The final location of Osama bin Laden was at a compound right next to Pakistan’s leading military academy. President Barack Obama said intelligence on bin Laden’s location was presented to him in late August, suggesting bin Laden was a long-term residence at the location.
Obama said he gave the go-ahead on the mission last week, after he “determined that we had enough intelligence to take action.”
Pakistan locals tweeted and blogged as helicopters flew overhead and as explosions echoed from a compound near the military academy. Local resident Sohaib Athar posted an image of the compound on Twitter, which appeared to be still in the process of construction. Similar images of the compound were posted by Radio Free Europe.
The mountainous resort town, full of Pakistan military, and home to two of its largest military bases in the north, seemed an unlikely place for bin Laden to be hiding. According to Jere Van Dyk, however, the location sits perfectly with what he was told by Taliban fighters and local residents.
“Every single Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun I met said bin Laden was too big; not in stature, but too big politically, too important for them to hide. It would be impossible for him to hide in a so-called cave along the border,” he said.
Van Dyk lived alongside the mujahedeen, Muslim fighters, in the 1980s and maintains contact with high-ranking Afghan officials. He was captured by the Taliban in 2008, an experience he recounts in his book, “Captive, My Time As A Prisoner Of The Taliban.”
While Van Dyk was in the Taliban prison, he was told by his jailor, and by bodyguards, that bin Laden was “being kept by an institution deep inside Pakistan where you will never find them.”
“By institution I think they meant some part of the Pakistani military,” van Dyk said.
While covering the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, van Dyk was allowed access to Abottabad, where bin Laden was killed. He said just north of there is where the Pakistanis “train their militants—with pine trees, hills there—to fight in Kashmir ... and Abottabad has two large military bases right there.”
He added that from his experiences and knowledge of the culture in the region, it is unlikely that bin Laden’s presence was unknown. “I don’t think it’s possible,” Van Dyk said.
He added, “I don’t see how Pakistan can avoid the very clear evidence that he was not hiding independently.”
The location is an odd piece to the puzzle. The Pakistan government, including its foreign office and the office of the prime minister, expressed support for the operation, calling it a victory. The Taliban meanwhile is doubling up retaliatory threats against both the U.S. and the Pakistan government.
The weight has largely fallen on the Pakistan military, and more specifically its intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI was accused of supporting and aiding both al-Qaeda and the Taliban in a leaked report commissioned by the U.K. government in 2006, cited by a Council on Foreign Relations report.
Similar accusations against the ISI have appeared since.
A U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the raid told The Long War Journal that the ISI “could not be trusted” with details on the raid.
Similarly, in an interview with Radio Free Europe, Farzana Shaikh, a Pakistan specialist at the Chatham House think tank in London, noted that in July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused the Pakistan government of withholding information on bin Laden’s location.
President Barack Obama said in his May 1 speech, “Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done.”
In 2005, Van Dyk was able to interview the man who founded the Mujihideen, and who rode into Kabul with the Taliban in 1996. He revealed, Van Dyke recalls, that “The ISI is a disciplined, technical part of the Pakistani army. There are no such things as rogue elements.”
The significance of this, according to Van Dyk, is that if this statement is true, there would be no divisions in support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda among the ISI.
“There are a lot of people in Pakistan who feel that the United States is truly there for one reason—that is to prevent a Muslim country from having nuclear weapons. We’re not seen as a friend,” Van Dyk said.
“Everybody I know there would say Pakistan is trying to create chaos here, with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in order to get money from the U.S,” he said.
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