The most recent news article I could find about Shakil Afridi is here. He is the Pakistani doctor recently sentenced to 33 years in prison for assisting the CIA with intelligence that ultimately led to bin Laden’s death. Pakistan sees him as a traitor for conspiring with a foreign intelligence agency without the Pakistani government’s approval. It’s hard to argue that he is not guilty of doing exactly what Pakistan accuses him of.
What should the USA do about it? The man was invaluable in the lead up to the operation that killed enemy #1. It could not have happened without him. I think the USA should use every non-violent diplomatic tool at our disposal to secure his release, including paying what would amount to a very large ransom to the Pakistani government for him. He risked a considerable amount to help kill a notorious criminal on behalf of our government, and in return our government ought to send the message that we won’t abandon people like him if it’s within our power to help.
I think the best case realistic outcome of this situation is that the USA pays Pakistan for Afridi’s release, and the Pakistani government deports him. He would be welcome to stay in America, and we would protect him and provide a comfortable lifestyle for him and his family for the rest of his life.
The sad thing is, don’t we *already *pay them plenty?
Yeah, I know, threatening to cut them off completely and further degrading our relationship with them would be risking a whole lot just to try to help out one guy.
I do agree that we should do everything short of force to try to help him, but I’m quite doubtful that even money will work. As you said, he really is guilty of working with a foreign government inside of his own country. The U.S. has (and would) come down hard on the same type of thing, even when the spy was working with a friendly country.
I think the very least we should do is take really good care of his family and do whatever we can to make his stay in prison comfortable.
I was just doing some further reading. Apparently, a Senate appropriations committee cut aid to Pakistan by $33 million… $1 million for every year of Afridi’s sentence. So, at least it’s a bit of symbolic and poetic justice. They had already cut Obama’s proposed Pakistan aid of $2 billion down to $800 million, at least partly due to just general budget cuts.
But this part of the story makes it even more disturbing, and has the ring of truth:
That’s completely believable and makes total sense. There’s no way the CIA would have told him what they were up to, or who they were looking for. There were only a handful of Americans who knew - there’s no way they’d tell a Pakistani doctor, even if he was a full blown CIA operative - it was “need to know” all the way.
Say a British SAS unit covertly entered the United States and raided a house inhabited by a known IRA terrorist, destroying the house and killing the occupants.
Say they were aided in their effort by an American citizen, who conspired with British intelligence in the plan, without informing the US government.
What do you think the US government would do to the American?
Look, Pakistan has to keep up appearances in front of the other Islamic states or else it’ll be seen as weak. Apparently weak countries tend to get overrun or have coups. Once this doctor’s collusion was known they HAD to come down on him; OBL was/is a popular figure in some circles that are important to Pakistan.
All this to say, our response is immaterial to the man’s sentence. There should (or could very well have been) a plan in place to get him and his family to a safer country where he wouldn’t be prosecuted. For whatever reason, he remained. The more we do on his behalf, IMHO, the more untrustworthy it makes us look in the eyes of the Islamic world.
And therein lies the problem in this whole mess: the very relationship of the United States with Pakistan.
Despite the PR rhetoric about the two nations being allies, they really aren’t. There are powerful forces within the Pakistani power structure who would like to sever the connection, and who do everything they can to undermine any alliance or cooperation. The United States has shown itself willing to get in bed with an authoritarian semi-theocracy because it needs help in the region, and because Pakistan isn’t quite as hostile as some of the other places that America seeks to influence.
The Afridi situation is an almost-inevitable consequence of this type of relationship.
Some people will quibble about calling Israel an allied government, but there’s the case of Jonathan Pollard. The details of the case make it much more complicated and not a very good comparison to this one, though.
Well, Jonathan Pollard comes to mind, but Pollard was actually working for the CIA while stealing intel to pass to Israel - he wasn’t some well-connected civilian passing on gossip and observations at the direction of a handler.
Israel has expressed interest in letting Pollard visit (and presumably emigrate) there, though the U.S. isn’t playing along.
That’s the first example i was going to use, although i agree that it can’t be directly compared to the Afridi case. Pollard was convicted of passing classified US information on to the Israelis.
But whether there has been a comparable case in the past is less important, in my opinion, that what the law would actually allow or require. That is, what would happen, under the law, if a US citizen aided a friendly foreign government in carrying out a covert operation, culminating in an assassination on American soil?
Mosier suggests deportation, but what if the person is a natural-born citizen with no foreign citizenship? Is there a legal mechanism for booting that person out of the country? Does this sort of assistance rise to the level of treason, if you’re aiding an official ally rather than an enemy? Would it simply fall under state-level laws associated with homicide and conspiracy to commit murder?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but i’d be rather surprised if the US government were inclined to let the American conspirator simply walk away.
Oh, I’m certain there have been lots of roughly similar cases, the thing is that they almost never happen right out in the public eye, so we just never hear about them.
It’s MUCH easier for the respective governments to bend the laws and work things out - and possibly go very easy on the offenders - when the public doesn’t know anything about it.
Seems to me a major difference between this case and other where somebody is “helping our allies” is this. This guy helped the US do something the Pakistanis were publicly onboard with, finding Osama Bin Laden.
Right, but this still begs the question: did he actually violate Pakistani law in helping the US? Did Pakistani law require him to inform his own government if he was going to aid a foreign government carry out an assassination on Pakistani soil.
Similarly, the United States might be “publicly onboard with” capturing IRA terrorists or Hamas terrorists, but that doesn’t mean that it would be lawful for an American citizen to assist a British SAS troop or a Mossad squad (respectively) in the assassination of such people within American territory.
It’s this aspect that makes me understand Pakistan’s desire to punish this guy.
If it had just been because he had helped us get OBL, I would have thought Pakistan were just being a bunch of two-timing dicks. But as it stands now, we’re already killing people in their border area, which they’re understandably pissed about but can’t really do anything about, and diseases like polio remain a problem there in large part because those people don’t really trust western aid workers. So for this Afridi guy to undermine Pakistan’s interest in vaccinating these people solely to help us catch one guy does seem like a case of misplaced loyalties.
I read someone somewhere who drew an analogy with America’s behavior during the Troubles. While the British were our ally, we had domestic political reasons for not completely helping them fight the IRA. So if we caught a suspected IRA terrorist in the US, we wouldn’t extradite him, but the FBI would help the British outside of the US. So I guess I’m not nearly as disgruntled with Pakistan as most people in our government seem to be.
Wouldn’t a great deal depend on how much aid he gave them? Did he actively participate, driving a car, say, or smuggling guns? Or was he just involved in filling in background information (“This street is a dead end,” etc.) How much did Afridi participate?
What was Afridi’s position in the Pakistani government? If he was just a private citizen, that’s very different than if he was in a ministry, or a bureaucrat, or a military officer.
Doesn’t the answer to such a question nearly always consist of “it depends…?”