IF the May 2, 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden (OBL) was the lash that shredded our defence establishment’s pride, then the leaked Abbottabad Commission report is the salt rubbed into those wounds.

When I thought of writing about the report, I dreaded the prospect of ploughing through 337 pages of turgid bureaucratic prose. So I was pleasantly surprised by the uncluttered, succinct style and the clarity of the approach. The Commission is to be applauded for its hard work and diligence.

Writing about the American commando raid a couple of days after the event, I wrote: “The space between an admission of gross incompetence or of complicity in a major crime is full of humiliation and pain.”

How much pain and humiliation? The report is full of collective breast-beating about the comprehensive political, intelligence and military failures that surrounded that shameful episode.

Witness after witness appearing before the Commission, from the director general of the ISI to the station house officer in Abbottabad, have lamented over the breakdown in governance.

In fact, the report uses a term I was unfamiliar with: Governance Implosion Syndrome (to characterise the catalogue of mistakes that prevented any agency from first detecting the presence of OBL in Pakistan for nearly 10 years, and then intercepting the American incursion that ended his life.

Apart from this litany of complaints about the collapse of the system, two other themes run through the report. One is the complete lack of coordination between military and civil agencies and departments. This is especially true of the ISI and the police: at OBL’s house, the local cops were told to stay out while the ISI conducted the investigation. Thus, no FIR for the crime was registered.

The second is the shared anguish among all the witnesses from the armed forces, including the ISI, over what was perceived as an American betrayal. ‘But we were allies!’ they seem to wail in unison. However, going by the edgy relationship between the two countries, this is a bit naïve.

The members of the Commission have expressed surprise over the fact that OBL’s house was built in contravention of various building regulations. They have also stated that the land was illegally bought against an ID card belonging to somebody else.

Clearly, these upright people have not had to deal with the lower echelons of the bureaucracy where everything can be fixed for money. In fact, half of the houses and high-rises in Pakistan do not comply with building regulations.

As I read on, I was often struck by the wide-ranging criticism of virtually every aspect of Pakistani society. From the “ruling elites and the rentier classes” to military-civil relations, there is little that does not come under the Commission’s cosh.

The problem with this broad-brush approach is that when everybody is guilty, nobody is guilty. Whenever the government wants to postpone or avoid a tough decision, it appoints a commission. Whether it is to look into a railway accident, a plane crash or an especially gruesome terror attack, the knee-jerk reaction is to appoint a commission of inquiry.

This makes it seem the government is doing something when in fact it is sweeping the problem under the carpet. Usually, the findings of these bodies are submitted months or years later, long after we have all forgotten about it. These reports are seldom released, and gather dust in some government office.

This would probably have been the fate of the Abbottabad Commission report had it not been leaked in its entirety on the Al Jazeera website. But clearly, those two-year old wounds have not healed yet: witness the immediate blocking of the site for web users in Pakistan.

Every witness in uniform spoke about the humiliation suffered by the ISI and the armed services. In fact, the air force even organised a presentation for its own demoralised officers to show how their service was not responsible for the failure to detect the American incursion.

In his deposition, DG ISI, retired Gen Shuja Pasha, bemoaned the unfairness of singling out the armed forces and the military intelligence agencies for what he saw as a “collective failure”. When prime minister Gilani rhetorically asked in parliament: “Who gave OBL a six-year visa?” this was seen as an attack on the ISI and the army.

Four months after the OBL raid, I was in the US to promote my book. There, I was asked again and again at universities and on TV and the radio to explain how OBL could live undetected in Pakistan for nearly a decade. Out of this time, he lived in Abbottabad for six years. How was this possible without some element of official connivance?

I replied then — as I wrote in this space a couple of days after the raid — that I was convinced that this was a case of incompetence rather than complicity.

Firstly, I could not believe that with a $25 million reward and the guarantee of relocation and changed identity in the US, nobody in our intelligence agencies would hand OBL over. A secret is like a pebble thrown into a pool: over time, the ripples expand, and more and more people gain access to the information.

Secondly, had an intelligence outfit been privy to OBL’s presence, it would certainly have kept an eye on the house as it would not want outsiders entering the compound. Thirdly, OBL was too toxic for our military to hang on to: like other high-value targets, they would have handed him over, and earned kudos in Washington. His detection on our soil would be devastating, as it proved to be.

Finally, given the papers and computer disks the SEAL commandos took with them, any links between OBL and Pakistani handlers would have been exposed long ago. I’m glad to be proved right by the Abbottabad Commission which has reached the same conclusions.

irfan.husain@gmail.com