Saturday, May 7, 2011

Pak-ed With Questions, Part 2

There's still a number of issues with our relationship with Pakistan right now that need to be answered, and those answers only lead to a ton of additional questions and a whole lot of people are asking them right now.

Amazingly enough, it's Hot Air's Allahpundit who raises a very good point on the "Pakistani Intelligence: Osama's Evil Accomplices or A Bunch Of Giant Morons?" question, arguing that the CIA's months-long safe house operation in Abottabad means the answer is the latter:

Kidding aside, this is the first evidence thus far that the Pakistani government wasn’t hiding Osama. If they knew the CIA team was in town and continued to let them operate, then either they were actively cooperating with us or they were double-dealing on Bin Laden by looking the other way at our spies. If they didn’t know the CIA team was in town, then it’s more plausible that they’re honest-to-goodness imbeciles who might have missed the fact that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been there for, um, five years. (If they were hiding him, wouldn’t they have been closely scrutinizing new arrivals in the neighborhood for fear that they were CIA?) Given the embarrassment OBL’s location has caused Pakistan, I assume there’s no way they would have willingly allowed us to take him out at the compound. Once they knew the CIA was there, either they would have spirited him away to a new location or they would have grabbed him and handed him over on the condition that we would say publicly that he was caught in the tribal areas, not a few blocks away from the national military academy.

Realistically, then, there’s no way that they knew the CIA was there. (In fact, according to a U.S. official, they’re reportedly “stunned” by the CIA’s penetration.) Which makes it slightly, but only slightly, more likely that they didn’t know Bin Laden was there either.

First of all, if the CIA was able to fool both bin Laden and Pakistan with this play, then these guys deserve a hell of a lot of credit.  (Or not, given Allahpundit's argument that the Pakistanis are pretty much the worst secret agents on the planet, maybe it wasn't all that difficult for the CIA to pull off after all)

Second, if we're dealing with morons here, that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence involving the integrity of Pakistan's nuclear program either.

On the other hand, considering Pakistan promptly rounded up a couple hundred people in Abottabad for the crime of knowing the AQ courier that led us to OBL this week, I'm betting we're not going to see any of these people again anytime soon based on what they know...and find out what Pakistan doesn't want us to know in turn.

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