06 May 2011

He's still dead

Elisabeth Bumiller has an article in The New York Times about the death of Bin Laden:
A top Pentagon official said that Obama administration officials “do not have any definitive evidence at this point” that Pakistan knew that Osama bin Laden was living in a compound in a garrison city only thirty-five miles from Islamabad, but she said that Pakistan would have to work hard to rebuild relations with the United States Congress.
In the public comments by a Pentagon official on the raid and its aftermath, Michele A. Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said that she had “a very candid conversation” with top Pakistani military officials at the Pentagon during a previously scheduled meeting. She said she had urged them to take clear steps to show Congress that they were committed to fighting terrorism and working with the United States.
As an example, Ms. Flournoy said that Pakistanis should help make sense of whatever the United States learned from the trove of computer files recovered by Navy SEALs from bin Laden’s compound.
After Bin Laden’s death was announced, and it became clear that he had been living in a large compound near a military academy for some time, perhaps years, angry members of Congress who are in charge of the billions of dollars in American military aid that flows to Pakistan have issued furious assessments of the Pakistani Army as either incompetent or duplicitous. Continuing aid is certain to come under sharp scrutiny.
Ms. Flournoy was cautious in her assessment of Pakistan’s knowledge about Bin Laden’s hideaway. For years, American officials have raised concerns that elements of Pakistan’s intelligence service have links to the Afghan Taliban and other militant groups.
“We are still talking with the Pakistanis and trying to understand what they did know, what they didn’t know,” Ms. Flournoy told reporters at the Aspen Institute. “We do not have any definitive evidence at this point that they knew that Osama bin Laden was at this compound.”
She said that it was early to assess the impact of Bin Laden’s death on the Taliban and the war in Afghanistan, but that her hope was that the Taliban were “rethinking their future.”
She added: “I think, now that Osama bin Laden is dead, some of the personal relationships that connected senior Taliban leaders to him, that tie is broken. And I think that creates an opportunity for them to step forward and renounce al-Qaeda and their affiliation with it.”
Rico says they can quibble all they like, but if someone the Arabs wanted real bad was living thirty-five miles from our capital (in, say, Baltimore, or Annapolis, where our naval academy is), in a million dollar mansion, they'd wonder why we didn't know...

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