The young Pakistani officer sighs when he thinks about what happened
to Osama bin Laden. "Was he really here?" he says. "All that, it's like
9/11, we don't even know if it really happened."
Sitting at the
end of the track leading to the compound where US Navy SEALs killed the
Al-Qaeda leader on May 2, Abdullah prefers to enjoy the fresh air
blowing down from the Himalayas than relive his country's darkest hour.
"This
is a holiday compared to Mathani or Charsaddah," he added, referring to
parts of the northwest where Taliban bomb attacks and shootings have
killed so many of his colleagues.
Abdullah is just one of
millions in Pakistan who doubt that bin Laden was behind the 9/11
attacks. That spotlights the country's ambiguous relationship with
extremism and selective approach to militants in what Washington calls
the headquarters of Al-Qaeda.
The ambiguity is all the starker
given that the cataclysmic events of September 11 dragged the nuclear
power into a decade of fighting and violence that the government in
Islamabad claims has killed 35,000 people.
The bulk of the
Taliban and Al-Qaeda escaped the US invasion of Afghanistan by fleeing
into Pakistan. The army -- furious with the West for doubting its
commitment to the terror fight -- says more than 3,000 soldiers have
died battling them since.
Opposed to the US alliance, jihadist
groups -- once sponsored by the state to fight in Afghanistan and
against India -- have splintered into a local Taliban blamed for more
than four years of unrelenting bomb attacks.
In such an insecure
country -- so fearful of India, distrustful of America and protective
of its traditional influence over Afghanistan as a counterweight to
Indian power -- conspiracy theories fester unchecked.
Wahab Khan
Maseeb, 20, leaves his lectures at the medical faculty in Abbottabad. A
young Pakistani-American in jeans and a T-shirt, he was in school in
Brooklyn on that fateful day 10 years ago. He saw the ash cover
everything.
But was it an Islamist attack? Wahab hesitates. Like
others, he saw the "Loose Change" series of documentary films, which
accused elements of the US government of carrying out the 9/11 attacks.
"It was pretty convincing," he says.
In
a country awash with anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, Pakistani
newspapers peddled totally unsubstantiated claims that 4,000 Jews
didn't turn up to work in New York that day, so the attacks were
somehow a Zionist plot.
Such theories are preached from mosques
and propagated by madrassas responsible for the education of millions
of largely penniless children.
Diplomatically, the United States
has never been more frustrated with Pakistan for refusing to, or being
incapable of, rounding up Al-Qaeda allies in the northwestern tribal
belt.
US troops say the Haqqani network, whose leadership is
based in North Waziristan, poses the biggest threat to security in
Afghanistan, yet Pakistani intelligence agents are known to have close
ties to the group.
"And yet there is no choice but to maintain a
relationship with Pakistan. Why? Because we're fighting a war there,"
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said recently.
With the US
relationship worse than ever in the wake of the bin Laden raid, the
perception that the United States has dragged Pakistan deeper into
disaster is prevalent among all classes of society.
"Even
educated people now believe in these theories, largely because of a
large distrust with the US," says journalist Zahid Hussain, author of
"Frontline Pakistan" and "The Scorpion's Tail".
The danger is that conspiracy theories create a climate in which it is easier for extremist networks to recruit.
"The
wave of intolerance sweeping the country is also due substantially to
the conspiracy theories put about by the ruling establishment and their
allies in the media," wrote Ahmed Rashid this summer in the New
Republic magazine.
One popular narrative -- that Washington is in
cahoots with India and Israel to destroy Pakistan's nuclear weapons and
the Muslim world -- papers over inadequacies of corruption and
inefficiency closer to home.
After the May 2 bin Laden raid, for
example, Pakistan denounced the violation of sovereignty rather than
elaborate on how and why the Al-Qaeda leader managed to live for years
near the country's top military academy.
Four months on, there
are still no answers, feeding suspicions of collusion between elements
in the security forces and Al-Qaeda.
"Certainly there were
perhaps retired or mid-level elements in the intelligence agencies who
perhaps knew bin Laden was in the country or how to get messages to
him," Rashid told AFP.
Instead of blaming India, Israel and the
United States, Pakistanis should realise "it is the selective state
sponsorship of extremism that is destroying the country", he wrote in
New Republic. AFP
