The Osama question

More than six years after Osama bin Laden was whisked away by US Navy Seals from his bungalow in Abottabad, and killed, questions continue to linger over the events which led up to the audacious raid. Because these questions have not been answered locally, because the Pakistani people have not been told the truth, and because the findings of the inquiry headed by Justice Javed Iqbal, under whom a commission was set up by the PPP government in 2011, have not been made public, many conspiracy theories and allegations linger on. Quite evidently, to quash these the detailed commission report should simply be made available. With the failure of both the PPP government and then the PML-N government to do so, for reasons that they know best, some clarity on the matter has now come from former US president Barack Obama. Speaking at a conference in India on Friday, Obama – on being asked whether the Pakistani state knew about the presence of Osama bin Laden in the country – said that: “We had no evidence that Pakistani government was aware of Osama bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. We obviously looked at it.”

Why should it take Obama to clear the shadows hanging over Pakistan? We already have the accounts of hundreds of people within the government. The Abbottabad Commission thoroughly investigated every aspect of the raid. An early version of the report was leaked to Al Jazeera and was scathing in its criticism of every institution in the country, and made more than 200 recommendations of how to guard against such embarrassments in the future. The duty to reveal the details lies with the government. If indeed, as former president Obama, Pakistan was never in the loop, then the report will just give closure to the matter. Failing to make an important document public simply creates suspicions. Moreover, for us, Obama saying he has no evidence of Pakistan’s awareness of Osama living on its soil still doesn’t resolve the troubling idea that the state had no idea that one of the most wanted men in the world was living undetected in one of its cities. There is a still a lot we don’t know about the Abbottabad raid, starting with how the US managed to cross our airspace without anyone knowing. The entire episode was a debacle for us from start to finish. At the very least, we can do ourselves a favour by breaking with past tradition and making inquiry reports public rather than letting them rot away on the shelves of some government office.