I’m not up to snuff on my international politics. I know there’s been a lot of controversy over the years about US operations in Pakistan, and Pakistan’s two-faced approach to fighting terrorism within its borders. I’m also under the impression that we don’t, at least officially, have a military presence in Pakistan.
I heard on the news that Pakistan’s official stance about the raid is that it violated their sovereignty, a point which seems hard to argue. However, the commentators are saying that this is yet another case where Pakistan can object to US operations within their borders while at the same time tacitly allowing them in order to keep the US happy. The political win-win, as it were.
My question – is this really necessary? Is it because the Pakistani people are sympathetic to bin Laden, or because it makes the Pakistani military look weak? What would have been the objection if SEAL team 6 just rolled up in a bunch of APCs and did an FBI-style raid? I mean, this was a normal neighborhood, not hostile enemy territory. Once they captured the compound they could have hung around for days searching for intelligence. Why the need for a snatch-and-grab?
Conspiracy theories aside*, presumably we did the snatch and grab because if we had involved the Pakistani government in advance, someone might have tipped ObL off. We don’t trust them, plain and simple.
*I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pakistanis knew what was going on, gave us their approval, and needed to have “plausible deniability”. We are never going to know what really went on.
Followup question, then – let’s say we decided to raid the compound without notifying the Pakistani government, but we still did it with APCs. That is to say, we snuck a bunch of ground vehicles across the border (with, say, 100 troops), drove up to OBL’s compound, raided it, then spent a week with all of our vehicles parked outside the compound while we scoured the place for intelligence.
Presumably Pakistan would not be very happy about that. What would they do, though? Would they try to kick us out? Would they pretend like they were cool with it? Why couldn’t they just say, “Yeah, we authorized this raid. We’d have done it ourselves, but we didn’t want to risk the lives of Pakistani special forces when the Americans were willing to do it.”
Pakistan is getting creamed by newspapers around the world. Few can see how they were not complicit in keeping Osama free to live in a mansion. Few can see how the Pakistani government did not or should not have known. The Americans skipped allowing the Pakistanis to be involved, because somebody would have told him we were coming. That seems pretty obvious. Their government can not be trusted.
Too risky. The convoy would probably be intercepted. Then what? We shoot it out with the Pakistani military and/or police?
Many Pakistanis are anti-American. We’re bombing their country and killing civilians on a pretty regular basis. The government could easily lose its legitimacy (such as it is) if they allowed us to do this.
This whole operation is one time when I wouldn’t dismiss “conspiracy theories” out of hand. It’s certainly possible. I guess the issue would be: is there any reason the Pakistanis would not say this, if it happened? They do seem to be publicly rebuking us.
Not that what you are proposing is necessarily a CT, but it’s in that realm.
It apparently broke down right over the compound, and since there were no casualties, it can’t have been very high, so it would’ve had to have been shot down by someone randomly sitting around an Islamabad suburb with an anti-helicopter weapon. Doesn’t seem very likely.
Pakistan could make a complaint to the UN or at least clearly complain publicly they don’t tolerate that kind of military action inside Pakistan.
A somewhat similar situation (breaching sovereignty, not the reason why) occurred in 1986 when the US bombed Libya. The UN ‘condemned’ the US attack, but nothing substantive happened. See UN Resolution:
I think the military pretty routinely uses “mechanical failure” to describe helicopters that have been shot down. So I pretty much expect it to come out that the destroyed helicopter was actually disabled by ground fire of one type or another. But I am assuming the fire came from the compound and not from Pakistani military.
It does strain credulity that one of the two copters stalled. I can’t imagine a vehicle anywhere in the world that had a better “tune up” before going into action.
As gonzomax stated, clearly Pakistan can’t be trusted. It takes total suspension of reason to think the Pak govt didn’t know OBL was there.
As such, prior notification of the raid would have jeopardized it’s success. However, the fact that the SEAL team was there for as long as they were, gathering intel, suggests they weren’t expecting resistance.
I still don’t know what to think. My best guess is that the Pak govt must have figured out what was going on as it was going on, and ordered a stand-down, because they had nothing to gain by getting in our way.
Do you have any evidence at all of ground fire? If the copter was shot down, it was done in a way that let it land exactly where it was supposed to and resulted in no injuries. The article in the Times about the raid made it sound as if it stalled after landing, and the demolition (which no doubt was prepared for) happened just before they left. There was also an explicit statement that there was not contact with any Pakistani military forces. You’d suspect their course kept them well away from the bases - and the training academy was the closest, which I doubt is prepared for an air attack.
The two possibilities are incompetence by intelligence or duplicity. Hard to tell which is true at this point. The interesting thing to observe is whose head rolls in the Pakistani intelligence community. If no one, they have effective control of the government. If low level people get fired, I’d guess that the link to alQ is at the high levels. It sounds like Administration officials are using Congress as a lever, which is pretty smart. Boehner’s statement on aid to Pakistan was moderate and reasonable, by the way.
Yes, one of the rotors was disabled, and the helicopter made a hard landing. The question is whether the rotor was disabled by ground fire or “mechanical failure” as the military claims. The Pentagon has specifically denied that the helicopter was damaged by enemy fire and instead blames the malfunction on unexpectedly high temperatures at the bin Laden compound. That explanation makes me go :dubious: