Pakistani Army Denies Sharing U.S. Report With Bomb Makers

The army called the assertions of collusion with militants “totally false and malicious.”

American officials said in early June that they had shared satellite information with Pakistan about two militant bomb-making factories. Within 24 hours, they said, they watched the militants clear out the sites, raising suspicions that the Pakistanis had shared the information.

In a carefully worded, two-paragraph statement on Friday, the Pakistani Army does not say that the United States had shared intelligence on the sites in question. But the statement said the army’s attempts to destroy four militant bomb-making factories only partly succeeded because intelligence on two of the sites was wrong.

The statement did not say where the sites were or when the raids occurred. But it is likely to further add to tensions between the United States and Pakistan, whose relations have been strained since the United States killed Osama bin Laden last month without notifying officials here ahead of time.

Various news media accounts said the factories were in the Waziristan stretch of Pakistan’s tribal belt, where militant fighters with Al Qaeda and the Taliban have long proliferated. The intelligence sharing was part of a United States attempt to improve the relationship with Pakistan.

Bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan only added to American suspicions that elements within Pakistan’s powerful security establishment were playing a double game by colluding with some militants while going after others.

Pakistani leaders have denied knowing that Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, and American officials have said they have seen no evidence that the upper ranks of the Pakistani military or civilian leadership helped hide him. In another sign of tensions, the Foreign Ministry lodged a protest on Friday with the American Embassy over an attack on a Pakistani military post.

In a statement, the ministry said it had told the United States of its “serious concern” about an incursion by NATO aircraft a mile and a half inside the Mohmand tribal area, in which the ministry said a Pakistani military post was attacked.

A ministry spokeswoman, Tehmina Janjua, said that the attack occurred around 9 a.m. on Friday, but that there were no casualties.

View the original article here

Pakistani Militant Chief Is Reported Dead

Mr. Kashmiri is considered one of the most dangerous and highly trained Pakistani militants allied with Al Qaeda. A former member of Pakistan’s special forces, the Special Services Group, Mr. Kashmiri was suspected of being behind several attacks, including the May 22 battle at the Mehran naval base in the southern port city of Karachi that deeply embarrassed Pakistani officials. He has also been implicated in the terrorist attack on Mumbai, India, in 2008, in which at least 163 people were killed, including some American citizens.

He was reported to have been killed Friday in a strike on a compound in Laman, near Wana, the main town of South Waziristan. Atifur Rehman, a senior government official in Wana, said the strike killed nine people. Mr. Rehman said there had been reports that Mr. Kashmiri had recently set up operations in Laman, and that a sharp increase in drone flights over the area had been noticed in the past few days.

A known Taliban militant in Wana contacted by telephone confirmed that Mr. Kashmiri had been killed. But an intelligence official in the capital, Islamabad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he had not received any independent confirmations of the report. And American officials — who cautioned that previous reports of Mr. Kashmiri’s death had turned out to be false, including a Pakistani claim he had died in a drone strike in September 2009 — said they were trying to confirm the new reports on Saturday morning.

Mr. Kashmiri’s death would certainly be welcomed by both American and Pakistani intelligence agencies, and could go some way to alleviating the strained relations between the two countries that have developed in recent months, in particular since the May 2 raid that killed Osama bin Laden 75 miles from Islamabad. Pakistan has accused the United States of pursuing its own agenda in Pakistan without coordinating with Pakistani security forces, running its own intelligence agents and conducting unilateral strikes that ride roughshod over Pakistan’s sovereignty.

The United States has sent three high-level delegations to Islamabad in recent weeks, the last one led by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to try to repair relations. Mrs. Clinton said the United States was looking for specific actions from Pakistan in coming days and weeks, including intelligence sharing, which had all but broken down.

Mr. Kashmiri was wanted by both countries and could have been a good target for renewed intelligence sharing. He is reported to lead a unit called the 313 brigade, and belongs to the group Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami, which is suspected of a number of high-profile attacks, including an attack against the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, the garrison city next to Islamabad.

The attack on the navy base in Karachi, conducted by half a dozen commando militants, lasted 16 hours before security forces regained control of the base.

Mr. Kashmiri, 45, has a long history of waging guerrilla operations. As a Pakistani Army trainer of Afghan mujahedeen fighters, he lost an eye battling Russian forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Later, while working with Kashmiri militants attacking India, Pakistan’s archrival, he earned renown in Pakistan after escaping from an Indian jail where he had been imprisoned for two years. But he turned against the state when President Pervez Musharraf banned his group after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He was arrested four years later in connection with an attempted assassination of Mr. Musharraf in December 2003, but released because of a lack of evidence.

Mr. Kashmiri was indicted in 2009 along with two Chicago men accused of plotting an attack against a Danish newspaper that had printed a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. One of the men, David Coleman Headley, testified recently at the Chicago trial of the other man, Tahawwur Rana, that Mr. Kashmiri, angered by the American campaign of drone strikes, had asked him to research possibilities for attacking the defense contractor Lockheed Martin in retaliation.

After the Pakistani government laid siege to Islamic militants in the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007, Mr. Kashmiri moved his operations to North Waziristan and took up arms with Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban there. He is listed as the fourth-most wanted man by the Interior Ministry, according to Pakistani media reports.

American intelligence and counterterrorism officials say Mr. Kashmiri is among the most dangerous militant leaders in Pakistan today because of his training skills, commando experience and strategic vision to carry out attacks against Western targets.

Reporting was contributed by Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

View the original article here

Meeting With Pakistani Leaders, Kerry Seeks to Ease Anger Over Bin Laden Raid

Mr. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has argued that it would be foolhardy for the United States to cut assistance to Pakistan. He said Monday that Pakistan had agreed to take “several immediate steps” to show its seriousness about the importance of relations with America. They included returning the tail of the helicopter that crashed on the night of the Bin Laden raid, he said.

But on the major differences at hand, Mr. Kerry declined to specify what, if any, progress had been made.

Mr. Kerry’s visit — and the postponement of Mrs. Clinton’s — reflected the strained ties between the two nations, but also the efforts by the administration to repair them.

Within the last 24 hours, a spokesman said Monday, Mrs. Clinton spoke with senior Pakistani leaders, including President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, about the tensions caused by Bin Laden’s killing. The State Department announced that it was dispatching the administration’s special envoy to the region, Marc Grossman, who only recently returned from Pakistan, where he was the first American diplomat to confront the country’s leaders in the hours after Bin Laden’s killing two weeks ago.

“We’re trying to move, to move on to address those questions as well as move forward with the relationship,” the spokesman, Mark Toner, said, referring to the questions raised by the raid, “because we feel it’s in both our countries’ interests.”

Mr. Kerry shed little light on the crucial issue of whether Pakistan would stop assisting the Haqqani network, whose forces keep sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas and cross into Afghanistan to kill American and NATO soldiers.

The senator, who came to Pakistan with the backing of the White House, said he had discussed the presence of the Haqqani forces in Pakistan, as well as Pakistan’s support for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and for Mullah Muhammad Omar, the spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban, with the head of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha.

“We discussed every single one of them,” Mr. Kerry said, adding that Pakistani action against them would help the United States end the war in Afghanistan.

On Sunday, Mr. Kerry visited Khost Province in Afghanistan, where American commanders briefed him on the Pakistani insurgents coming across the border. It appeared that Mr. Kerry planned to use that information in his discussions with the Pakistani leadership.

In an unusual joint Pakistani-American statement negotiated Monday at a meeting attended by President Zardari and General Kayani, the main demand of the Pakistanis appeared to be a pledge that the United States had “no designs against Pakistan’s nuclear and strategic assets.”

“Senator Kerry stated that he was prepared to personally affirm such a guarantee,” the statement said.

Members of the Pakistani military have complained bitterly that the United States did not inform them in advance of the Bin Laden raid, and part of Mr. Kerry’s mission involved soothing wounded feelings and papering over American officials’ statements that Pakistan could not be trusted with advance knowledge.

Pakistani officials have said that they had no idea that Bin Laden was living in a compound in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, where Navy Seal commandos killed him in a raid on May 2. “Even in the U.S. government, very few people knew about it,” the joint statement said of the Bin Laden operation.

Mr. Kerry, an author of a major $7.5 billion package of civilian aid to Pakistan, said he had warned the Pakistani leadership of the “grave” worry in Congress about the presence of Bin Laden in Pakistan. Those concerns had put future aid in peril, he said.

Mr. Kerry’s calming tone was apparently echoed Monday when editors of some of Pakistan’s newspapers met with General Kayani.

In contrast to the strong anti-American speech General Pasha delivered at a closed-door session of Parliament on Friday, General Kayani said that Pakistan would continue a relationship with the United States because otherwise the country risked becoming isolated, according to an editor who attended the meeting but declined to be named because the matter was politically delicate.

The editor said that General Kayani’s basic message was that “Pakistan understood the limits of its own reach.”

Moreover, according to the editor, General Kayani said that Pakistan needed to remain on good terms with the United States in order to have its say in the settlement of the nearly 10-year-old war in Afghanistan.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington.

 

Florida Men Accused of Supporting Pakistani Taliban

 

MIAMI — Six people, including two imams at South Florida mosques, have been indicted on federal charges of providing financial support and encouraging violence by the Pakistani Taliban, the United States attorney here announced Saturday.

The indictment, which was handed up on Thursday, charged Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan, 76, the imam at the Miami Mosque (also known as the Flagler Mosque), the oldest mosque in Miami. The indictment also charged two of the imam’s sons: Izhar Khan, 24, the imam at the Jamaat Al-Mumineen Mosque in nearby Margate, Fla.; and Irfan Khan, 37, of North Lauderdale, Fla. All three men are American citizens who are originally from Pakistan, the authorities said.

The four-count indictment charges the Khans, and three others living in Pakistan, with conspiring to provide material support to a conspiracy to murder, maim and kidnap people overseas, as well as with conspiring to provide about $45,000 in financial support to the Pakistani Taliban from 2008 to 2010.

“Despite being an imam, or spiritual leader, Hafiz Khan was by no means a man of peace,” Wilfredo A. Ferrer, the United States attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in a statement. “Instead, as today’s charges show, he acted with others to support terrorists to further acts of murder, kidnapping and maiming.”

Hafiz and Izhar Khan are scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Miami on Monday afternoon. Irfan Khan will be arraigned in Los Angeles on Monday. Each of the four counts in the indictment carries a maximum 15-year prison term.

Prosecutors said the indictment did not charge the mosques. They added that the defendants were charged “based on their provision of material support to terrorism, not on their religious beliefs or teachings.”

The Muslim Communities Association of South Florida announced that Hafiz Khan had been suspended indefinitely from his mosque.

“Our organizations, together through the Coalition of South Florida Muslim Organizations, has been working with the U.S. attorney’s office and the Miami F.B.I. office,” the association said in a statement released Saturday afternoon, “and appreciate the efforts of law enforcement to root out potential sources and supporters of terrorism.”

“We stand together with the U.S. attorney, Wilfredo Ferrer, and the men and women of the F.B.I., and have been and will be cooperating with law enforcement to our fullest ability,” the Muslim association added.

The charges of supporting the Pakistani Taliban but not actually carrying out operations are the most common types of terrorism prosecutions that American authorities have pursued since the Sept. 11 attacks. Of the 50 top terrorism cases since 9/11, about 70 percent have involved financing or other support to terrorist groups, according to the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law.

The Pakistani Taliban is closely allied with Al Qaeda and is responsible for attacks against Pakistani police and military targets in recent years. Pakistani authorities believe that a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban was responsible for the suicide attack in northwestern Pakistan on Friday that killed more than 80 cadets from a government paramilitary force.

The indictment comes at a tense moment in relations between the United States and Pakistan after Osama bin Laden was killed in a raid by the Navy Seals on May 2 in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

On Saturday, the Pakistani Parliament condemned the raid as a “unilateral action” and “a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty,” and demanded a formal review of the country’s relationship with the United States.

F.B.I. agents arrested Hafiz Khan and his son Izhar in South Florida on Saturday, the authorities said. Irfan Khan was arrested in Los Angeles, they said.

Lizette Alvarez contributed reporting from Miami, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

 

Pakistani Army Chief Warns U.S. on Another Raid

In his first public reaction to the American raid early Monday that left many Pakistanis questioning the capacities of the nation’s army, General Kayani did not appear in person, choosing instead to convey his angry message through a statement by his press office and in a closed meeting with Pakistani reporters.

The statement by the army’s press office said, “Any similar action violating the sovereignty of Pakistan will warrant a review on the level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States.”

General Kayani had decided that the number of American troops in Pakistan was to be reduced “to the minimum essential,” the statement said.

He did not specify the exact number of American troops asked to leave Pakistan, and it was not clear that the level was below what Pakistan had previously demanded after a C.I.A. contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis in January.

Then, the Americans were told that the number of Special Operations soldiers involved in a training program would have to be reduced to 39 from 120, that C.I.A. contractors would no longer be allowed to stay in Pakistan, and that other American officials who appeared to be working for the C.I.A., but whose jobs were not clearly defined, would have to leave, too.

Clearly, the Bin Laden raid has compounded Pakistani anger, and further worsened relations.

Calling the American raid a “misadventure,” General Kayani told the Pakistani reporters that another, similar, raid would be responded to swiftly, a promise that seemed intended to tell the Pakistani public that the army was indeed capable of stopping the Americans’ trying to capture other senior figures from Al Qaeda.

General Kayani’s blunt warnings came after he met with his top commanders at their monthly conference at army headquarters at Rawalpindi, a gathering of the top 11 generals. The meeting was devoted to the consequences of the raid, which has severely embarrassed the Pakistani military, leaving the nation’s most prestigious institution looking poorly prepared and distrusted by its most important ally.

The official statement acknowledged “shortcomings” in developing intelligence on the presence of Bin Laden in Pakistan, a reference to the fact that the Qaeda leader was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, a midsize city that is home to a top military academy and is about two hours from Islamabad, the capital.

The C.I.A. had developed intelligence on Bin Laden with the Pakistanis in the early going when the Pakistani spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, had provided “initial information.”

But the C.I.A. did not share further development of intelligence on the case with ISI, “contrary to the existing practice between the two services,” an account that generally conformed with what American officials said in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid.

Pakistani officials and Western diplomats have described General Kayani and Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of ISI, as seething with anger at the American go-it-alone action.

In an earlier account on Thursday, the foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, sought to dispel domestic criticism of Pakistan’s lack of response to the raid, saying that two Pakistani F-16 fighter jets were airborne as soon as the Pakistani military knew about the operation. But, by that time, he said, the American helicopters were on their way back to Afghanistan.

Mr. Bashir, speaking at a news conference, said that the Americans had used technology to evade Pakistani radar.

Alternately combative and defensive, Mr. Bashir said Washington should abandon the idea that Pakistan was complicit in helping Bin Laden hide. But he did not elaborate, saying only that the ISI had a “brilliant” record in counterterrorism.

Defending the Pakistani Army, the fifth largest in the world, Mr. Bashir said, “Pakistani security forces are neither incompetent or negligent about the sacred duty to the nation to protect Pakistan.”

But after withering criticism at home and abroad about how and why the Pakistani security forces could allow Bin Laden to be in Pakistan, the initial reaction here to Mr. Bashir’s appearance was mixed.

One of Pakistan’s best-known television journalists, Kamran Khan, who is regarded as a supporter of the military, dismissed the performance. “They have no answer,” Mr. Khan said. “We have become the biggest haven of terrorism in the world and we have failed to stop it.”

A retired ambassador and newspaper columnist, Zafar Hilaly, who has called for a public inquiry into Pakistan’s military, said that Mr. Bashir had erred in seeming to ask for the world’s sympathy by saying 30,000 Pakistani civilians and more than 3,000 soldiers had lost their lives in the fight against terrorism.

“The world wants to know whether we are effective,” Mr. Hilaly said.

Apparently in response to comments by American officials that the United States decided not to share details in advance with Pakistan because of a lack of trust, Mr. Bashir said, “All we expect is some decency and civility, especially in the public domain.”

The Pakistani authorities first learned of the operation when one of the American helicopters involved in the raid crashed at the Bin Laden compound.

“Immediately our armed forces were asked to check whether it was a Pakistani helicopter,” Mr. Bashir said. Although Abbottabad is home to a major military academy and three military regiments, he said, none of these institutions required sophisticated defenses that could have detected the impending raid.

The authorities learned that Bin Laden had been killed in the raid from surviving members of his family, he said.

Pakistan received the first official word from the United States about the covert operation when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, called General Kayani about 3 a.m. Monday local time, Mr. Bashir said.

That call took some time to arrange, he said, because “secure sets” were needed. Mr. Bashir said Admiral Mullen had been the first to raise the issue of Pakistan’s sovereignty in the call, but he did not specify exactly what the admiral said. Later, President Obama telephoned the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari.

The relationship between the United States and Pakistan will endure, the foreign secretary said, because “we share strategic convergence.”

In Washington, American aid to Pakistan faced new criticism. The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday expressed “deep and ongoing concerns” about the United States providing Pakistan more than $1 billion a year in security assistance in light of the discovery of Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad and other recent evidence that Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies are aiding militants.

The lawmaker, Representative Howard L. Berman of California, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that “Pakistan’s continued resistance to cooperate with the United States in counterterrorism bespeaks an overall regression in the relationship.”

View the original article here

Pakistani Army Chief Warns U.S. on Another Raid

In his first public reaction to the American raid early Monday that left many Pakistanis questioning the capacities of the nation’s army, General Kayani did not appear in person, choosing instead to convey his angry message through a statement by his press office and in a closed meeting with Pakistani reporters.

The statement by the army’s press office said, “Any similar action violating the sovereignty of Pakistan will warrant a review on the level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States.”

General Kayani had decided that the number of American troops in Pakistan was to be reduced “to the minimum essential,” the statement said.

He did not specify the exact number of American troops asked to leave Pakistan, and it was not clear that the level was below what Pakistan had previously demanded after a C.I.A. contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis in January.

Then, the Americans were told that the number of Special Operations soldiers involved in a training program would have to be reduced to 39 from 120, that C.I.A. contractors would no longer be allowed to stay in Pakistan, and that other American officials who appeared to be working for the C.I.A., but whose jobs were not clearly defined, would have to leave, too.

Clearly, the Bin Laden raid has compounded Pakistani anger, and further worsened relations.

Calling the American raid a “misadventure,” General Kayani told the Pakistani reporters that another, similar, raid would be responded to swiftly, a promise that seemed intended to tell the Pakistani public that the army was indeed capable of stopping the Americans’ trying to capture other senior figures from Al Qaeda.

General Kayani’s blunt warnings came after he met with his top commanders at their monthly conference at army headquarters at Rawalpindi, a gathering of the top 11 generals. The meeting was devoted to the consequences of the raid, which has severely embarrassed the Pakistani military, leaving the nation’s most prestigious institution looking poorly prepared and distrusted by its most important ally.

The official statement acknowledged “shortcomings” in developing intelligence on the presence of Bin Laden in Pakistan, a reference to the fact that the Qaeda leader was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, a midsize city that is home to a top military academy and is about two hours from Islamabad, the capital.

The C.I.A. had developed intelligence on Bin Laden with the Pakistanis in the early going when the Pakistani spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, had provided “initial information.”

But the C.I.A. did not share further development of intelligence on the case with ISI, “contrary to the existing practice between the two services,” an account that generally conformed with what American officials said in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid.

Pakistani officials and Western diplomats have described General Kayani and Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of ISI, as seething with anger at the American go-it-alone action.

In an earlier account on Thursday, the foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, sought to dispel domestic criticism of Pakistan’s lack of response to the raid, saying that two Pakistani F-16 fighter jets were airborne as soon as the Pakistani military knew about the operation. But, by that time, he said, the American helicopters were on their way back to Afghanistan.

Mr. Bashir, speaking at a news conference, said that the Americans had used technology to evade Pakistani radar.

Alternately combative and defensive, Mr. Bashir said Washington should abandon the idea that Pakistan was complicit in helping Bin Laden hide. But he did not elaborate, saying only that the ISI had a “brilliant” record in counterterrorism.

Defending the Pakistani Army, the fifth largest in the world, Mr. Bashir said, “Pakistani security forces are neither incompetent or negligent about the sacred duty to the nation to protect Pakistan.”

But after withering criticism at home and abroad about how and why the Pakistani security forces could allow Bin Laden to be in Pakistan, the initial reaction here to Mr. Bashir’s appearance was mixed.

One of Pakistan’s best-known television journalists, Kamran Khan, who is regarded as a supporter of the military, dismissed the performance. “They have no answer,” Mr. Khan said. “We have become the biggest haven of terrorism in the world and we have failed to stop it.”

A retired ambassador and newspaper columnist, Zafar Hilaly, who has called for a public inquiry into Pakistan’s military, said that Mr. Bashir had erred in seeming to ask for the world’s sympathy by saying 30,000 Pakistani civilians and more than 3,000 soldiers had lost their lives in the fight against terrorism.

“The world wants to know whether we are effective,” Mr. Hilaly said.

Apparently in response to comments by American officials that the United States decided not to share details in advance with Pakistan because of a lack of trust, Mr. Bashir said, “All we expect is some decency and civility, especially in the public domain.”

The Pakistani authorities first learned of the operation when one of the American helicopters involved in the raid crashed at the Bin Laden compound.

“Immediately our armed forces were asked to check whether it was a Pakistani helicopter,” Mr. Bashir said. Although Abbottabad is home to a major military academy and three military regiments, he said, none of these institutions required sophisticated defenses that could have detected the impending raid.

The authorities learned that Bin Laden had been killed in the raid from surviving members of his family, he said.

Pakistan received the first official word from the United States about the covert operation when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, called General Kayani about 3 a.m. Monday local time, Mr. Bashir said.

That call took some time to arrange, he said, because “secure sets” were needed. Mr. Bashir said Admiral Mullen had been the first to raise the issue of Pakistan’s sovereignty in the call, but he did not specify exactly what the admiral said. Later, President Obama telephoned the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari.

The relationship between the United States and Pakistan will endure, the foreign secretary said, because “we share strategic convergence.”

In Washington, American aid to Pakistan faced new criticism. The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday expressed “deep and ongoing concerns” about the United States providing Pakistan more than $1 billion a year in security assistance in light of the discovery of Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad and other recent evidence that Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies are aiding militants.

The lawmaker, Representative Howard L. Berman of California, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that “Pakistan’s continued resistance to cooperate with the United States in counterterrorism bespeaks an overall regression in the relationship.”

View the original article here

Pakistani Army, Shaken by Raid, Faces New Scrutiny

 

That American helicopters could fly into Pakistan, carrying a team to kill the world’s most wanted terrorist and then fly out undetected has produced a stunned silence from the military and its intelligence service that some interpret as embarrassment, even humiliation.

There is no doubt that the raid has provoked a crisis of confidence for what was long seen as the one institution that held together a nation dangerously beset by militancy and chronically weak civilian governments.

The aftermath has left Pakistanis to challenge their leadership, and the United States to further question an already frequently distrusted partner.

By Wednesday, members of Parliament, newspaper editorials and Pakistan’s raucous political talk shows were calling for an explanation and challenging the military and intelligence establishment, institutions previously immune to public reproach.

Some were calling for an independent inquiry, focused less on the fact that the world’s most wanted terrorist was discovered in their midst than on whether the military could defend Pakistan’s borders and its nuclear arsenal from being snatched or attacked by the United States or India.

“If these people are found to be incompetent, heads should roll,” said Zafar Hilaly, a prominent newspaper columnist.

Different questions were coming from Pakistan’s neighbors and Western allies, including the United States. In Congress, powerful lawmakers in charge of foreign military assistance delivered scathing assessments of the Pakistani Army as either incompetent or duplicitous, saying that renewed financial support was hardly guaranteed.

In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament it was unbelievable that the Pakistani authorities did not know that Bin Laden was hiding not far from the capital.

But the most urgent question of all is what to do about it, and whether the United States should continue to invest in a Pakistani military whose assurances that it does not work with terrorists carry less weight than ever.

Pakistani officials, who feel betrayed by the United States for not informing them in advance about the raid, are responding more defensively by the day.

The biggest question for Pakistan is whether the event prompts a reconsideration of its security strategy, which has long depended on militant proxies, including groups entwined with Al Qaeda.

American officials are certain to use the fact that Bin Laden had taken shelter in Pakistan to press the country for a clearer break from its past. Both sides have an interest in preserving some form of the status quo. Pakistan would like to keep the billions of dollars in aid that flow from the United States. The United States would like to prevent this nuclear-armed Muslim nation from turning more hostile, hosting terrorist networks and complicating efforts to end the war in Afghanistan. But the challenges ahead were revealed in how the outrage over the Bin Laden raid has cut differently in Pakistan and the United States.

For the United States, it has raised the issue of whether any assurance provided by the Pakistani military can be trusted, including the security of its nuclear arsenal. The army has insisted it is adequately protected from extremists, but has resisted security assistance from the United States that it considers too invasive. “We can press Pakistan until the cows come home on its nuclear program,” said Michael Krepon, a co-founder of the Stimson Center in Washington, which works on programs to reduce nuclear weapons. “But they are not going to do the things that we would like them to do that they don’t want to do.”

In Pakistan, commentators who consider the nuclear weapons the country’s most valued asset have raised another concern: In light of the American operation, are the weapons safe from a raid by the United States, or even India?

Meanwhile, the chief of the army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, have remained silent about what they knew or did not know about Bin Laden’s presence.

They have both met with President Asif Ali Zardari since the American raid, but no mention has been made in public of those discussions. Civilian politicians have been virtually absent.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani left for France on Tuesday, but said Wednesday that he would cut short his trip and return home. Senior ministers in the cabinet failed to turn up in Parliament to offer any explanations on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Instead, the Foreign Office and the information minister, apparently on orders from the military, issued statements intended to explain the shortcomings.

In Parliament on Wednesday, Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan said the American helicopters had evaded detection by radar “due to hilly terrain” and use of “nap of the earth” flying techniques, an account that failed to comfort almost anyone.

The Foreign Office defended the fact that Bin Laden was not detected because the high security walls at his house in Abbottabad were in line with a culture of privacy. These scant explanations fueled more speculation.

One of the military’s biggest advocates, Kamran Khan, a journalist whose nightly television show garners big audiences, led the chorus: “We had the belief that our defense was impenetrable, but look what has happened. Such a massive intrusion and it went undetected.”

Mr. Khan posed the question on many Pakistani minds: “What is the guarantee that our strategic assets and security installations are safe?”

In some Pakistani quarters, the failure of the army and intelligence agencies to detect Bin Laden, or to do anything about him if indeed his presence was known, prompted calls for an overhaul of the nation’s strategic policies.

“Instead of making more India-specific nuclear-capable missiles, the funds and the energy should be directed to eliminating the terrorists,” said an editorial in the newspaper Pakistan Today.

The editor, Arif Nizami, said the American raid made a mockery of the Pakistani military’s bravura that its fighter jets could shoot down American drones. “You talk of taking out drones, and you can’t even take out helicopters,” Mr. Nizami said.

Some Pakistanis said they were more concerned about the fact that known terrorists were living in their midst than the violation of sovereignty by the Americans.

“The terrorists’ being on our soil is the biggest violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty,” said Athar Minallah, a prominent lawyer. “If Osama bin Laden lives in Abbottabad, there could be a terrorist in my neighborhood.”

View the original article here

Pakistani Military Investigates How Bin Laden Was Able to Hide in Plain View

ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan — The Pakistani military has taken charge of investigations into the circumstances that allowed Osama bin Laden to reside quietly in a three-story house on the edge of this town, officials here said. Military intelligence investigators returned to the house on Wednesday and spent most of the day working inside the compound, while the army and the police barred journalists and others from approaching the area.

The walled-off property in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was killed early Monday has become the object of curiosity. Investigators spent Wednesday inside the house.

The intelligence agencies have detained at least 11 people for questioning, including an immediate neighbor who once worked with the family and the construction manager who built the house, Pakistani news organizations reported.

They have also taken into custody the bodies of four people killed when an American Navy Seals team made an air assault on the house early Monday.

Three women and nine children found in the house after the raid are also in the custody of the intelligence services, Pakistani security officials said. At least two are related to Bin Laden, one security official said: a 12- or 13-year-old daughter and his wife, who was shot in the leg but has received hospital care and is out of danger. He spoke on the condition of anonymity in accordance with the rules of his agency.

The national daily newspaper The News published a photograph that it said was the photo page of the passport of Bin Laden’s wife. The passport was from the Republic of Yemen and pictured a woman in a black head scarf named Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, born March 29, 1987, making her 24 years old, about 30 years younger than Bin Laden.

Asked about the validity of the passport, the security official said he could not confirm whether it was connected to anyone detained after the raid.

Officials are still investigating the identity of the four people whose bodies were found inside the compound after the Seals team departed with Bin Laden’s body. The bodies included two brothers and a son of Bin Laden, the security official said. American officials have said the fourth person killed was a woman, while the Pakistani official said the fourth was an unknown man.

The two brothers were known as Arshad Khan, the owner of the house, and Tareq Khan. Neighbors say they were either brothers or cousins. Preliminary investigations have made officials suspect that these were not their real names and that they were living under fake identities.

Arshad Khan was carrying an old, noncomputerized Pakistani national identity card, which said he was from Khat Kuruna, a village in Tangi district, near Charsadda in northwestern Pakistan. Yet officials have found that there is no record of an Arshad Khan in Khat Kuruna.

Pakistan introduced computerized identity cards a few years ago to cut down on the production of fraudulent identity cards, many of them bought by Afghan refugees, among others.

American officials said that Arshad Khan was the local alias of the trusted courier who led them to Bin Laden and who was known inside Al Qaeda as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. They describe him as a Pakistani who was brought up in Kuwait, hence the suffix to his name, and say that he was a close protégé of two senior figures in Al Qaeda, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi, who were both arrested in Pakistani cities before being handed over to United States custody.

The men and the compound do seem to have on occasion drawn the attention of intelligence agencies. Both Afghan and Pakistani officials have said they had pointed out the compound as one of interest to C.I.A. officials in previous years.

Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, told the BBC that officials had indicated it as suspicious in 2009, and as a possible hide-out for Bin Laden, although there were “millions” of other suspected locations.

An Afghan intelligence official told Agence-France Presse that Afghan intelligence pinpointed the compound last August, but that officials thought a senior Taliban commander, Maulavi Abdul Kabir, was living there.

“The house that Osama bin Laden was killed in was pinpointed for the first time by Afghan intelligence,” the official told the news agency, which said the official declined to be named because of the delicacy of the issue.

Afghan agents living in an old refugee camp in the nearby town of Haripur carried out surveillance of the house, he said.

He said that Afghan intelligence’s information about the house “was shared with the Americans and they showed lots of interest,” but that Afghan spies had not been involved in the subsequent investigations or operation, the news agency reported.