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A year ago yesterday, May 2nd 2011, was the day Osama bin Laden, the man the FBI claims is responsible for the 1998 US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya and the 2001 World Trade Center bombings, was cut down by US Navy Seals and CIA operatives under President Barack Obama’s orders and abruptly dumped at sea. He was 54-years old. The Pakistani authorities detained three of Osama’s widows and his 11 children and grandchildren. They were charged in March of 2012 for illegally entering the country and were held for 45 days. Just in time for the anniversary of the Bin Laden raid is the return of the bin Laden family to Saudi Arabia, to the land that birthed the fallen Osama. The treatment of the Bin Laden family by the US government is something worthy of inspection.
Since Tuesday morning on September 11th 2001, bin Laden’s kin have been sheltered and conveyed between the United States, Pakistan, and as April 2012, Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was the most wanted man in the Universe. Declan Walsh of the New York Times is a journalist worth following in Pakistan. He has reported from there for 7 years and is wise to the nuances of the Pakistani government. Pakistan has been a client of the United States since its inception by the hand and sword of the British Empire. He has documented the lives of the bin Laden clan for many years.
Pakistan developed through no major revolution on behalf of its own people. As England was preparing the grounds to cede India over to the Indian National Congress, it divided that ground between ethnic-religious factions of the populations. This policy of ‘Divide and Quit’ (an updated form of divide and conquer) in effect installed tribalism as the organising principle of India, Pakistan and Kashmir. Salman Rushdie’s novels like Shame and Midnight’s Children all revolve around these themes, he himself being of Kashmiri and Urdu speaking peoples.
Pakistan and India were divided in a calamitous policy by the British Foreign Office, which necessitated by design the sub-partition of many more nations. In the Pakistan region, western regions like Punjab and Sind were hastily carved out while in the East of the Indian subcontinent, Bengal and Assam given borders through division. Do you see what I mean by installing tribalism? Each division was accompanied by a subsequent genocide. When religion is the prime determinant of nationality, the whole subcontinent of which Pakistan and India are part, becomes engulfed in wars of faith and wars amongst the factions of faithful with each brand of religion. How else to explain why Islamic states like Indonesia and Pakistan are the most thrashed victims of Islamic irredentists and their jihad?
The area known as Pakistan was given over to the Pakistani Army in 1947, which is a force endowed with copious amounts of US cash. Its name is derived by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, the founder and head propagandist, and it is in fact an acronym adding “land” (-stan) onto the end of Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Indus-Sind or Paki. The Baluchis and the Bangals are unfortunately left out of Rahmat Ali’s configurations. As the name makes clear, the Pakistani elite consider Afghan to be its semi-colony and it’s alone. It flagrantly violates the territory of the Afghan people and as Kite Runner portrays, the Pakistani intelligence para-state force, the Taliban, has committed similar such genocides among the Hazara and Tajiks in the North of that country. They were the peoples from whom the Northern Alliance was assembled to fight the Taliban in the Afghan civil war that racked Kabul and brought the country to rubble and ash and putrefaction.
Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, which is apparently a retirement haven for Pakistani military generals. These establishment elders are a huge force in the Pakistani government, let me tell you. They are, in other words, not the type of people for whom the whereabouts of bin Laden came as shocking news as it did for us.
The details of intrigue are coming out of the shadows. The Manchester Guardian reported that bin Laden and his family were outwitted by a Pakistani doctor who concocted a semi-phony Hepatitis B test facility in Abbotabad. Interestingly, it has been shown that the government health care workers, which extracted the Bin Laden family’s DNA for the CIA, was a government institution.
This opens more questions about how Bin Laden was living with a family in a military-paradisiacal environment and receiving government health care, and the Pakistani authorities claim the assassination mission was an affront to sovereignty. Bin Laden is in part an incubus of the Pakistan security system, who had colonised Afghanistan and made it a confessional state where music and public displays of anything feminine were banned.
The old alliances of the region are being rearranged. The US has started to retract their aid packages, but risk allowing space for the Taliban to colonise Pakistan’s army. In all, this suspicious dependent relation continues to befuddle US foreign policy. As far as justice goes, well, we can say an attempt was made to subvert and obtain it. The CIA’s doctor, Dr. Afridi, is being charged with treason. Does this give away Pakistan’s position during bin Laden’s nine-year vacation in its borders, where the very state doctors who treated his family, and stole their DNA, brought about his finality? Is it treason because he colluded with a CIA affront to Pakistan sovereignty or because they killed a military hero? Both? Mā šāʾ Allāh!
