By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Last week a Pakistani friend and I spent a lot of time wrestling with this question: how could American helicopters have accomplished the Bin Laden mission without being detected and intercepted by Pakistani forces?
My friend contends that there was nothing to detect. She believes the U.S. and Pakistan had cooperated in shielding Bin Laden until they jointly decided it was time to blow his cover.
Not convincing was my response. Delay in capturing or killing bin Laden, once located, would have had fatal consequences for an Obama administration facing an election in 2012. Imagine how betrayed the Survivors of 9/11 would have felt! Imagine the response of the Republican leadership!
Then how, without collusion, could those helicopters have reached the target compound? Some say that Pakistani forces may have been forewarned, but that’s not likely given the deep lack of trust between American and Pakistani forces.
A modest search of the web revealed a second conjecture: Pakistani radar may have been jammed.
Jamming is possible, although I’ve read of no complaints to that effect, but Wikileaks may have provided a third, perhaps better answer. I found it in one of the classified U.S. cables that was published last week by Karachi’s Dawn newspaper. The primary subject of this cable was the duplicity of the Pakistani military. On the one hand, the army begs the U.S. to conduct drone missions over the tribal areas. On the other, and for public consumption, the Army deplores the egregious intrusion.
The cable I found goes on to describe how the drone missions were to be facilitated: via three Pakistan-approved attack corridors. Drones using these corridors, obviously, are not intercepted. They accomplish their missions unmolested by Pakistani defenses.
So here’s my thought: what if the helicopters used one of these pre-approved attack corridors? Even if they had been observed, no alarm would have been raised. By the time they’d emerged from the mountainous drone target areas the distance to Abbottabad (and the flying time to get there) would have been shortened by half or more. Thus, if no one smelled a rat before the shooting in the compound began, it’s not surprising that, given the time needed by Pakistani forces to muster and reach the compound, the mission would have been accomplished.
I’m not a military person, so I could be entirely off the mark here. But I can’t help thinking that those attack-corridors might have been essential elements in a very successful mission. Is this possible? Or am I totally off the wall?