Leaked report cites Pakistan's failure before US killed bin Laden

Osama bin Laden lived unmolested in Pakistan for almost a decade because of the "collective incompetence and negligence" of the country's security forces, according to a scathing Pakistani government report that was leaked to the news media on Monday.

The four-member Abbottabad Commission, led by a Supreme Court judge, interviewed 201 people, including the country's intelligence leaders, in an effort to piece together the events around the American raid on May 2, 2011, that killed bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaida, and embarrassed the Pakistani government.

But although the commission's report was completed six months ago, the Pakistani authorities suppressed it, and the first leaked copy was made public by Al Jazeera on Monday.

The broadcaster published the 336-page report on its web site, while acknowledging that there was one omission - a page of testimony from a Pakistani spy chief that appeared to describe elements of Pakistan's security cooperation with the United States.

Hours later, Pakistan's telecom regulator blocked access to Al Jazeera's web site inside Pakistan.

In some ways, the commission hewed to expectations. In its findings, it leaned toward incompetence rather than conspiracy in explaining Pakistan's failure to catch bin Laden after he arrived in the country in mid-2002, having fled the American assault at Tora Bora in Afghanistan.

But in other ways, the report was a surprise. It contained flashes of visceral scepticism about the testimony of key government officials, noted that key questions remained unanswered, and allowed for the possibility that some security officials had covertly helped bin Laden.

"Connivance, collaboration and cooperation at some levels cannot be entirely discounted," it said.

The report offered tantalising new details about life on the run for bin Laden, as he shifted among six addresses in Pakistan from 2002 to 2011, when his American pursuers finally caught up with him. At times the Qaida leader is said to have shaved his beard and worn a cowboy hat to avoid detection by Pakistani or American forces.

Once, a vehicle he was riding in was stopped for speeding, but the police officer failed to recognise him and let him go.

The report also took Pakistani officials to task for failing to shut down Central Intelligence Agency operations in the country, and variously portrayed American actions as illegal or immoral. It said the CIA had used mainstream aid agencies as cover to spy on the Qaida leader, employed "hired thugs" and grossly deceived its allies in the Pakistani government.

"The US acted like a criminal thug," the report said.

For all its untempered language and institutional constraints, the report offered the most comprehensive official account yet of Bin Laden's time on the run in Pakistan and the American Navy SEALs raid that took his life.

The four-member commission was comprised of Justice Javed Iqbal of the Supreme Court, a retired police officer, a retired diplomat and a retired army general. It first met in July 2011, two months after the American raid, and has held 52 hearings and conducted seven field visits.

American officials did not cooperate with the commission, and on Monday, Jen Psaki, a US State Department spokeswoman, declined to comment on the report. One senior American official who follows Pakistan said he had not yet read a copy of the commission's voluminous report, but he said that from summaries he had seen, the document appeared to offer "the Pakistan people some accounting of how bin Laden came to end up where he did."

In many places, the Pakistani report seems to seethe with frustration at the failures of Pakistani officials to find bin Laden before the Americans could get to him.

It highlighted inept border officials who allowed one of his wives to pass into Iran, inept municipal officials who failed to spot the unusual construction at his house, intelligence officials who hoarded information, and senior police officials who it deemed guilty of a "grave dereliction of duty".

The commission interviewed military officials who failed to detect American aircraft entering Pakistani airspace, and it noted that on the night of May 2, the first Pakistani fighter jets were scrambled 24 minutes after the Americans had left Pakistan with bin Laden's body on board.

"The extent of incompetence, to put it mildly, was astounding, if not unbelievable," the report said.

The report noted that the military's powerful Inter-Service Intelligence directorate "completely failed to track down OBL" and contained detailed testimony from Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then head of the spy agency.

The commission highlighted how the ISI operates largely outside civilian control. General Pasha, in turn, retorted that the CIA shared only disjointed intelligence about Bin Laden after 2001. The report noted that the Americans provided false information about Bin Laden's presence in four cities - Sargodha, Lahore, Sialkot and Gilgit - before alighting on Abbottabad.

"American arrogance knows no limits," General Pasha was cited as saying, as well as that Pakistan was "a failing state, even if we are not yet a failed state."

The missing page of testimony from the leaked version published by Al Jazeera related to General Pasha's testimony. Al Jazeera noted on its web site that, judging from the context, the missing material appeared to contain a list of seven demands the country's military leader, Gen Pervez Musharraf, made to the United States after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

©2013 The New York Times News Service