From the
Wall Street Journal:
LAHORE—A Pakistani doctor who helped the Central Intelligence
Agency track down Osama bin Laden was sentenced to 33 years in
prison, officials said, a decision that will further strain
relations with the U.S.
The doctor, Shakil Afridi, established a vaccination program at
the CIA’s request in Abbottabad, a Pakistan garrison town where bin
Laden was living. The plan was to collect DNA from residents of the
compound where the U.S. suspected bin Laden was hiding.
Pakistani authorities arrested Dr. Afridi shortly after U.S.
forces killed the al Qaeda leader in a raid on his compound a year
ago. Leon Panetta, who was CIA director at the time, appealed to
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari for the release of Dr. Afridi
on a visit to Pakistan after the raid. CIA officials also worked
intensively with Pakistan’s then-ambassador to the U.S. to gain the
doctor’s release.
U.S. officials had expected that Dr. Afridi would be set free
after questioning. But Pakistan instead launched an investigation
and continued to hold him.
“The doctor was never asked to spy on Pakistan. He was asked
only to help locate al Qaeda terrorists, who threaten Pakistan and
the U.S.,” said a senior U.S. official with knowledge of
counterterrorism operations against al Qaeda in Pakistan. “He
helped save Pakistani and American lives. His activities weren’t
treasonous, they were heroic and patriotic. “
Dr. Afridi was convicted in a secretive sentencing in the Khyber
tribal region near the border with Afghanistan, where the case
could be kept out of the public eye.
Pakistan’s tribal regions are governed under a special set of
laws that date to the British colonial era and give wide-ranging
powers to a government-appointed political agent, including the
right to sentence people to time in jail…
An official with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
Directorate military spy agency contested the U.S. view that Dr.
Afridi was a patriot. “He wasn’t serving Pakistan. He was serving
Americans,” the official said.
No surprise that an ISI official would talk as if Pakistan and
the US aren’t allies; as Eli Lake
explained in a New Republic feature on the Pakistani
“deep state” last year, elements of the ISI are allied with al
Qaeda and the Taliban, and those same elements have helped support
a terrorist safe haven the tribal regions where Afridi was
sentenced. One of Eli’s sources put it this way: “Imagine if the
CIA was supporting the drug cartels of Mexico over the wishes of
the Congress and the White House… That’s what we have in
Pakistan.”
But in that situation, it would be incumbent on the government
to arrest those rogue pro-cartel agents. If the Pakistani
government can’t or won’t curtail its anti-American security
apparatus — if it doesn’t even protect someone like Dr. Afridi —
at what point is the government itself, for all intents and
purposes, our enemy?
