Pakistan Surrenders To Bin Laden?
If this report by ABC News is true, it’s completely, 100% unacceptable, and it requires a firm diplomatic response and an immediate severing of economic and military aid:
Osama bin Laden, America’s most wanted man, will not face capture in Pakistan if he agrees to lead a “peaceful life,” Pakistani officials tell ABC News.
The surprising announcement comes as Pakistani army officials announced they were pulling their troops out of the North Waziristan region as part of a “peace deal” with the Taliban.
If he is in Pakistan, bin Laden “would not be taken into custody,” Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan told ABC News in a telephone interview, “as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen.”
Bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border, but U.S. officials say his precise location is unknown.
In addition to the pullout of Pakistani troops, the “peace agreement” between Pakistan and the Taliban also provides for the Pakistani army to return captured Taliban weapons and prisoners.
“What this means is that the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership have effectively carved out a sanctuary inside Pakistan,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism director [yes, it's THAT Richard Clarke - Mark].
The agreement was signed on the same day President Bush said the United States was working with its allies “to deny terrorists the enclaves they seek to establish in ungoverned areas across the world.”
The Pakistani Army had gone into Waziristan, under heavy pressure from the United States, but faced a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.
“They’re throwing the towel,” said Alexis Debat, who is a Senior Fellow at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant. “They’re giving al Qaeda and the Taliban a blank check and saying essentially make yourselves at home in the tribal areas,” Debat said.
I assume the Bush Administration is prepared to challenge this forcefully…further than that, I prefer not to say in the heat of the immediate news, other than to reiterate that under no circumstances can we allow this to stand. If Pakistan truly has done such a thing, then they are, by any definition, no longer our allies in the War on Terror.
More as events warrant…
The alternative isn’t very pretty, is it? It’s a country swarming with radical Islamists. If there’s one country in the world, we don’t want to be a democracy, it’s Pakistan.
Yeah, but our entire war with Aghanistan was predicated on their harboring Osama; this makes a mockery out of the entire War on Terror…
Comrades,
Perhaps it’s time to call out old buddy Mushariff to the White House for a little ‘splainin’ time…..
He ought to be made ti understand that this nation will not tolerate allowing Bin Laden to esists in a state-within-a-state situation, and that we posses many and varied ways to make huge tracts of land unliveable….. for generations upon generations….. Easy enough to find Pakistan from space…. just look for the starlight reflecting over the huge tracts of glass…….
This ain’t acceptable in any way shape or form.
Respects,
Gwedd
Given the fact that Musharraf is unpopular in his country for taking a pro-Western stance and has been the target of several assassination attempts, I doubt you would find a receptive audience in Islamabad for what we will and will not tolerate.
One of the unintended consequences of invading Iraq is that we have inflamed the Muslim world so much that leaders like Musharraf who are moderate (at least in the context of the region) have to move further away from where we would like them for them to remain in power (or, in Musharraf’s case, to stay alive).
Hence you have countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which were gingerly moving towards democracy, backing off in order to avoid losing their countries to radical Islamists. They don’t want an Ayatollah Khomeini rising in their midsts to seize power.
The war in Iraq was originally sold to the American people as a fight to keep us safe from WMD, and when they turned out to be illusory, the concept of democratizing the Middle East was retroactively used to justify the invasion. (This ignores the more important question: by what right do we invade a country to impose our preferred form of government?). The irony is that in the purported attempt to impose Western values on the Middle East, in reality the Middle East is moving further away from those values.
peter, I don’t doubt we don’t have a receptive audience in Islamabad, that’s not my point. My point is that we shouldn’t find a receptive home for our economic and military assistance there, either, if they truly have declared a safe haven for Al Qaeda there.
Again, I repeat: we toppled the Taliban for this very stance. Totally, totally unacceptable remains my verdict…
I agree with you — I was responding to Gwedd –
Oh – well, in the immortal words of Emily Litella – “never mind!”…
Pakistan is backtracking, though – I’m about to post news…
[...] The ABC report that Pakistan had basically conceded a safe haven to the Taliban is being vehemently denied today: Pakistan’s decision to withdraw military troops from a key northern region at the center of the U.S.-backed war on terror does not indicate a change its commitment to hunt down Osama bin Laden, according a senior Pakistani army spokesman. [...]