The Prime Minister of Pakistan denies Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan - yet all the available evidence points to his presence there.
With Afghanistan once again dominating the headlines, the question which could hold the key to the conflict, indeed the very reason for the war in the first place, remains unanswered: namely the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden.
On Sunday Gordon Brown asked that exact question, in a strongly-worded address to the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) summit in Trinidad – pointing the finger at Pakistan. He said:
“We’ve got to ask ourselves why, eight years after September 11, nobody has been able to spot or detain or get close to Osama bin Laden.”
However today, standing alongside Mr Brown, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani denied any such link, saying:
“I don’t think Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan.”
So where is the al-Qaeda leader?
Almost all accounts put him in Pakistan, in the mountainous no-mans-land to the west of the country, along the border with Afghanistan – the most recent being the United States Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations report, published Monday, which concluded:
“On or around December 16 [2001], two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area.
“Most analysts say he is still there today.”
The publication, “Tora Bora revisited: How we failed to get bin Laden and why it matters today”, looks at the weeks leading up to 9/11 and the first months of the war.
It reveals just how close US troops, in concert with Afghan allies, came to capturing bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his second-in-command and now the face of al-Qaeda, fronting their chilling in-cave videos in which the terrorists threaten attacks and criticise Western civilisation.
Committee chairman John Kerry added:
“When we went to war less than a month after the attacks of September 11, the objective was to destroy Al Qaeda and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, and other senior figures in the terrorist group and the Taliban, which had hosted them.
“Today, more than eight years later, we find ourselves fighting an increasingly lethal insurgency in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan that is led by many of those same extremists.
“Our inability to finish the job in late 2001 has contributed to a conflict today that endangers not just our troops and those of our allies, but the stability of a volatile and vital region.”
13 Responses to “Where’s Osama?”
Anon E Mouse
Diane Abbott said: “Private schools prop up the class system in society. It is inconsistent, to put it mildly, for someone who believes in a fairer and more egalitarian society to send their child to a fee-paying school.”
When Prime Minister Tony Blair sent his eldest son, Euan, to the London Oratory, a selective school, she criticised him, saying people voted Labour because they believed in equality.
When the countesses niece, Harriet Harman sent her son to a selective grammar school in Orpington, Kent, she said: “She made the Labour Party look as if we do one thing and say another.”
And “You can’t defend the indefensible – anything you say sounds self-serving and hypocritical.”
Diane Abbott sent her son to a £10 000 / year private school…hypocrite.
Anthony Charles Linton Blair, Labour, privately educated beat John Major, Conservative, educated at the local comprehensive.
Says everything really about this bunch of creeps – they are not “Labour”… now Estelle Morris – she’s Labour…
Shamik Das
Wrong thread mate! Tell us your thoughts on Bin Laden…
Anon E Mouse
Shamik Das – I don’t like him very much! My mistake on the post here!
Dungeekin
@Liz McShane:
That’s the point. That’s why he’ll never be captured, and all the time he’s out there the wholesale destruction of civil liberties can proceed in his name.
D
Liz McShane
Also he might havea few beans to spill het would embarrass the former Bush I regime etc … my enemy’s enemy …….the Bush and Bin Laden families have a few close connections.