THE WOMEN IN ABBOTTABAD: WHAT PAKISTAN LEARNED

BY STEVE COLL

When Osama bin Laden moved to his hidden-away compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2005, “he wore a cowboy hat to avoid detection from above,” according to a newly disclosed report by an independent Pakistani commission. The report continues: He was concerned about the poplar trees on the perimeter of the Compound as they might provide cover for observers. He had thought of buying them to cut them down. Whenever OBL felt unwell … he treated himself with traditional Arab medicine (Tibb-i-Nabawi) and whenever he felt sluggish he would take some chocolate with an apple…. Khalid, OBL’s son, looked after the furnishings inside the house and the internal plumbing…. They lived extremely frugally. The family of OBL did not mix with the families of Abrar and Ibrahim [the Pathan brothers, who were bin Laden’s couriers and protectors]. The children did not play together. There was in fact a wall separating them. The children of the OBL family led extremely regimented and secluded lives. OBL personally saw to the religious education of his grandchildren and supervised their play time, which included cultivating vegetable plots with simple prizes for best performances. This account of the banality of the world’s once most-wanted man comes from the testimony of two former teen-age brides, who lived in the Abbottabad compound throughout the half-dozen years of bin Laden’s stay. One of them, Maryam, had married Ibrahim al-Saeed in 2001, when she was fourteen. The other, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, was also a teen-ager when she travelled from Yemen to Afghanistan to marry Osama bin Laden, in 2000. Maryam and Amal became friends after they met in Karachi, early in 2002. Maryam was fifteen and fresh from her wedding; Amal had found her way out of Afghanistan just before the September 11th attacks, and some of her husband’s friends were protecting her in Karachi, she explained, while she sorted out a passport problem. While various groups of robed men came and went and met without their wives present, Amal taught Maryam, a Pashto and Urdu speaker, some Arabic. Eventually, Amal’s husband appeared. He was a tall, clean-shaven Arab. At first, that was all Maryam knew about him. Later in 2002, the two women moved, together with their families, to Swat, a former resort in the mountains west of Islamabad. There they lived in a “beautiful house with a river flowing behind it.” It took Maryam some time to realize that her husband, Ibrahim, who could be a little secretive, was in fact an Al Qaeda operative, and that the clean-shaven Arab married to Amal was bin Laden. The clues Maryam had about whether the men in her life were outlaws or had ins with the Pakistani authorities were ambiguous. According to her, when the families moved to Swat, a man in a police uniform drove with them from Peshawar. Another time, driving to the local market with bin Laden in the car, they were pulled over by a cop for speeding. Ibrahim quickly extracted them from any difficulty. Their only visitors in Swat were a man and his large family. Maryam later identified this man as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, who is now imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. When K.S.M. was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March of 2003, the young wives hurriedly left Swat with their husbands and families—no doubt because the men feared that K.S.M. would rat them out. They moved to a two-story house in the city of Haripur, where they stayed for two years, and then to Abbottabad, to the compound built especially for them by Ibrahim and his brother, Abrar. Once, Maryam asked her husband, even though he didn’t like to talk about the subject, why he was taking the risk of protecting bin Laden. Ibrahim said that he would soon hand off the job to a successor and that he would receive money and land, maybe in Saudi Arabia, as his reward. He was dead before he could collect. The wives’ narrative is a highlight of the three-hundred-and-thirty-seven-page report of the Abbottabad Commission, impanelled by Pakistan’s parliament in 2011, after the May 1st Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden—though much else in it is fascinating. The report was published this week by Al Jazeera. By recording transparent, careful accounts of the four wives who survived—Maryam, Amal, and two older Saudi wives of bin Laden who lived more briefly in Abbottabad—the commission has delivered to the historical record illuminating testimony that had previously leaked out only through anonymous intelligence briefings, some of them plainly designed to spin the facts. Bin Laden’s killing, understandably, galvanized Americans, but the raid’s meanings in Pakistan have been remarked upon less often. The attack was a sensation there, too, but hardly in the spirit of hubristic triumph and relief that characterized American responses. For Pakistanis, the raid was a humiliation, a broadcast-round-the-world exposure of the country’s military weakness, the corrosive distrust between Washington and Islamabad, and the amateurism or malfeasance—or both—of Pakistan’s powerful Army and intelligence forces. The Abbottabad Commission is a landmark of the country’s troubled proto-democracy. Its report had been suppressed, presumably at the insistence of Pakistan’s military. The newly elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may seek to benefit from its publication, as the report criticizes both the Army and, at least by implication, the civilian government led by the Pakistan People’s Party, which Sharif opposed. The commission—its members were a Supreme Court Justice, a senior police officer, a diplomat, and a retired general—interviewed more than two hundred people and reviewed thousands of documents during 2011 and 2012. The report provides a thorough review of how local authorities, police, and intelligence agencies failed to notice the strange living arrangements at the Abbottabad compound—or else covered up their involvement. It examines whether Pakistan’s intelligence service, the I.S.I., was complicit or incompetent—that is, whether it aided bin Laden in his life underground after he escaped the battle of Tora Bora in December, 2001, or just failed to find him, even though he was living in a conspicuous house near Pakistan’s leading military academy. The commission, though unable to answer the question definitively, leans toward a judgment of incompetence. Its tone is admirably clear and careful. In a country where political discourse is too often muddled by conspiracy thinking, rumors, and evidence-free arguments, the Abbottabad Commission has contributed an example of fact-finding, judicious analysis, and policy recommendations. Pakistan’s failure to find bin Laden and to prevent America’s violation of its borders on May 1st “was rooted in political irresponsibility and military exercise of authority and influence in policy,” the commission wrote, for which the Army “had neither constitutional or legal authority, nor the necessary expertise and competence.” But the commission equally criticizes civilian political leaders for failing to rein in the I.S.I., or to resolve the many contradictions in Pakistan’s policies toward the United States. The commission notes that it is not charged with extracting lessons from the Abbottabad raid on behalf of American citizens. But what are those lessons? Americans seem to prefer the easy one: our SEALs acted bravely and competently. Indeed. But it does not diminish their achievements to reflect upon the hidden domesticity that Maryam and Amal unveiled. It was a world of powerlessness, pretension, passivity—cramped and steadily diminishing, like Al Qaeda itself. Bin Laden spoke and wrote dangerously from his Abbottabad compound, inspiring and directing attacks against civilians. Al Qaeda and the adherents of bin Laden’s nihilism persist today as a threat to Pakistanis and Americans alike, even if that threat is fractured and much reduced. The character and scale of this menace recedes into proper proportion with each revelatory detail about bin Laden’s life on the run after 2001. Like the great and powerful Oz, he occasionally puffed smoke and fire, but he was just a humbug behind a curtain.