By ADAM B. LERNER
2/10/15
A retired Pakistani general who previously led the country’s top intelligence agency is suggesting publicly that his country knew about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts before the U.S. raid that killed him in May 2011.
The former spy chief, Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani, said it was “more probable” than not that his country’s government knew of the late Al Qaeda leader’s location, speculating that “the idea was that at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo.”
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The comments came during an interview taped in Doha for Al Jazeera’s program “Head to Head.” The full interview is set to air this April.
Duranni also speculated that bin Laden’s whereabouts were revealed to U.S. intelligence agents in exchange for an accord on “how to bring the Afghan problem to an end.” It’s not clear what such an agreement might have contained.
The interviewer asked Durrani whether the Abbottabad complex where bin Laden lived and was ultimately killed was a safe house run by Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani spy agency.
He responded, “If ISI was doing that, then I would say they were doing a good job. And if they revealed his location, they again probably did what was required to be done.”
Durrani served as director-general of ISI from 1990-92 and then as Pakistan’s ambassador in Germany and Saudi Arabia, finishing his diplomatic work in 2002.
To date, the Pakistani government has maintained that it played no role in harboring bin Laden. The government commissioned an investigation after the May 2011 raid and concluded that “gross incompetence” and “collective failures” led to bin Laden’s safe harbor in Abbottabad, a city that contains one of Pakistan’s most prestigious military academies.
“The admission of incompetence was probably done [for] political reasons,” Durrani added. “As far as the people of Pakistan were concerned, it was going to be very uncomfortable.”
In 2011, less than 3 months after the raid on bin Laden’s compound, The Atlantic published an essay from Durrani in which he was far more equivocal in his speculation. “I do not know what all the ISI knew about Bin Laden’s whereabouts. … But the fact that we denied all knowledge or cooperation — even though the military and the police cordons were in place at the time of the raid, our helicopters were hovering over the area, and the Army Chief was in his command post at midnight—explains the Country’s dilemma.
“If its leadership was to choose between inability to defend national borders and complicity with the US … it would rather concede incompetence,” he added.
It’s unclear what, if any, new information Durrani might have unearthed since writing the essay.
Durrani is not the first high-ranking Pakistani to break from the government’s official claim that it was unaware of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.
In a March 2014 article for The New York Times Magazine, Carlotta Gall cited a Pakistani official who claimed to have “direct evidence” that then-ISI Director-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha was aware that bin Laden was in Abbottabad.
The Obama administration has been unable to substantiate that claim.
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