Focus on Pakistan
What did Pakistani officials know about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and when did they know it? Were they complicit — or dumb? Or smart at playing dumb? Those questions were analyzed by a panel of foreign policy experts on Wednesday (May 4) at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). With the international spotlight shifting from the killing of the al-Qaeda leader to the ramifications of his death, a key issue now is the future relationship between the United States and Pakistan, a sometimes tumultuous but often mutually beneficial partnership. The U.S. administration may have faced two problematic conclusions: officials in the Pakistan military and/or its Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) knew of bin Laden’s location in a Pakistan community or they showed “a stunning degree of incompetence,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA intelligence officer and now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Let’s not pre-judge complicity,...