New Delhi: Despite the fact that the US had infringed on Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty during a daring commando mission to kill Al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, the then Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari was very relieved when former US President Barack Obama telephoned the former to break the news.
A team of Navy SEALS commandos had shot dead the most-wanted terror chief on May 2, 2011 in a daredevil mission conducted on a house in Pakistan’s Abbottabad, 10 years after bin Laden-masterminded terrorists blew up the twin towers in New York on September 9, 2001.
The Pakistan government was kept in the dark about the US mission.
Soon after bin Laden was shot dead, Obama telephoned former US Presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton and also UK PM David Cameroon “to recognize the stalwart support our closest ally (UK) had provided from the very beginning of the Afghan War”.
But the then Pakistan President Zardari was evidently relieved when President Obama telephoned the former to break the news of the killing of bin Laden.
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Writing about the incident in his recently-published book “A Promised Land”, Obama recounts: “I expected my most difficult call to be with Pakistan’s beleaguered president, Asif Ali Zardari, who would surely face a backlash at home over our violation of Pakistani sovereignty.”
“When I reached him, however, he expressed congratulations and support….Whatever the fallout,” he said, “it’s very good news.”
“He showed genuine emotion, recalling how his wife, Benazir Bhutto, had been killed by extremists with reported ties to al Qaeda.”
A two-term PM, Benazir Bhutto was killed in a bomb explosion on December 27, 2007 in Rawalpindi. Al Qaida and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) are believed to have perpetrated the blast.
The former US President also writes that preparations had been made—if bin Laden was killed in the raid—to give a traditional Islamic burial to take place at sea, in order to avoid “the creation of a pilgrimage site for jihadists”.
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President Obama had watched the operation code-named “Neptune Spear” real-time live from the White House.
“This was the first and only time as president that I’d watch a military operation unfold in real time, with ghostly images moving across the screen”. With him were his aides including present President-elect Joe Biden and members of the national security team.
Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, had already been spoken to by Mike Mullen, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “While the conversation had been polite, Kayani had requested that we come clean on the raid and its target as quickly as possible in order to help his people manage the reaction of the Pakistani public,” the former president writes.
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Later while meeting the team of about 30 odd Navy SEAL commandos who took part in the mission to kill Osama, Obama was surprised by how many of the team members looked, unlike tough commandos.
He writes: “I studied the thirty or so elite military members seated before me in folding chairs. Some of them looked the part—strapping young men whose muscles bulged through their uniforms. But I was struck by how many of them could have passed for accountants or high school principals—guys in their early forties, with graying hair and understated demeanors.”
