Anyone hoping to see Pakistan’s civilian government hold the country’s powerful military establishment to account over Osama bin-Laden will have been disappointed by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s speech Monday. Eight days after the raid that killed bin-Laden in Abbottabad, Gilani addressed his people for the first time. Speaking in parliament, he hailed bin-Laden’s demise as “justice done,” but fiercely defended the Pakistan Army and its premier intelligence agency, the ISI, and warned Washington against any further such raids. Gilani derided any suggestions that Pakistan’s commitment to fighting extremism — a fight that has cost Pakistan 30,000 civilians and 5,000 security personnel — and put the blame for the bin-Laden debacle outside Pakistan.
“Pakistan alone cannot be held to account for [the] flawed policies and blunders of others,” he said, in one of many, thinly veiled anti-U.S. jibes that peppered the speech. “Pakistan is not the birthplace of al-Qaeda. We did not invite Osama bin Laden to Pakistan or even to Afghanistan,” he added. There was even an oblique reference to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1980 exhortation to the mujahideen, calling on them to taken on the Soviet occupiers, “because God is on your side.”
