The operation that led to the killing of arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden continues to strain U.S.-Pakistani relations more than eight years after the fact, but Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan offered a distinctly different narrative Tuesday than what is commonly accepted by U.S. officials.
At the heart of the debate is the Obama administration’s decision not to tell Pakistan about the operation beforehand, which has strained relations ever since. Administration officials have said Pakistan’s intelligence service couldn’t be trusted with the information, requiring the U.S. to go in unilaterally without the government’s permission.
Khan, a former cricket star-turned-politician, made his first official visit as prime minister to Washington, D.C. this week in an apparent effort to build rapport with President Trump. U.S.-Pakistani relations frayed well before the bin Laden raid, and remain tense as the U.S. continues to negotiate an end to the conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan. During a talk at the U.S. Institute for Peace, Khan said his meeting with President Trump was surprisingly warm, with the two leaders deciding to make efforts to improve the relationship between their countries. But during the interview with Fox’s Bret Baier, Khan made it clear the raid is still a major point of contention.
Baier asked the Pakistani leader if he would release Shakil Afridi, a jailed Pakistani doctor who reportedly helped the CIA confirm bin Laden’s presence in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Shafridi was arrested as a spy following the 2011 raid and convicted of treason in 2012.
“This is a very emotive issue, because Shakil Afridi in Pakistan is considered a spy,” Khan told Baier.
“For the U.S.?” Baier asked.
“A spy for the U.S.,” Khan replied. “We in Pakistan always felt that we were an ally of the U.S. and that we had been given the information about Osama bin Laden, we should have taken him out.”
“But you understand the skepticism, the ISI and all of the leaking that was going on early days?” Baier asked, referring to the Pakistani intelligence service.
“And yet, it was ISI which gave the information which led to the location of Osama Bin Laden, because if you ask CIA, it was ISI which gave the initial location through the phone connection,” Khan claimed.
ISI officials claim they passed along a phone number that eventually led to Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a courier for bin Laden that U.S. intelligence eventually tracked to the Abbottabad compound.
Khan’s phone number claim is a talking point that has been reiterated in Pakistan for years, but the ISI put it forward in 2012.
“The lead and information actually came from us,” the unnamed official told the Washington Post that year. The U.S. denied ISI’s claim at the time.
The 2011 raid has been a point of contention between the two allies for years. Pakistan, in theory, has been a partner in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda since 2001, but the revelation that bin Laden was holed up in a compound in Abbottabad — home of Pakistan’s premier military academy — had sown mistrust on both sides.
Khan’s claim goes against what former Obama administration officials have previously claimed: that Pakistan was not helpful in tracking down the infamous terrorist leader.
“In the end, he would be found not through the $25 million reward or a new agent with firm evidence of this location, and certainly not through any help from the Pakistanis,” wrote former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his memoir. “Bin Laden was found through old-fashioned detective work and long, painstaking analysis by CIA experts.”
That detective work included finding a lead to bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracing Kuwaiti.
“We theorized that bin Laden operated within a very tight circle of trust, communicating to his forces through people he personnally knew or had confidence in,” Leon Panetta, Obama’s former CIA director, in his memoir.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told U.S. officials Kuwaiti was one of bin Laden’s couriers after his capture in 2003. A source revealed his true name in 2007: Ibrahim Sa’id Ahmed Abd al-Hamid. Afer delving into Ibrahim’s whereabouts, U.S. intelligence tracked him to bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound in 2010.
Panetta and Vice Adm. William McRaven, the former head of Joint Special Operations Command who oversaw planning of the raid, discussed whether or not to bring the Pakistanis in on the operation, according to Panetta.
“But ISI’s reputation for leaks and divided loyalties — many ISI agents had ties with Taliban — made it difficult to trust others with this information,” he wrote.
Panetta expressed skepticism that Pakistan would not have been curious about a mysterious compound located in a residential neighborhood just two miles from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point.
“If Pakistani authorities were genuinely curious, they could have found this compound as easily as we had,” Panetta wrote. “It could mean that our intelligence was simply better than theirs; it could mean that we were wrong about who might be in the house; or it could mean that they lacked the desire to get Bin Laden.”
Far from being a help, Gates was concerned Pakistani forces could be a hindrance. Sharing Panetta’s concerns, he wrote that before the raid he was “worried that Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was aware of where Bin Laden was and there might be rings of security around the compound that we knew nothing about, or at minimum, that ISI might have more eyes on the compound than we could know.”
Gates was concerned about what might happen should U.S. special operations forces confront the Pakistani military during the raid. He made clear to McRaven that surrender could not be an option for the troops.
“If the Pakistani military showed up, our team needed to be prepared to do what was necessary to escape,” Gates wrote.
Khan’s claim could be interpreted as an attempt to portray Pakistan as not being opposed to U.S. efforts, according to Bill Roggio, an expert on the Global War on Terrorism and editor of the Long War Journal.
“It’s a kind of old revisionist history,” Roggio told the Washington Examiner.
In a talk at the U.S. Institute for Peace on Tuesday, Khan admitted he was “humiliated” after the bin Laden raid.
“Never did I feel more humiliated because here was a country that was supposed to be an ally,” Khan said. “And our ally did not trust us.”
