Pak military had links with Qaida: Obama on Osama raid

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Biden weighed in against the raid

The former US President has said the top secret operation was opposed by the then Defence Secretary Robert Gates and his former Vice-President Joe Biden, who is now the President-elect.

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Washington, November 17

Barack Obama has said that he had ruled out involving Pakistan in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout because it was an “open secret” that certain elements inside Pakistan’s military, and especially its intelligence services, maintained links with the Taliban and perhaps even the Al-Qaida, sometimes using them as strategic assets against Afghanistan and India.

Giving a blow-by-blow account of the Abbottabad raid by American commandos that killed the world’s most wanted terrorist on May 2, 2011, in his latest book “A Promised Land”, the former US President said the top secret operation was opposed by the then Defence Secretary Robert Gates and his former Vice-President Joe Biden, who is now the President-elect.

In the book that hit the stands globally on Tuesday, America’s first Black President described the various options of killing Osama once it became increasingly clear that the elusive Qaida chief was living in a safe hideout on the outskirts of a Pakistani military cantonment in Abbottabad.

“Although Pakistan’s government cooperated with us on a host of counterterrorism operations, it was an open secret that certain elements inside the country’s military, and especially its intelligence services, maintained links to the Taliban and perhaps even Al-Qaida, sometimes using them as strategic assets to ensure that the Afghan government remained weak and unable to align itself with Pakistan’s number one rival, India,” Obama revealed.

“The fact that the Abbottabad compound was just a few miles from the Pakistan military’s equivalent of West Point only heightened the possibility that anything we told the Pakistanis could end up tipping off our target,” he wrote.

“Joe (Biden) also weighed in against the raid, arguing that given the enormous consequences of failure, I should defer any decision until the intelligence community was more certain that bin Laden was in the compound.

“As had been true in every major decision I’d made as president, I appreciated Joe’s willingness to buck the prevailing mood and ask tough questions, often in the interest of giving me the space I needed for my own internal deliberations,” Obama wrote. PTI