Country ... Pakistan
War on Terror ... hunt for Bin Laden

Charity's foreign staff to leave Pakistan ... Order follows intelligence report alleging link between Save the Children and vaccination drive used in bin Laden hunt.

COMMENTARY
I have spent some time working in Pakistan which gave me an opportunity to understand a little of the complexities and the contradictions of the country, its institutions and its society.

Pakistan, like many countries, is a whole lot more complicated than it is possible to communicate in sound bytes and news headlines. In my own case I learned something of the raw intelligence of a lot of Pakistanis ... my counterparts who learned more than what I knew in short order. At the same time I learned that 'government' in Pakistan has similar dysfunctions in its structure as there are in Europe or the United States or anywhere else in the world.

A big part of the country suffers from poverty. The root causes of this povedrty is lack of resources, lack of education and lack of appropriate organization and governance. There is a terrible disconnect between the traditional systems of governance ... tribal governance, if you will ... and modern governance that emanates from the West.

The military may well be the most respected institutuion in Pakistan. The military is almost certainly the most efficient institution ... or was when I was there in the 1990s. Perhaps national level government ... politics and administration ... is the least respected. The systems of governance have been tainted by 'money' for a very long time, and I doubt this is much better now that it was years ago.

The involvement of the United States in Afghanistan and the war on terror has added another layer of complexity in Pakistan. I get the impression that the Unted States did a lot of its planning with no idea at all what the conditions were on the ground either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan. When the plans did not work out, the Afghans and the Pakistanis were blamed, when it was foreign ignorance that was the big reasong for failure.

The idea of 'sovereignty' is big ... in my view, too big. I have seen 'soverignty' used as a smkescreen for many abusive practices over the years, notably the large scale thievery of international funds flowing through government into a local economy in support of development and poverty reduction. In the case of the search for Bin Laden, secrecy was critical, and experience suggested that there were leaks at many levles in the intelligence apparatus ... certainly in Pakistan, but also quite likely in the US security apparatus and its allies. Leaking for political gain is not unknown ... and in this case the 'need to know' doctrine was strictly followed and in the end the attack on Bin Laden was successful.

The politics in Pakistan mean that there will be ongoing responses like the one reported here. These responses are likely to be popular in Pakistan while at the same time showing the world something of the dysfunction of governance in Pakistan.

It will be interesting to see what comes next.
Peter Burgess

Charity's foreign staff to leave Pakistan ... Order follows intelligence report alleging link between Save the Children and vaccination drive used in bin Laden hunt.

IMAGE DNA collected through the vaccination programme helped the CIA to locate bin Laden in Abbottabad

Pakistan has ordered all Save the Children's foreign staff to leave the country within four weeks in the wake of accusations linking the aid agency to a fake vaccination programme used in the hunt for al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

Save the Children said on Thursday it had received no explanation for the order, under which the charity's six expatriate staff have been told to leave within four weeks.

A Pakistan intelligence report has linked the aid agency to Shakeel Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who the CIA allegedly used to carry out a fake vaccination programme as they searched for bin Laden.

'Earlier this week we got a call from special branch instructing us to send back all expatriate staff,' Ghulam Qadir, Save the Children spokesman, told AFP news agency.

'There were no reasons given. We are working with the government to comply with the instructions.'

He said the agency would continue to operate in Pakistan where it has 2,000 staff, serving more than seven million children. And he strongly denied allegations that Afridi was introduced to the CIA through Save the Children.

'On Shakeel Afridi, our stand is very clear that there is absolutely no truth in it. There is no concrete proof to these allegations,' Qadir said.

No government official was immediately available to comment.

Bin Laden's presence

Afridi allegedly worked for the CIA collecting DNA in a bid to verify bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, where US navy SEALS killed him in a raid on his compound in May 2011.

Bin Laden was living in the garrison town north of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, at the time of his killing.

Pakistan reacted with fury to the raid, which it branded a violation of sovereignty.

An official report prepared jointly by Pakistan civil and military intelligence blamed a former Save the children director for introducing Afridi to the Americans.

The report, obtained by AFP, said Afridi went to Peshawar in November 2008 to participate in a workshop organised by Save The Children, where he met the charity's country director, who later invited him to come to Islamabad.

Afridi met him at a book stall in Islamabad and was introduced to a western woman, the report said. Afridi and the woman met regularly afterwards in various locations in Islamabad.

In May Afridi was sentenced to 33 years in jail for treason after being convicted over alleged ties to Lashkar-e-Islam, not for working for the CIA, for which the court said it did not have jurisdiction.

The US was enraged by Afridi's sentencing and the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to cut aid to Pakistan by a symbolic $33m.

'Misguided over-reaction'

Richard Hoagland, the US deputy ambassador to Pakistan, reacted to the news of the expulsion by saying Save the Children had nothing to do with the discovery of bin Laden.

'Save the Children were in no way involved with Abbottabad - I repeat, no way. A very sad and misguided over-reaction,' he wrote on Twitter.

The expulsion of Save the Children's foreign staff was first reported by the British newspaper The Guardian.

Save the Children is an international aid group with operations in more than 50 countries around the world that aims to improve the lives of children.

The group has been working in Pakistan since 1979, according to its website.

Of late it has been helping some of the roughly 250,000 people who have fled fighting in Pakistan's Khyber agency, a tribal area that borders Afghanistan.

Save the Children has about 2,000 Pakistani employees across the country, who will continue to work despite the expulsion.

Source: Agencies