Bruce Riedel writes in The Daily Beast that a former head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate has accused former President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, of knowing that Osama bin Laden was in Abbottabad.
General Ziauddin Khawaja was director-general of the ISI from 1997 and in October 1999 was promoted to Chief of Staff of the Pakistani army, in which capacity he would have replaced General Musharraf. Except . . . Musharraf apparently didn't take to well to being fired from the position, and launched the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and installed Musharraf as Pakistan's president until August 2007. Not one to let bygones be bygones, one of his first orders of business was to throw Ziauddin in jail, where he spent the next two years in solitary confinement. Amongst his initiatives as head of the ISI, Ziauddin formed a Pakistani commando team that the Clinton administration would fund in order to pursue bin Laden in Taliban-run Afghanistan, but the coup also meant the end of the unit.
Ziauddin claims that another Pakistani intelligence officer, Brigadier General Ijaz Shah -- who is linked to other Pakistani-supported terrorists -- was responsible for setting up bin Laden in Abbottabad, ensuring his safety and keeping him hidden from the outside, and that Musharraf knew all about it and said nothing.
Ziauddin clearly has an ax to grind against Musharraf, but given what we know about Ijaz Shah they could be plausible. Not only do we need to get to the bottom of these charges in order to target the remainder of al-Qa'ida's senior leadership, but also to determine our strategy towards Pakistan in light of Musharraf's stated desire to make a comeback in Pakistani politics.
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