and put the blame for the bin Laden debacle outside his country.

"Pakistan alone cannot be held to account for [the] flawed policies and blunders of others," he said in one of many thinly veiled anti-U.S. jibes that peppered the speech. "Pakistan is not the birthplace of al-Qaeda. We did not invite Osama bin Laden to Pakistan or even to Afghanistan," he added. There was even an oblique reference to Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1980 exhortation to the mujahedin, in which he called on them to take on Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers, "because God is on your side." (See stills from the videos found in bin Laden's compound.)

The Prime Minister conceded that bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad had exposed an "intelligence failure." But, he insisted, that failure "is not only ours but of all the intelligence agencies of the world." He claimed that it was the ISI that had furnished crucial intelligence that ultimately led the U.S. to bin Laden and that it had been the ISI that seized 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. "Indeed, the ISI is a national asset," Gilani said, "and has the full support of the government. We are proud of its considerable achievements in the antiterror campaign."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2070632,00.html#ixzz1M0OiwNvo

“The intelligence failure is a failure of the world’s intelligence agencies”?  Are you kidding me?  Let me think a moment. . . . . No; the most wanted terrorist in the world was not living four blocks from our WestPoint in a mansion larger than any other house on the block, with a twelve foot high block wall fence covered in barbed wire.  He was living down the street from you.  You can deny it all you want, and you can blame whoever you want, but you were in partnership with this freak, hiding him and supporting him, and you failed the world.  You have way too much at stake to admit that you aligned yourself with his mission.  He was like the runt of the litter.  You couldn’t destroy him, couldn’t abandon him, in fact you had affection for him, but you wouldn’t be caught dead letting your neighbors see you taking him for a walk on a Saturday morning.  I urge President Obama (although I don’t believe he reads my blog. . . . . . yet) to break off all ties with Pakistan.  Mr. President; if you choose not to break off these ties, then at least do not give in to their stupid position that they won’t allow us in their country to get others like bin Laden.