By: Ghalib Sultan
While people say Zawahiri or ISI sold out bin Laden, everyone should know which partner in the War on Terror is actually being betrayed on a daily basis since May 02
According to US President Barack Obama, Al Qaeda supremo Osama bin Laden was killed in a US Special Forces action in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 02, 2011. President Obama himself announced this to the world, withholding all previous information and leaks, but failed to benefit from a long-term boost in popularity that could help him win the next Presidential elections. Well, at least he proved to the world that he’s not a wimp.
Yes. Barack Obama is not a wimp; he may be a criminal who violated Pakistan’s sovereignty, whose troops killed an unarmed Osama bin Laden (then lied about it) as well as his unarmed associates, and who proved that he (and the US) does not deserve the trust placed in them by Pakistan and its Armed Forces. But no, US President Obama is not a wimp.
Of course, neither Afghanistan nor India are wimps. Afghanistan’s President Karzai can barely hold his glee: he said he has been proven right, and that Pakistan has been supporting terrorism in Afghanistan all along. India, on the other hand, turned its propaganda machine (read: ‘free and independent’ electronic media) and a prominent opinion was that if the US can take such action for Osama bin Laden, India should undertake such an operation to capture or kill Hafiz Saeed. Indian Army Chief V K Singh, who is notorious for having a prolonged fallout with previous chief Deepak Kapoor, said that India was capable of carrying out the same kind of operations.
Pakistan’s army commanders, meeting in the Corps Commanders Conference, took notice of this remark from the Indian military leadership, and said that any misadventure on Pakistan’s eastern border will be met with a swift, commensurate and deadly reply – there should be no doubt about it. India is not the US, and even if India does have the capability to evade Pakistan’s defences across the Radcliffe Line, Pakistan will mount a similar operation (or will deploy cruise missiles) in India “within minutes” according to the Kayani Doctrine.
Coming back to the topic (of Indian propaganda) it seems that Osama’s death had been foretold by a great many people – Webster Tarpley, Enver Masud of The Wisdom Fund, The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur – all having a different strategic vision of how Osama will die, and why. This is where Indian propaganda comes in: in an apparent attempt to create rifts within Al Qaeda and to prove its counter-terror credentials (which don’t exist – unless you consider the Gojra riots and pogroms counter-terrorism) Indian news media has been presenting the notion that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s former no. 2 and now acting leader, betrayed Osama bin Laden and leaked his location to the CIA through a courier or intermediary. Maybe this was staged by Zawahiri without the knowledge of the US and CIA, who were determined to get Osama by any means necessary. Prominent Indian news mouthpieces like Times of India, Indian Express, IBN Live, Zee News and Sify argue on the basis of a report from a Saudi newspaper (talk about intelligent reporting – none of the Indian reports cited the Saudi report, let alone mention the name of the Saudi newspaper) which claimed that ever since the uprising in Tunisia and Egypt, there was tension among Al Qaeda members that their organization was becoming irrelevant and that the revolutions that Al Qaeda was supposed to foment in the Muslim world against their dictators and autocrats was now being led by people who want freedom, not Islamic rule. On this basis, a rift developed between Egyptian and Arab members of Al Qaeda – a difference of background exemplified at the top level by none other than Zawahiri and Osama, respectively.
Well, Zawahiri may have been Osama’s number two, but reports say that it will be US-born Colorado-educated White-House-visiting Anwar al-Awlaki who will become the new leader of Al Qaeda. Al Awlaki has been instrumental in indoctrinating the future cadres of Al Qaeda and executing (failed) attacks on the US and its interests – his attacks have been the most prominent ones by Al Qaeda in the last few years, even though they were foiled. Any propaganda on that, Press Trust of India? Or are you all out of fantasies and sensational reports?
Now lets come to Pakistan, the so-called epicenter of terror that has been time and again betrayed by the US. Forget all the questions being asked, forget all the fingers being pointed at it. It has become clear that Pakistan’s alliance with the US – which has existed since the 1950′s but was given new life after 9/11 – was a huge mistake. Pakistan received little to no benefit from the alliance, and any benefit accrued was adequately neutralized because of the deteriorating conditions the country faced. And the US, Pakistan’s ‘ally’, has been breaching the sovereignty of its partner in the War on Terror since 2006-07, by using armed drones and by trying to send Special Forces in the tribal areas. Twice, US choppers were shot at and scared away, so that a US-Pakistan military engagement were avoided. But a US military intrusion doesn’t really matter when the CIA is sprawling all over Pakistan, in each and every nook and cranny.
If Pakistan is the epicenter of terrorism, it is also the epicenter of the CIA. If both are mutually exclusive, that will be news to a lot of people in Pakistan, especially those of the right wing.
The Foreign Secretary of Pakistan, Salman Bashir, said that there will be no investigation into why the ISI did not know Osama was in Abbottabad, claiming that casting aspertions on ISI meant that people are forgetting the agency’s frontline role and successes in the War on Terror. However, later, in the Corps Commanders Conference, an investigation was ordered into the intelligence failure and into sutdying how the US got to Abbottabad without security forces finding out and without them running into Pakistani countermeasures… That is, if the modified Blackhawk helicopter wasn’t shot down by Pakistan’s air defences near Abbottabad. Pakistan’s amibguous stance – coupled with retractions, clarifications, corrections and overall silence – also makes the issue more murky and more difficult to understand. However, Pakistan is used to such stances by its political governments; it is especially important to focus on why the US and its government, administration and military are acting like Pakistan, being shy about revealing the truth, and backtracking on statements that they have made but can’t back up.
Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, issued a multitude of visas to US ‘citizens’ who turned out to be intelligence operatives working for the US government, or former intelligence operatives now hired as private contractors or by mercenary firms. Ambassador Haqqani, who has promised an investigation into why the ISI did not know of Osama’s presence in Abbottabad, is equally responsible for breach of sovereignty that was exemplified on May 02, 2011. Husain Haqqani has little to no say in what happens in Islamabad, and is generally considered an American lackey who is sometimes not even invited to parties at the White House. Once, he was refused entry at the White House gate when his credentials checked out but the State Department had carefully struck him off the guest list. Of note is the story that 4 diplomats were caught near Kahuta on May 01 with surveillance and communications equipment – this is one day (or a few hours) before the Osama operation was launched, and Kahuta is where Pakistan’s nuclear facilities are hosted, apart from being very close to Abbottabad as well.
Maybe the international media forgets to make a point of how close Osama was to Pakistan’s nuclear nerve center, and how Al Qaeda already has a dirty bomb made by Pakistan (but actually made by the US-Israeli combine). Well, all this will become clearer when the next false-flag attack is executed, when it is nuclear in scale, and when Pakistan is blamed and associated with the attack. THAT is when this link will come up.
Otherwise, Osama might as well have been caught from Islamabad.
Tags: Afghanistan's President Karzai, Al Qaeda supremo Osama bin Laden was killed in a US Special Forces action in Abbottabad, Corps Commanders Conference, Enver Masud of The Wisdom Fund, Foreign Secretary of Pakistan, ghalib sultan's blog, IBN Live, Indian Express, Osama Betrayed, Pakistan
