Killing Machine : The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare (9781595589439) by Gardner Lloyd C

Author:Gardner, Lloyd C. [Gardner, Lloyd C.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781595589439
Publisher: Perseus Book Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Lead-in to Neptune’s Spear

The compound at Abbottabad, a midsize city only an hour’s drive from Islamabad, was where Osama bin Laden had lived in secret for six years. It was also less than a mile away from a large Pakistani military academy. Without being prompted, Brennan had brought up the latter point during his first briefing, more than implying some form of Pakistani involvement in the latter stages of his career. “We are looking right now at how he was able to hold out there for so long, and whether or not there was any type of support system within Pakistan that allowed him to stay there.”9

President Obama had been careful in his original announcement of the raid’s success to credit Pakistan with help in finding the al Qaeda leader, but journalists took Brennan’s hints and pursued the leads he offered. “Signs Point to Pakistan Link,” wrote three reporters in the Wall Street Journal almost immediately after Brennan’s comments. Reaching out for background confirmation to a “high-level” European military official, they got this answer to Brennan’s “question.” “There’s no doubt he was protected by some in the ISI,” said the European official, referring to the Pakistani intelligence service. These “same elements,” they were told by American officials, had connections with “other Pakistan-based terror groups, the Haqqani militant network and Lashkar-e-Taiba”—the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai hotel raids in India that left 165 dead and more than 300 wounded.10

Obama’s own words about Pakistani aid in finding bin Laden clashed with the reality of his aides’ responses to questions about when the Pakistanis had actually been informed of the raid: not until the Americans had recrossed the border and were safely out of Pakistani airspace. Speculations about whether it was the ISI who protected bin Laden’s hiding place, or some unconnected “rogue element” acting in sympathy with his anti-American agenda, led to a discussion of the problematic cooperation between the ISI and the CIA in the post–9/11 era. In the early days of the Obama administration, the president appointed Richard Holbrooke, now deceased, as his special representative for what was called the “Af-Pak” theater to stress the connections between events in the two countries and American objectives. Of course, one vital connection was Pakistan’s possession of a nuclear arsenal—a situation that scared the daylights out of the administration in the spring of 2009. The Bush administration had spent more than $100 million teaching the Pakistanis how to build fences around their nuclear installations. But Islamabad had refused any technical visits to sites it thought might help Americans identify the actual location of nuclear weapons. The most frightening thing was the possibility that a bin Laden sympathizer or one of the groups “allied” to al Qaeda might sneak out of a facility with enough weapons-grade plutonium to make a bomb.11

The issue of Pakistan’s vulnerability somehow got into the press with rumors that the local Taliban had a bead on stockpiles of highly enriched uranium—material, ironically, that had been supplied for a reactor by the United States years earlier.

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