Pak probe into Osama killing squarely blames ISI, army

Osama bin Laden, the late chief of the terrorist A-Qaeda network, was able to hide in Pakistan for nine years due to the "collective failure" of state military and intelligence authorities, a leaked Pakistani government report revealed on Tuesday.

The report was compiled by the Abbottabad Commission, formed in June 2011 to probe the circumstances around the killing of Bin Laden by US forces in a unilateral raid on the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad.

Pointing to collective failure of all state agencies, including Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), it urges the political leadership to institute a mechanism for proper accountability of the agencies.

The report pointed out that in the absence of proper accountability procedures, the intelligence agencies were incompetent. ''The problem was apparent: none of the intelligence community, including the premier intelligence organisation, which is ISI, has ever been subjected to proper accountability procedures.

''It is a law of nature that under such circumstances institutions degenerate and progressively lose competence. This has happened in Pakistan.''

The report, obtained by the Al Jazeera news network, also outlines how "routine" incompetence at every level of civil governance structure allowed the once world's most wanted man to move to six different locations within the country.

In one instance, it points out how Osama was stopped for speeding in Swat in 2002. Then clean-shaven and apparently fond of fast driving, he was stopped along with a trusted bodyguard, but let off after the henchman spoke a few words to the cops.

The report of the commission draws on testimony from more than 200 witnesses, including members of Bin Laden's family, Pakistan's then spy chief, senior ministers in the government and officials at every level of the military, bureaucracy and security services.

The report had apparently been suppressed by the government till the Al Jazeera leak. Soon after the news broke, the government blocked access to the network's website for users in Pakistan.

This comes on the heels of a report by AP news agency revealing that top US special operations commander, Adm William McRaven, ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.

Following the US operation to kill Bin Laden in May 2011, which was avowedly conducted without the Pakistani government or military's knowledge, the commission was set up to examine both "how the US was able to execute a hostile military mission which lasted around three hours deep inside Pakistan", and how Pakistan's "intelligence establishment apparently had no idea that an international fugitive of the renown or notoriety of [Osama bin Laden] was residing in [Abbottabad]".

Life on the run
The Commission's 336-page report is scathing, holding both the government and the military responsible for "gross incompetence" leading to "collective failures" that allowed both Bin Laden to escape detection, and the United States to perpetrate "an act of war".

Moreover, through the testimony of Bin Laden's family members, intelligence officials and the wife of one of his couriers, the commission was able to piece together a richly detailed image of Bin Laden's life on the run from authorities, including details on the secluded life that he and his family led in Abbottabad and elsewhere.

It found that Bin Laden entered Pakistan in mid-2002, after narrowly escaping capture in the Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001. Intelligence officials say he stayed briefly in the South Waziristan and Bajaur tribal areas of Pakistan, before moving to the northern Swat Valley to stay with his guards, Ibrahim and Abrar al-Kuwaiti, for several months.

While in Swat, Bin Laden reportedly met with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks against the United States, in early 2003. A month later, Mohammad was captured in Rawalpindi in a joint US-Pakistani operation, and Bin Laden fled Swat.

Bin Laden turned up next in the town of Haripur, in northern Pakistan, where he stayed for two years in a rented house with two of his wives and several of his children and grandchildren.