Tuesday, May 3, 2011

U.S. Troops Were 1,800 Yards from Osama bin Laden in 2008, Training Pakistanis How to Catch Him

By John Cook

U.S. Troops Were 1,800 Yards from Osama bin Laden in 2008, Training Pakistanis How to Catch Him

U.S. Troops Were 1,800 Yards from Osama bin Laden in 2008, Training Pakistanis How to Catch Him According to Wikileaks documents, about 100 U.S. troops deployed to Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2008, just yards from Osama bin Laden's lair. They were there to train the Pakistani military how to capture or kill Al Qaeda terrorists. It didn't take.

The Guardian caught the diplomatic cable, which recounted a meeting between then deputy secretary of state John Negroponte and Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi to discuss U.S. military aid to Pakistan. It doesn't appear to be among the 12,000 or so cables released by Wikileaks yet—the Guardian has the full database—and the paper didn't publish the cable itself.

But it mentions "US Training-of-Trainers for the Frontier Corps starting in Abbottabad in October" of 2008. And that sounds a lot like this plan, reported in the New York Times in March 2008, to send 100 or so troops to train Pakistan's Frontier Corps, which the Times decribes as a "Pakistani paramilitary force that is the vanguard in the fight against Al Qaeda." If such training were indeed taking place in Abbottabad, as the cable reports, then it almost certainly took place at the Pakistan Military Academy, roughly 1.7 kilometers from the compound where Osama bin Laden lived from 2005 or so until Sunday night.