Bombshell: Book claims Pakistani gov't harbored terrorists including bin Laden -- and the U.S. knew and ignored it

In a New York Times Magazine article adopted from a soon-to-be-released book "The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014," author Carlotta Gall reveals that the Pakistani government harbored terrorists including explicitly protecting Osama bin Laden, while putting on a facade of cooperation with the U.S. in its counterterrorism operations. When the U.S. government uncovered information about the Pakistanis' aiding and abetting of terrorists, it failed to address it "for fear of setting off a greater confrontation with a powerful Muslim nation."

Gall states [emphasis ours]:

President George W. Bush and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf pose during a photo-op in the Oval Office Saturday, Dec. 4, 2004. (Image Source: White House photo/Tina Hager)

"The Pakistani government, under President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was maintaining and protecting the Taliban, both to control the many groups of militants now lodged in the country and to use them as a proxy force to gain leverage over and eventually dominate Afghanistan. The dynamic has played out in ways that can be hard to grasp from the outside, but the strategy that has evolved in Pakistan has been to make a show of cooperation with the American fight against terrorism while covertly abetting and even coordinating Taliban, Kashmiri and foreign Qaeda-linked militants. The linchpin in this two-pronged and at times apparently oppositional strategy is the ISI. It’s through that agency that Pakistan’s true relationship to militant extremism can be discerned — a fact that the United States was slow to appreciate, and later refused to face directly, for fear of setting off a greater confrontation with a powerful Muslim nation."

During her investigation on the goings-on in Pakistan, Gall got word that the Pakistani government might have known of Osama bin Laden's location, information that when brought to U.S. government officials was effectively denied, leaving Gall stonewalled:

People gather outside the compound where Osama Bin Laden was killed during a raid in Abottabad, Pakistan. (Getty Images)

"Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid. “He knew of Osama’s whereabouts, yes,” the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. “Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy,” the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

Colleagues at The Times began questioning officials in Washington about which high-ranking officials in Pakistan might also have been aware of Bin Laden’s whereabouts, but everyone suddenly clammed up. It was as if a decision had been made to contain the damage to the relationship between the two governments. “There’s no smoking gun,” officials in the Obama administration began to say."

Anecdotally, Gall began to collect evidence that Pakistan was aiding and abetting bin Laden:

"Bin Laden did not rely only on correspondence. He occasionally traveled to meet aides and fellow militants, one Pakistani security official told me. “Osama was moving around,” he said, adding that he heard so from jihadi sources. “You cannot run a movement without contact with people.” Bin Laden traveled in plain sight, his convoys always knowingly waved through any security checkpoints."

After more than two years of investigation, Gall finally found the stunning evidence to buttress her thesis:

This undated file photo shows al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. (Photo: AP)

"In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. Only one man, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told me that he thought Musharraf had arranged to hide Bin Laden in Abbottabad. But he had no proof and, under pressure, claimed in the Pakistani press that he’d been misunderstood. Finally, on a winter evening in 2012, I got the confirmation I was looking for. According to one inside source, the ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle Bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: Bin Laden. I was sitting at an outdoor cafe when I learned this, and I remember gasping, though quietly so as not to draw attention. (Two former senior American officials later told me that the information was consistent with their own conclusions.) This was what Afghans knew, and Taliban fighters had told me, but finally someone on the inside was admitting it. The desk was wholly deniable by virtually everyone at the ISI — such is how supersecret intelligence units operate — but the top military bosses knew about it, I was told."

One Pakistani legislator with whom Gall spoke argued that the blind eye of the U.S. government towards Pakistan continues, leading to the continued growth of anti-Western terrorist groups throughout the Middle East:

"The United States was neither speaking out against Pakistan nor changing its policy toward a government that was exporting terrorism, the legislator lamented. 'How many people have to die before they get it? They are standing by a military that protects, aids and abets people who are going against the U.S. and Western mission in Afghanistan, in Syria, everywhere.'"

In a related story of interest, Mediaite reported that Gall's entire article, which was printed in the International New York Times, was completely censored in its Pakistani edition.

What the front page of the New York Times looks like in Pakistan today pic.twitter.com/EBwUzb3RRz

— Aleem Maqbool (@AleemMaqbool) March 22, 2014