WITH or without the Commission Report there are two things that no Pakistani would accept -- failure on the part of the ISI to detect the presence of OBL in Abbottabad and the army and air force let down for full two hours while the Americans returned undetected.

Osama was at a stone’s throw of the PMA, Kakul, for a full five years and yet the ISI was unaware of his presence?

Gen Pasha did not explain the failure of his organisation in detecting the presence of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. I think there is something more to it than meets the eye. Gen Pasha is passing a red-herring to confuse the whole issue. To me it appears there was a nexus between the ISI and the CIA to deliberately keep Pakistani public in the dark.

It has now become all the more essential that a high-level meeting be called on security in which all political parties aided by the University of Strategic Studies, the military and the ISI discuss threadbare the national policy on security issues both at the national and the international level, setting parameters within which the ISI should operate.

You can’t have a state working within a state at cross-purposes. The ISI should have come clean before the Abbottabad Commission on why it let the nation down. Weren’t these included in the terms of reference for the Abbottabad Commission? Did it include the reasons behind the ISI’s failure? Musharraf’s apology at the failure is not good enough. As Lincoln said “... you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

The army and air force were working on a master plan as given to the ISI to ensure that American Seals take out Osama bin Laden. Has the Abbottabad Commission laid blame of culpability of offence which was the purpose behind setting up this Commission?

WG.CDR. (r) AHMED SHAH JAN Peshawar

Content and authenticity

THE report is finally out by default, proxy or by design. Whatever means adopted to make the report public may raise a few eyebrows on the intent. However, our concern lies in its authenticity first and then the contents, which leads to grey areas, more appropriately the black holes in our governance and security agencies.

The formation of commission on any issue seems to be our reflex action, which provides the government space to adjust their seats and even edit the contents to their advantage. The time given to the commission is also timed depending on the situation developing and likely to shape. More the time given, the truth gets diluted and the facts are placed on the back burner.

It is very hard to accept the credibility of the commission headed by a very senior judge who recorded all the relevant and irrelevant without any remorse. The drop scene of the whole drama rested on the killing of OBL. The stress of the commission, however, remained focused on the role of the army, ISI and the air force. Only occasionally, civil security agencies’ and the police role came in for scrutiny, supposed to be the first line of defence on all in-house matters.

OBL was a patient of kidney malfunctions and required regular dialysis procedure twice weekly, which involves hours of intensive checks of vitals by well-trained doctors and paramedics. The commission seems to have not probed this most important aspect to ascertain how doctors, paramedics and dialysis equipment moved in and out where OBL lived.

If the commission believed that all supports were kept permanently for five years there, it is then for us to believe it or not. It looks that either OBL was not a patient of kidney malfunction or he lived in Abbotabad without any such medical support. Whether we accept it or not, OBL appears to have died long time back due to complete kidney failure and it was kept secret waiting for the Abbottabad fiasco to unfold as done in this commission report, maligning the Pakistan army, ISI and air force.

LT COL (r) DAOOD HUSNAIN Karachi