Ex-US ambassador solves mystery: Pakistan was not aware of Osama’s presence

LOS ANGELES: Former US ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter on Tuesday has solved the mystery about Pakistan’s involvement in keeping Osama bin Laden (OBL) in Abbotabad by saying that Pakistan was not aware about OBL’s presence in her city. 

Munter said that  Pakistan probably didn’t know about Osama bin Laden as there is no evidence to suggest there was a link.

Giving a talk at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs on re-envisioning US-Pak relations, the former ambassador presented a prologue to the year 2011 which he says was “a terrible year if you happen to be an ambassador to Pakistan”.

In a clear and candid manner, Mr Munter touched upon the past and said, “We had very high expectations and [through] a system set up by late Richard Holbrooke wanted to put an end to the negativity of the past [between the two countries]. But the imbalance of US-Pak relationship, a relationship of perfidy and exploitation depending on which side you are looking at it from, manifested itself through the series of events that took place.”

The subsequent raid on the Abbottabad compound of OBL in May, came six weeks after Raymond Davis, a contractor who worked for the CIA, was bailed out by the ambassador after he shot dead “two thugs who tried to rob him” by paying blood money to the family.

“These incidents came at a time when the trust we were trying to build, the whole Richard Holbrooke project about maintaining trust and not falling back to the old ways, was buckling a bit.”

During the course of his talk, he didn’t mention the drone programme saying instead that the attack in the tribal areas a day after Davis’s release from Pakistan, “was bad timing”.

Just as the diplomats on both sides were figuring out how to work on the “badly damaged relationship”, the Abbottabad raid came about.

Mr Munter said Pakistan probably didn’t know about OBL’s presence. “Because everything was taken out during the raid and if there was a link it is hard to imagine there would have been no trace of that.”

The raid and its implications made cooperation between the two countries difficult, the former ambassador said.