On reflection, I may have been way harsh in my reaction to the comments of the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of Pakistan on the raid by US Navy SEALS on Osama Bin Laden’s compound the night of 1 May. You remember—they said it wasn’t their fault they couldn’t find Bin Laden, it was an intelligence failure of truly global proportions.
But I’m thinking I shouldn’t have accused them of being disingenuous.
I mean—we did penetrate their air space, crash a helicopter and blow it up, spent 20-40 minutes shooting up OBL’s posse and got out without the Pakistani military apparently noticing. Our government had to tell their government after the fact what had happened.
(Moreover, apparently no one in their government is on Twitter, or they’d have known about it before Hillary made the call.)
Their intelligence agency really is crap.
And, bless their hearts, once they’ve been caught looking like the village schmendricks, what are they going to say—“Jeez, we really screwed the pooch here, and as soon as we get our heads out of our intestinal tracts we’re going to take measures to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again”?
No government in the history of the world ever said that. From the Macedonian Empire to the Bakersfield city council. They never admit to making mistakes. It’s their job to never admit to making mistakes.
So I probably shouldn’t have come down so hard on their reaction, which was entirely natural and predictable, given that they were trying to spin a really challenging situation in which they were shown to be inept slackers in the intelligence department—any way you look at it.
My bad.
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