What Pakistan Knew

The U.S. and Pakistan make strange bedfellows in the best of times. Where they stand after bin Laden's death is anyone's guess.

Osama bin Laden's death might have brought closure for millions of Americans, but it's also opened a can of worms about Pakistan's relationships with the U.S. and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency. The Washington Post's David Ignatius questions whether the ISI withheld knowledge of bin Laden's whereabouts. “The ISI is, in the biblical phrase, a house with many mansions. What was known in one wing was not always shared with others,” says Ignatius. “Indeed, if the ISI had transmitted information about sheltering bin Laden, U.S. intelligence almost certainly would have picked it up through surveillance.” Hopefully, documents found in the Abbottabad compound will shed light on what Pakistan knew, Ignatius writes, because an organization as secretive as the ISI would never do so on its own.

Adding to the confusion are the explanations coming from the U.S. and Pakistan, which Ramesh Thakur dispels in The Globe and Mail as spin. “In effect, Mr. bin Laden was betrayed, intentionally or indirectly, by his protectors,” he writes. “But, to avoid a terrorist and public backlash, Washington and Islamabad will co-operate in purveying the fiction that this was a unilateral U.S. operation.” Regardless, it's a fiction that could reform the security apparatus that dominates Pakistan, Thakur says, because it's exposed the shadier dealings of the Pakistani military and the ISI while diverting blame away from elected officials.

That opportunity also gives the U.S. a reason to shift aid to Pakistan away from the military and toward humanitarian goals, writes The New York Times' Thomas Friedman. “Together, the message would be that we’re ready to help Pakistan fight its real enemies and ours – ignorance, illiteracy, corrupt elites and religious obscurantism,” he says, “but we have no interest in being dupes for the nonsense that Pakistan is threatened by India and therefore needs 'strategic depth' in Afghanistan and allies among the Taliban.” Extricating U.S. aid dollars from a self-defeating relationship with the ISI is a laudable aim, but if a decade of war in central Asia has proven anything, it's that those with guns ­– or nuclear weapons – are much better at convincing foreign powers that they, rather than schoolchildren, deserve money.