Osama Bin Laden: VIEW:

 OBL — what more to say? —
Dr Syed Mansoor Hussain

Monday, May 09, 2011

As I write this, the Pakistan Army is in the field fighting against the Taliban types on the western frontier. Officers and men are fighting, not for the ISI or the US or to protect the Haqqani network, they are fighting and dying to defend their homeland As I sat down to write this column, I had no idea what I was going to write about, but I was sure that I did not want to write about Osama Bin Laden (OBL). For instance, I definitely did not wish to discuss whether OBL was actually killed on the day that President Obama said he was. Nor did I wish to dwell upon the claims of all the different well-informed sources that OBL had been dead for years or perhaps never existed at all except as a figment of the collective US imagination. So I started to think about all the other things about OBL that I did not wish to discuss. These, of course, included the hotly contested possibility that OBL was, in any way, responsible for what happened in the US on 9/11. We all know that most Pakistanis, like many others in the Muslim world, are convinced that the tragedy of 9/11 had nothing to do with OBL but was a plot by ‘somebody’ to defame Muslims and give a reason to the US to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq. So, no point talking about it since it has all been covered in great detail by infinitely better informed ‘experts’. As far as the whereabouts of OBL since Tora Bora are concerned, here again not much to say. After all, two consecutive presidents of Pakistan, Musharraf, the man who knew everything, and now Zardari, who perhaps does not know everything but probably thinks he does, have repeated often enough that OBL was never in Pakistan or was long dead. As far as the question that the Americans love to ask, what did they (the ISI) know and when did they know it, are concerned, who cares? Spies never tell anybody the truth and if they did they would not be spies. Concerning the recurrent questions about the ‘sovereignty of Pakistani territory’, no point talking of it since that matter was laid to rest once and for all 50 years ago when Gary Powers took off in his U-2 plane from a US airbase in Pakistan near Peshawar and was shot down over the USSR. That incident prompted Khrushchev, the Russian PM, to declare that he had put a ‘red circle’ around Peshawar (that Peshawar now had the Russian missiles aimed at it). The same is true of our ‘defenders’ of Pakistani sovereignty on the Islamist side, for would they even be able to drive a single Pajero without all the petro-dollar aid they get from abroad? Of course there is no point in trying to affix any blame on anybody in any position of authority in Pakistan for all this seeming mess. Nobody is going to resign or fall on their proverbial sword to save the honour of the country or even their own honour. That is not the done thing in the Islamic republic, the home of the pure. Also, what commission is needed to enquire about what? Over the last 60 years of our national history, many commissions have existed to ascertain facts about many tragedies starting with the assassination of our first prime minister. With the exception of the Munir Report about the 1953 Anti-Ahmediya riots leading to our first martial law, no enquiry commission report has ever seen the light of day. But then there are a few things I do want to talk about. The first is the bum rap the Pakistan Army is getting in the war against terrorism. As I write this, the Pakistan Army is in the field fighting against the Taliban types in the western frontier. Officers and men are fighting, not for the ISI or the US or to protect the Haqqani network, they are fighting and dying to defend their homeland. As far as I am concerned, for us in Pakistan the entire OBL scenario is a sideshow. Perhaps he was being kept under ‘house arrest’ as ‘insurance’ or as a gift to be offered up to the US at an appropriate time in return for more goodies. Some of us might remember that it was an OBL tape that surfaced a few weeks before President Bush’s re-election that became a game changer and assured his re-election. So, in spite of all the US declarations about how OBL was managing al Qaeda from his Abbottabad ‘mansion’, I sort of believe that all the missives he sent out through his couriers were intercepted and vetted by the ISI before they were allowed to proceed. That seems reasonable since OBL was supposedly sending out a stream of directives and tapes and few of them ever surfaced, especially over the last couple of years. Another thing I do wish to talk about is the ire and anguish being demonstrated by our ‘expat’ community and commentators from their ‘safe houses’ in the US or in Europe. It would seem that they know a lot more about what is going on in Pakistan. And, evidently, they worry much more about the future of this country than all of us living and slogging it out in the heat and dust do! My suggestion to them is that if they are really so worried about what is happening in Pakistan, they should form an expat brigade, come down to Waziristan and fight for the sovereignty and the territorial independence of Pakistan. I am sure the CIA will be very willing to train and arm them. And one last thing I do want to talk of is the plight of the poor wives of OBL. OBL lived where he did by choice but these poor women evidently were literally imprisoned on the third floor of the Abbottabad mansion. The idea that these women willingly subjected themselves to such a restricted life seems difficult to accept and if they really did accept such a life without any reservations, then that is indeed a sad commentary on the status of women among ‘believing’ Muslims. The writer has practised and taught medicine in the US and Pakistan. He can be reached at smhmbbs70@yahoo.com