"They've got a lot of explaining to do," Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters Monday.
Intelligence officials have long suspected that Pakistan's weak and fractured government may be host to rogue elements either disinterested in catching -- or actively sympathetic to -- anti-Western terrorists. But the presence of Bin Laden's heavily fortified compound in a garrison town near Islamabad magnified concerns that Al Qaeda had help from the inside in concealing its leader's location.
"It's very difficult for me to understand how this huge compound could be built in a city just an hour north of the capital of Pakistan in a city that contained military installations, including the Pakistani military academy, and that it did not arouse tremendous suspicion," Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, said at a press conference on Monday.
"It was not like a normal house in New Jersey, I can tell you that," Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who has called for a new review of military and economic aid to Pakistan in light of the Bin Laden raid, told TPM.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, also told TPM that the operation raised red flags for her.
"I've had a growing concern that the Pakistani intelligence community is really walking both sides of the street and the question comes what to do about it," she said. "At some point I think there has to be an understanding."
Trying to get out ahead of the emerging attack on his government's credibility, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari published an op-ed Tuesday in the Washington Post claiming credit for helping root out Bin Laden and noting that attacks by Islamic extremists had cost his country thousands of lives, including his late wife and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
In briefings with the media, U.S. defense officials sought to tamp down speculation as to whether Bin Laden was operating with aid from inside the Pakistani government.
"We have no indications that the Pakistanis were aware that Osama Bin Laden was at the compound in Abbottabad," one senior official told reporters Monday.
But defense and intelligence officials indicated to reporters that the American military carried out a months-long casing of the compound and finally a complicated and dangerous raid all without ever informing their Pakistani counterparts of their interest in the target. "It should tell you a lot that we didn't trust them to help us" take out bin Laden, one U.S. official was quoted as telling the Wall Street Journal. "You think about where he was living, and we didn't want their help."
That last fact, that we completely kept Pakistan out of the loop on this, speaks volumes. At best, Pakistan's government is so badly compromised with AQ and Taliban sympathizers that we now feel that anything we tell them will end up getting back to the bad guys. Worst case scenario? Large parts of Pakistan's controlling powers, namely the Army and elements of the Zardari government, worked to actively hide OBL for years. As Rachel Maddow pointed out yesterday, it seems like whenever we make a bust of a major AQ/Taliban player, it's in one of Pakistan's larger cities and not the "lawless tribal regions" of North Waziristan or the mountainous Af-Pak border. These guys aren't being found in caves, they are being found in large heavily guarded compounds in populated areas.
The notion that Pakistan's military or the ISI security service had no prior knowledge of OBL hanging out in this compound for 5+ years either makes Pakistan's leaders the biggest morons on the planet...or it makes us the biggest morons on the planet for being stupid enough to believe them all this time. Either way, it's far past time to re-evaluate our relationship with the country.
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