This always seems really disingenuous to me. He was hiding in an extremely concealed manner. Never ever went outside, and it's not as if the Pakistani military can just break into every house nearby and search for him everywhere.
How they caught him was crazy in and of itself, and required fake vaccination drives, another thing no military can do to its own people to catch terrorists.
I really don't think they are blameless at all, at all, but this kind of stuff feels conspiracy-level to me. This was the most wanted guy in the world, no country, no army could plausibly have concealed him and coordinated that effort to keep him hidden. Someone along the chain would have given him up
I mean, there is a way they didn't know it though. There aren't any hard evidences available today that prove this happened. Imo, it's pretty unlikely. Like I said, he never left the compound or ever got any sunlight. He didn't even have internet access. He passed all his messages through couriers to other people. When he was found, out of his enormous trove of documents, not a single one indicated any kind of coordination with any intelligence service.
I also don't get what Pakistan gains from sheltering him. Turning him into the US aids them tremendously, and Al Qaeda was not a valuable or useful asset for years before Bin Laden was found. New groups were forming at the time as well, so they could have easily turned him and handed the money over to those groups which had beef with him anyways. Again, it's all assuming they were sheltering him knowingly.
Like I said before. He was very close by, but he was locked down in a compound. How many people here on HN know anything about the people or activities going on in the house 2 blocks away from them? The army also cannot just search everyone's house randomly.
Consider India, they equally have pretty poor competence with catching terrorists. Many of the biggest terrorist attacks in India were not caught and evaded detection. Even the latest terrorists seem to have evaded detection. Pakistan doesn't have a far more advanced security service. Isn't it far more likely they are incompetent? Idk, the harboring Bin Laden claim never made much sense and Occam's Razor always told me the most likely option is probably the real one, in the absence of any hard evidence.
Why do you assume that nobody in the Pakistani military may be motivated by factors such as religious extremism, above and beyond simple utility calculations?
It may very well be that some people in ISI were sheltering Bin Laden for no reason other than that he was a genuine hero to them.
It's very possible that some people sheltered him outside of the official policy or whatever. It's even possible that it was ISI / Pak gov't official policy, but again there's no proof of any of these things.
It is also possible, that he just was able to hide from the entire world close to an army base in a compound he never exited from, never approached a window near, and never accessed internet from.
Everything is possible, there's no proof either way. And I don't see what the govt or army or ISI would gain from harboring him as a policy matter. If someone is crazy and personally helped out, that's not what most people are even implying is it? That's much more reasonable and doesn't really have much to do with the current conflict and the claim that the latest terror attack was sponsored by Pakistan (again, possible but not proven)
Please read about Dr. Shakil Afridi. The doctor who helped CIA find Laden has been in Pakistani prison for a decade plus now, on false drummed up charges.
Why are you sure that Pakistan is not supporting terrorists now, after decades and decades of evidence otherwise?
I know about him. Idk, if you ever lived in India, you'd know the govt puts people in jail on trumped up charges all the time. Pakistan is probably the same. And this guy did do a fake vaccination drive for a foreign power. Indian police would have dealt with him the same probably...
As for evidence, there isn't hard evidence that Pakistan supported Bin Laden. And I'd expect that after he was caught. The US, where many ministers and army personnel and intelligence chiefs were skeptical when he was found, eventually said there was no hard evidence linking Pakistan secret services to Bin Laden. They were so skeptical of this link that they didn't tell them the nature of the raid which found him, for fear of tipping him off.
I think it's just what it looks like on the surface. It looks suspicious, so that's why everyone was suspicious. But when we looked into it, it wasn't what it looked like.
I don't doubt Pakistan supports some proxy terrorists. That is what nearly every nation-state does these days. I just doubt they sheltered Bin Laden, worth far more to them in US hands than elsewhere, after seeing what they did in Afghanistan to the last group who sheltered him, way past his prime. That too while being good enough to scrub any evidence of the connection? I just don't think there's motive or proof of it
Lol, whats disingenuous is your arguments, honestly. So, either you have to argue that Pakistan's military is extremely idiotic / naive that it could not even detect a known terrorist living just around the corner or you have to argue that they knowingly kept him in their "shadow". The vast majority of the people believe its the latter - you are free to believe that they were idiots.
I do think the Pakistani intelligence and military are probably as competent as the Indian ones given the money, similar levels of development of state, etc. And Indian intelligences are not Mossad-level in any way. My belief is that they didn't know and were embarrassed. I mean, what would they gain from harboring Bin Laden, so wanted he can barely move anywhere, and Al Qaeda, a group that's basically been useless since way before his capture? There are new groups they could fund and arm all while giving up Bin Laden. They already caught and turned over other AQ figures before, so even if they sponsored other terror groups, why keep him?
