Is There Any Proof That Pakistan Sheltered Bin Laden?

President Obama and members of his national security team receiving an update on the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Pete Souza/The White House

Pakistan Sheltered Bin Laden? Prove It -- Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

(CNN) -- The New York Times magazine is running a bombshell story alleging that the Pakistanis knew all along that Osama bin Laden was living for years in his longtime hiding place in the northern Pakistan city of Abbottabad, where he was killed by a U.S. Navy SEAL team on May 2, 2011.

The Times story, titled "What Pakistan Knew About bin Laden," will carry weight: It was written by Carlotta Gall, the dean of the correspondents who have covered Afghanistan and Pakistan since that fateful day in 2001, when al Qaeda's four hijacked planes crashed through America's comfortable sense that vast oceans insulated it from its enemies.

At great personal risk Gall has authoritatively covered the war in Afghanistan for the past 12 years. Indeed, I first met her during the civil war in Afghanistan during the mid-1990s when she was an aid worker, and I have met her many times since. I encouraged her (along with, I'm sure, many others) to write a book about her reporting in Afghanistan, as no Western reporter has more to say about what has transpired there since the fall of the Taliban.

The bin Laden story in the New York Times magazine is an extract from Gall's forthcoming book, "The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014."

Gall makes two astonishing claims in her Times magazine piece.

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My Comment: There is a critical flaw in Peter Bergen's analysis .... he believes that there must be some document out there that will implicate the Pakistani government in hiding Bin laden .... but this is not how government functions on implementing messy and critical policy decisions. Case in point .... and I am using an extreme example .... as of today no one has found a direct order from Adolf Hitler that called for the establishment of the concentration camps .... and I predict that one will never be found. Adolf Hitler did not need to issue an order .... because everyone understand exactly what Adolf Hitler wanted for the simple reason that they were like Adolf Hitler .... after-all .... that is why Hitler positioned them to be where they were .... he knew that they thought like he did. Jumping to Pakistan of today .... no one had to be issued an order to protect Bin Laden .... everyone understood that bin Laden had to be protected .... and the best way they protected him was to ignore him and to deny any argument that he was in Pakistan. And in the event that he was found (which he was) .... well then .... everyone in Pakistan would then be in a position to deny that they knew he was in their country .... which is exactly what they then did after his killing.

Update: Everyone knows that Bin Laden's right hand man and now Al Qaeda leader (Zawahiri) is in Pakistan .... not surprisingly .... I do not know of any massive investigation and hunt for him is occurring in Pakistan today .... and I predict that there will be none for the simple reason that they have positioned themselves to be in denial mode when he is eventually found and captured/killed.