Past as prologue: The Bin Laden saga

 If there were one, simple conclusion to be drawn from the report of the Pakistani commission established to investigate Operation Neptune Spear - the US raid on Abbottabad, in which Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011 - it would be that there are times when things are precisely as they appear. The long-suppressed Abbottabad Commission report has now emerged to provide a timely reminder of a truism which this author learned long ago through hard experience: When seeking to explain negative events, and given a choice between some grand conspiracy and simple incompetence, bet on incompetence every time.
Who would have guessed? Surely, few either in the US or Pakistan were prepared to believe that Osama bin Laden, easily the most wanted man in the world, could have lived for years with multiple wives and many children in the heart of a town in settled areas, a mere kilometre from Pakistan's Military Academy, without anyone in Pakistani officialdom any the wiser.
And yet that is precisely what the Commission found. It is one of the great ironies of this affair that had the planners of the US raid had more faith in the passivity and incompetence of their Pakistani counterparts, they might have been willing to bring the Pakistanis at least partly into confidence and sought their assistance in raiding the compound in question, thus avoiding a huge public embarrassment for the Pakistanis. But the Americans had no such confidence: Faced with the clear risk of official Pakistani complicity in hiding bin Laden, they had no choice but to move against him unilaterally.
There were yet other alleged conspiracies which the Commission report has debunked: How, it was asked, could multiple US helicopters have penetrated some 100 kilometres into Pakistani territory, flying for over an hour each way, conducted a noisy operation in a military cantonment area, actually blown up one of their crippled craft on the ground, and made good their departure without generating any reaction, either from the Pakistani air defence system or by local security forces in Abbottabad? How could the Americans have even hoped to pull this off, without quiet assurances from the Pakistani side? Yet the Commission found that they could, and did. If there were any Pakistani complicity, the Commission could find no evidence of it.
In fact, the Commission summed up its findings concerning the government of Pakistan in the bin Laden affair in three words, reiterated several times: Negligence, inefficiency, and incompetence
One would have difficulty making a case to suggest that the Commission were somehow trying to protect Pakistani officialdom, indicting their fecklessness to avoid the greater charge of treasonous complicity in a blatant violation of Pakistani sovereignty. No one who reads this report can doubt the fierce independence of its authors, who shrewdly, and amusingly, point out that commissions such as theirs are appointed by governments for one of two reasons: Either because they eagerly desire to catalogue the malfeasance of a previous regime, or because they have no choice but to grudgingly accede to overwhelming public and parliamentary demand for an accounting of their own behaviour.
The Commission firmly places itself in the latter category. Given its scathing appraisal of virtually every aspect of the Pakistani government's performance regarding bin Laden, there is little wonder that the Commission's handiwork has been suppressed.
(To be continued...)