Pakistan arrests informers who helped find Bin Laden

Even seasoned Washington observers of US-Pakistan relations have their heads in their hands. Instead of hunting down the support network that enabled Osama bin Laden to live undetected in Abbottabad for several years until his assassination by US special forces in May, Pakistani authorities have arrested five informers suspected of helping the CIA find the al-Qaeda terrorist leader.

This extraordinary development is reported today by the New York Times. The paper says the arrested men are all Pakistanis. One of them is understood to be a Pakistan Army major who is claimed to have recorded the license plates of cars visiting the Abbottabad compound where Bin Laden was discovered.

The arrests have been carried out by Pakistan's notorious spy agency, the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence). The New York Times calls the development "the the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan... Some in Washington see the arrests as illustrative of the disconnect between Pakistani and American priorities at a time when they are supposed to be allies in the fight against al-Qaeda."

The fate of the arrested men is described as "unclear". What is clear is that the recently much-vaunted "cooperation" between the US and Pakistan in the hunt for al-Qaeda and Taliban militants operating out of Pakistan is little short of a joke.

The CIA tries publicly to paint a picture of healthy cooperation. "We have a strong relationship with our Pakistani counterparts and work through issues when they arise," said a CIA spokeswoman.  

But the New York Times reports that, at a closed briefing last week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked deputy CIA director Michael Morell to rate Pakistan's cooperation with the US on counter-terrorism operations on a scale of 1 to 10 – and Morrell replied: "Three."

Robert Fox, writing for The First Post earlier this month after a trip to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, said it was "generally acknowledged" by US forces that the Taliban in that area were "directly sponsored and supplied by the ISI, with little attempt at disguise".

Indicative of the frustrating relationship between Washington and Islamabad is the story from CIA director Leon Panetta's trip to Pakistan last week when he presented the Pakistani government with apparently strong evidence of collusion between the ISI and the militants.

The CIA had identified two bomb-making factories on the Pakistan side of the border and asked the ISI to raid them. But when Pakistan Army troops turned up some days later, the bomb-makers had vanished, clearly having been tipped off.

As a result, a $300m payment from the States to reimburse Pakistan for the coat of patrolling the Afghan border was put on hold. Now, according to the New York Times, an ambitious Pentagon programme to train Pakistani paramilitary troops to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban has been cancelled. ·