Peter Bergen says there was no indication "of any such interaction" between Pakistani military and the terrorist in all the documents that had emerged from bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad
Did Pakistan know that Osama bin Laden had been hiding in a walled compound less than a mile from its elite military training institute for five years? The question occupied a high-powered panel of journalists and a former diplomat on day four of the 2018 ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF). And the luminaries, who had tracked the al Qaida founder killed by American forces in 2011, think "most likely not".
Peter Bergen, the CNN journalist who has authored books on bin Laden and was the first to interview him on TV, said there was no indication "of any such interaction" between Pakistani military and the terrorist in all the documents that had emerged from bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad.
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, the British journalists who recently penned the book, Exile, on bin Laden's years on the run after 9/11, concurred with the view that the terrorist had remained under the radar of Pakistani intelligence service ISI.
TCA Raghavan, former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, who was a member of the panel moderated by senior journalist Suhasini Haider, said the ISI's ignorance was its inefficiency, and pointed to the fact that junior ISI officers did not always pass on the information to their bosses, often choosing to function "tactically".
Bin Laden lived a reclusive life in Abbottabad, said Levy, and even many inside the compound did not know the identity of the "sheikh" they guarded.
"They grew their own crops, with cattle and chicken, so that they didn't have to go out for food. It was a life of poverty without even an air-conditioner," said Levy. By the time bin Laden moved to Abbottabad, he was "constrained" by his situation, said Bergen, unable to rely on any but the most trusted of couriers to hand-deliver his detailed memos to al Qaida members around the world, because messages relayed via modern methods would be traced back to him by the Western agencies on his scent.
Combined, these practices and factors likely went a long way in concealing the terrorist's identity even from the Pakistani security agencies.
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