It is a truth well established that Pakistan is a major thorn in Indo-US relations. Both sides try to live with it but sometimes it burrows deep and draws blood. This is one of those times.

It turns out the Obama Administration has been sitting on a treasure trove of intelligence information hauled from Osama bin Laden’s digs in Pakistan which it apparently didn’t fully exploit because it would have interfered with the narrative of “success” for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. The narrative: Osama was dead, al-Qaeda was a spent force, the anti-terrorism campaign was ending and America was winning. The truth was anything but.

The White House apparently blocked access to the rich haul of material to its own intelligence agencies after a quick “scrub” of the documents for actionable intelligence. Access was denied for almost a year until a bureaucratic battle allowed the Defence Intelligence Agency a “read-only” access. Then the White House released 17 handpicked documents for analysis which supported the story of success while the bulk of the information remained out of reach.

This beats House of Cards and Homeland hollow but then reality is stranger than fiction. These stunning disclosures were made in a recent piece on the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal—admittedly no friend of the administration. However, there is far too much credible reporting in the column to dismiss it as a right-wing hatchet job.

But there was, perhaps, another equally important reason behind the hands-off order by the White House. It is called Pakistan. If bin Laden’s many hard drives, thumb drives and DVDs were allowed to circulate among various US agencies, it would have been impossible to control the narrative on Pakistan. The ISI’s role in keeping bin Laden safe in his “humble abode” would become impossible to ignore in public. Leaks would have inevitably followed, causing ripples among allies and strategic partners alike.

India would have raged and the Obama Administration’s emphasis on the trade and business side of things, which helps to sometimes obscure the security differences, would dilute. Access to bin Laden’s library would have corroborated what Indian intelligence had been telling the American side —that the ISI was in regular touch with bin Laden.

Now the case has been made in a few new bin Laden documents submitted earlier this month as evidence in a trial of a Pakistani in New York. They nail the Pakistani establishment, the Brothers Sharif, two former ISI chiefs and the large web of lies that has become a natural way of being for our western neighbour. Not that anyone in India would be surprised but can the latest evidence bend the arc of the American mind away from constant rationalisations about Pakistan?



A letter submitted to the Brooklyn court was by Atiyah Abd al Rahman, described as the general manager of al Qaeda. The letter talked of Shahbaz Sharif wanting to cut a deal at “any price” with the Pakistani Taliban with al-Qaeda’s blessings to spare Punjab from terrorist attacks. By implication, it was OK to attack India, the US and other parts of Pakistan. We know that Nawaz Sharif benefitted greatly in the last election from his brother’s outreach when his party was spared while the terrorists targeted PPP candidates mercilessly.

The letter to bin Laden, dated July 2010, also talks of a “Shuja Shah” —a possible reference to Ahmad Shuja Pasha who headed the ISI at the time. “Shuja Shah” wanted to talk to al-Qaeda and “we gave them the same message, nothing more.”

The message was that al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban have planned “earth-shaking operations in Pakistan” but had shelved them “to calm things down” because America remained the main enemy. Here was ISI, the beneficiary of Washington’s billions, saving its skin and endangering Americans in a deal with the terrorists. The main messenger for the back-andforth between Abbottabad and ISI was Fazlur Rehman Khalil, the head of Harkat ul-Mujaheddin, a man close to both the ISI and bin Laden. So chummy were they all that former ISI chief, Hamid Gul, practically a jihadist himself, also attended a meeting.

ISI’s repeated message to al-Qaeda: bear with us while we try to convince the Americans to negotiate with you just as we are. In turn, the ISI helped the terrorists stay safe from American intercepts. These were not rogue ISI elements but the core itself. The coordination was impeccable.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s top men — the army chief, the ISI chief and the interior minister —have come to Washington recently to say they are fighting terrorists for real this time. Can a leopard change its spots?