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THERE was a sense of déjà vu about the Delta Force mission that led to the death of Abu Sayyaf in Syria last week, given the obvious similarities with the Abbottabad operation four years ago: helicopters, a fire-fight, a “treasure trove” of documents, and so on, down to the allegation that the target tried using women and children as shields.
The killing of Osama bin Laden has lately been back in the headlines because of Seymour Hersh’s intriguing dissertation on the subject in the London Review of Books, in which he claims that the official story surrounding the raid was pure fiction in key respects.
Hersh’s version has been challenged and ridiculed, both officially and by fellow journalists. At the same time, important aspects of it have also been corroborated, and there has even been the occasional claim that while the report is substantially true, it contains very little that is new.
The OBL report hasn’t led to much scepticism of US claims in other places.
That’s a bit harsh on Hersh, given that at the very least he has helped to reinforce long-held suspicions on various fronts, not least Pakistan’s alleged complicity in first harbouring the leader of Al Qaeda and then his elimination.
This issue was, of course, widely canvassed in 2011, with the debate centring on whether the ISI was guilty of duplicity or incompetence. According to Hersh’s account, bin Laden had been under house arrest since 2006, and the Americans were in the dark about this until an ISI informer walked into the US embassy in Islamabad.
If true, this raises a host of questions. Chief among these is Pakistan’s motivation: what exactly was the big idea in keeping the world’s most wanted terrorist holed up in a compound close to the Kakul military academy?
In an interview on Democracy Now last week, Hersh suggested that Saudis forbade Pakistan from handing bin Laden to the Americans, which kind of makes sense. In his article, he quotes a retired American official as saying that Shuja Pasha, the then ISI chief, indicated that having bin Laden in custody gave Pakistan leverage over Al Qaeda and the Taliban — which seems highly unlikely, as informing them would have made it impossible to safeguard the secret.
Hersh says Saudi Arabia was paying for bin Laden’s upkeep, but there is no indication of the level at which such matters were being decided in Riyadh. In the case of Pakistan, both Pasha and Gen Kayani, the then army chief, enter the picture after the prisoner’s whereabouts were revealed to the US. Back in 2006, though, the head of the military (as well as the state) was Pervez Musharraf — and it’s safe to assume that a decision to confine bin Laden would have been made at the highest level.
What lends credence to this version of the course of events is that Hersh’s key claim about an ISI “walk-in” in August 2010 appears to have been widely corroborated. It would be surprising if further details — let alone the whole truth — were to emerge, given that blanket denials remain the preferred means of covering up.
Hersh’s reliance on unnamed sources makes it tempting to question his credibility, but protecting identities also facilitates the flow of information. Besides, he has operated on a similar basis for more than 45 years, and the more sensational of his revelations — from the My Lai massacre to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib — have more often than not turned out to be factually reliable.
In the case of the Abbottabad raid, he rubbishes American claims of a fire-fight, as well as the notion that bin Laden was armed or used one of his wives as a shield, and says that capturing him alive was never on the agenda — which seemed obvious anyhow — adding the claim that this was based on Pakistani insistence. That’s not implausible, although it’s not hard to imagine why the Americans wouldn’t anyhow have wanted him as a prisoner. Hersh can also find no evidence that the purported “burial at sea” ever took place, or that anything more than “some books and papers” was retrieved from the house.
In the light of all this, it is somewhat surprising that the official account about the boots on the ground that terminated Abu Sayyaf has not attracted greater scepticism — although questions have been raised about the man’s significance in the Islamic State hierarchy.
There’s no reason to expect, though, that we will be any the wiser four years hence. What’s shocking, though, is that so many of us no longer flinch when the US pursues to the end quarries that it helps to create. No jury, no trial, just a death sentence. Al Qaeda and IS are no doubt atrocious organisations, and their destruction would be a huge relief. So would the demise of American exceptionalism, which adds up to little more than an excuse for going rogue — followed by an exhibition of extreme mendacity.
Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2015
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