Pakistan lawmakers insisted yesterday there must be no repeat of the US commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden and said drone strikes targeting terrorists near the border with Afghanistan must end.
The resolution followed a 10-hour parliamentary session in which MPs debated the “situation arising from unilateral US action in Abbottabad”, the northern garrison town where Navy Seals shot dead the Al-Qaeda chief on May 2.
Pakistan has vowed to review intelligence cooperation after the embarrassing revelation that Bin Laden had been living less than a mile from one of its military academies in Abbottabad, prompting claims of official collusion.
The country’s intelligence head Ahmad Shuja Pasha, chief of military operations and deputy chief of air staff, offered to resign over the raid as he briefed lawmakers ahead of the announcement of their resolution, parliamentary sources told AFP.
But Premier Yousuf Raza Gilani and Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani urged him to stay, according to local media. The debate came hours after Pakistan’s Taliban claimed responsibility for a double suicide bombing on a paramilitary police training centre that killed 89 people in the first major attack to avenge Bin Laden’s death.
Parliament called on the government “to appoint an independent commission on the Abbottabad operation, fix responsibility and recommend necessary measures to ensure that such an incident does not recur”.
Lawmakers also threatened to withdraw logistical cooperation for US troops based in Afghanistan and condemned CIA-operated drone strikes. US missile strikes doubled last year, with more than 100 operations killing over 670 people, according to an AFP tally, and the CIA has said the covert programme has severely disrupted Al-Qaeda’s leadership.
“Mistakes have been committed by us in the past due to gaps in political and military regimes and we resolved that such mistakes do not happen again,” information minister Firdous Ashiq Awan said.
“We stand by our military and we will not leave our intelligence alone,” she said.
The lawmakers’ censure reflects the “strong anguish of people of Pakistan” over the US raid, political analyst Shafqat Mehmood said.
Meanwhile US officials revealed yesterday that commandos discovered a stash of pornographic films in the Al-Qaeda kingpin’s Abbottabad hideout, reports said, in a disclosure which could erode his appeal to followers.
The officials said computer files taken by US special forces from Bin Laden’s home contained a considerable quantity of x-rated videos, The New York Times reported.
There has been little public protest in support of Bin Laden in a country where more people have been killed in bomb attacks in the past four years than the nearly 3,000 who died in Al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 strikes on the US.
But Pakistanis have been outraged at the perceived impunity of the US raid, while asking whether their military was too incompetent to know Bin Laden was living close to a major forces academy, or, worse, conspired to protect him.
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf plans to return to his homeland next year in order to stand in elections, an Emirati newspaper quoted him as saying yesterday.
“I am going to land in Lahore on March 23, 2012, if not earlier – but not later,” Musharraf said in Dubai, according to the report in The National.
He lives in self-imposed exile in London but is wanted in connection with the 2007 murder of ex-premier Benazir Bhutto, accused of failing to provide her with enough security.