The Abbottabad Commision Report (Part Two): Willful Ignorants?

Freelance journalist Umar Farooq comments on the Abbottabad Commission's report in ForeignPolicy.com, arguing that it suggests the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) "is either shockingly inept or duplicitous, or both.

Farooq notes that between 2002 and 2005 bin Laden was not sitting in a cave, but rather that he and his family moved between cities such as Karachi, Quetta, and Peshawar. "Bin Laden might not have had a Facebook account," he writes, "but his social network was vast." For example, Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti's wife recalls that her wedding party took place at Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's home in Karachi, and was attended by bin Laden's wife Amal. While in Swat, bin Laden felt secure enough to go to the bazaar with his family, and KSM and his family stayed with the bin Laden's for two weeks in 2003. KSM was arrested in Rawalpindi a month later.

Farooq also notes that the Abbottabad compound itself was roughly a mile from the Kakul military academy (the Pakistani equivalent of West Point), had four separate electricity and gas connections, an illegal third story, and that its walls were well above the maximum height allowed by the military housing scheme the house was situated in. "Pakistan's top military officials, constant targets of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, must have passed by the home on a regular basis," Farooq writes. "Surely, someone in charge of their security detail must have made a mental note to look into what paranoid Pakistani lived in that fortress."

Yet at the same time, Farooq notes the depressing weaknesses of Pakistani institutions that made that government's ignorance plausible. The Abbottabad compound was located in a cantonment that was home to 7,000-8,000 unregistered buildings. There are no regular checkpoints on the highways connecting Pakistani cities, so it is understandable why bin Laden or his wives were never intercepted on the road (one speeding ticket excepted), and that where checkpoints do exist the police disproportionately stop the poor rather than those who appear well-off.

In other words, assuming the Pakistanis were willing to hunt for bin Laden, it is unclear whether they possessed the institutional capacity or sheer competence to do so effectively.