The Abbottabad Commission Report, Part Three: Stephen Tankel's Take

My former RAND colleague, Pakistani terrorism expert Stephen Tankel has part one of a two-part analysis of the Abbottabad Commission Report, focusing on the question of how Pakistan missed Osama bin Laden’s presence in the country for nearly a decade. Similar to Omar Farooq’s analysis, Stephen notes the significance of “endogenous deficiencies” that allowed the Saudi terrorist to remain undetected, and argues “many of these infirmities also militate against Pakistani efforts to confront the country’s own jihadist insurgency.” Stephen discusses at length the implications of these findings (which he lauds as "an important step forward . . . in a country too often prone to conspiracy theories) for the future of U.S.-Pakistani relations.

Stephen also notes the finding that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence lost interest in the hunt for bin Laden “once it stopped receiving intelligence from the U.S. on the issue” in 2005. Although no answer was provided for why the ISI did not continue the pursuit on its own, Stephen suggests it was likely a case of the same benign neglect that Pakistan often takes towards jihadists who refrain from attacking Pakistani targets.

This, to me, remains the great counterfactual of the bin Laden hunt. Given that the history of strategic manhunts shows that bilateral assistance is a key variable determining success or failure, would the bilateral assistance gained by keeping the Pakistanis in the loop have expedited bin Laden's capture thanks to improved access to HUMINT within Pakistan? Or was the ISI too corrupted ideologically (or were other relevant Pakistani institutions too incompetent) that such sharing would have destroyed the thin connection we made to bin Laden through his courier Ahmed al-Kuwaiti? Evidence in the Pakistanis favor would be the series of al-Qa'ida number threes captured before 2005; evidence against them is the strong suspicion they were tipping off members of favored militant groups (i.e. the Haqqani Network) to U.S. drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Although the Commission does not rule out the complicity of rogue members of the ISI, it does not present any positive evidence of such complicity and chooses the "Occam's Razor" explanation of incompetence and weak institutions instead.

*NOTE: Stephen’s piece runs on a new web journal devoted to conflict and international affairs, www.warontherocks.com, whose launch party I attended last Friday. The site looks incredible graphically, and so far the roster of contributors is impressive. I recommend checking it out.