Daily Times
Although Mansoor Ijaz, the main character in the memogate saga, has sought protection from the Pakistan Army during his stay in Pakistan for appearing before the memo inquiry commission, he had earnestly accused the army and ISI of protecting Osama bin Laden right after the May 2 US raid in Abbottabad, research into his articles and statements reveals.
In a radio interview in May, Ijaz had also suggested that Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani may have been forewarned by the US about the raid, though in November he claimed that it was the country’s civilian leadership that had prior information about the raid.
These contradictions raise serious questions about the credibility of Ijaz, who is expected to testify before the memo commission on Monday.
In an article in Financial Times on May 3, Ijaz wrote, “As Pakistan now awakens to a post-bin Laden era, the nuclear-armed nation seems unable to respond truthfully or credibly to the duplicity of its policies or the complicity of its spy agency in harbouring a mass murderer.” He added, “The compound’s location near an elite Pakistani military academy and among the homes of high-ranking Pakistani military retirees raises hard questions about Pakistan’s role in harbouring the al Qaeda leader in plain sight while its intelligence services and military chiefs nursed on the American taxpayers’ wallet.”
According to Mansoor Ijaz, “It seems implausible that Inter-Services Intelligence, the premier Pakistani spy agency, knew nothing about where bin Laden was. Indeed, it seems much more likely that elements within the agency knew exactly where he was and kept bin Laden within that compound on just the terms it wanted. In all of this, Pakistan has almost certainly acted as a knowing babysitter, watching over the terror master so he would do no further harm –as long as the babysitting fees were sufficient and recurring.”
Ijaz argued that “the ISI’s watchful eye on bin Laden also would have had the advantage of creating plausible deniability with both the military and civilian wings of government, as we are now seeing…Put more bluntly, Pakistan intelligence service chiefs should once and for all wake up to the reality that every time they try to con the world into thinking they are a bunch of good guys protecting their country, they just get caught with their pants down –each time eroding further the nation’s credibility.”
Also on May 3, Mansoor Ijaz appeared on Fox News TV and claimed “military types” were involved in building the compound in Abbottabad where Osama bin Laden was located. He said, “Yeah I mean in that area, almost all the land is owned by the Pakistani army. That’s the bottom line (sarcastic laugh). That’s where all the retired general of Pakistan Army live. And in very good houses I might add. I’ve been up there before.”
About President Asif Ali Zardari, Ijaz said in his Fox News interview, “I would say that he is a naïve buffoon. And I would say that he is someone who doesn’t have any control over any single lever of government in that country that has relevance other than his political party and I will also say we ought to be thinking about from a strategic standpoint where Pakistan is concerned.”
Ijaz’s proposed policy for the US was identical to what he subsequently proposed in the unsigned memo he sent through General Jones to Admiral Mullen. He said, “From now on, if we get actionable intelligence we just go in there. Sovereignty or no sovereignty, I don’t think that America can ever again look at Pakistan just as a nation. We have to look at it as a place where they are allowing the breeding of these terrorists that want to come and destroy us and we have got to stop this.”
On May 5, 2011, Ijaz gave a detailed interview on the ‘Morning Majority’ show on 630 WMAL radio station. In this interview, he said, “I think no American listening to this radio programme or anywhere else in America today should believe for one second a word out of the Pakistani civilian side of the government or the military side that they did not know that bin Laden was there. They absolutely knew that he was there.”
The anchor of the show asked him if anyone in Pakistan might have been forewarned by the Americans about their operation and suggested that COAS General Kayani might have been given some information just prior to the operation.
The anchor further asked, “What about this theory, just as a possibility. The helicopters come in, somebody in the military, Kayani, somebody gets a phone call from the US and in that phone call following is communicated: we are coming in, you do not want to interfere. Helicopters are not all that we have. If you interfere, the consequences will not be pretty. Just keep your planes on the ground.”
Mansoor Ijaz responded, “Yeah, it’s a good theory. I think that it would’ve had to happen just as they were entering Pakistani airspace for that to be the case.”
In this radio programme, Ijaz said of bin Laden, “I think that the reality is Pakistanis not only knew, but they were harbouring him. They were giving him direct assistance to be able to stay where he was because they had a deal with him and God knows who else and the question is whether or not we are implicated in any way shape or form in that deal. Whether we just decided this was the moment we go get him, whether there was an active process in place here to determine when the right time was to actually execute that kind of a plan.”
On May 6, 2011, Mansoor Ijaz published another article on the Washington Post blog title ‘After Osama bin Laden, Pakistan’s narrow window for redemption.’ In this article he argued for redesigning US-Pakistan relations along lines very similar to the ones that can be identified in the disputed memo.
Ijaz wrote, “For much of its life as a country, Pakistan has been ruled either directly or indirectly by the military. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has grown to act like a state within the state, operating with absolute power and impunity — often arrogantly and shamelessly in its own interests — the country and its civilian population be damned. Yet the same firewalls, now exposed, that were erected by the army and ISI to shroud in secrecy their activities to harbour Osama bin Laden, and to make their civilian leaders appear hapless and cartoonishly stupid on the world stage, contain important silver linings in them. Taken advantage of properly by US policymakers, exposed treachery could usher in a new era of transparency in Pakistan’s internal affairs — much as the Watergate scandal did in America. It could transform the US-Pakistan bilateral relationship from one of begrudging mistrust in the mutual need of each other into one of an openly architectured security relationship that reduces, perhaps one day even eliminates, the myriad threats emerging from Pakistani soil.”
Ijaz went on to say, “Pakistan is the global epicenter of radical Islamist ideology, its extremist practices and the terrorists it breeds. Since the country’s founding in 1947, Pakistan’s spy services have used extremists as a foreign-policy sledgehammer to level the playing field for the army’s sub-standard performance on the battlefield.”
He also wrote, “President Asif Ali Zardari, a shrewd politician even if always self-interested, has a narrow window in which he can potentially end the army’s rogue operations and get control over his spies. He should instruct Chief of Army Staff Gen Ashfaq Kayani and ISI Director-General Shuja Pasha that in order to compensate for Pakistan’s complicity in sheltering bin Laden, they are to locate Mullah Omar, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Sirajuddin Haqqani and other high-value targets and hand them over to US special forces in five days. If they do not, he should tell them he will permit any US military operation on Pakistani soil or in its airspace that rids Pakistan of the terror masters, and then fire both generals.”
Interestingly, having suggested that US should take advantage of a Watergate type situation in Pakistan, Mansoor Ijaz helped create memogate and also created tensions between civil and military leaders.
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