Salman Taseer Murder and Hunt for Bin Laden

On the fateful day of January 4, 2011, the governor of Pakistan’s most populous Punjab province Salman Taseer was assassinated at the Kohsar Market in Islamabad by his bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri, who accused the governor of committing blasphemy.

Eight months after the assassination, Taseer's son, Shahbaz, was kidnapped in broad daylight from the capital city of Punjab, Lahore, by the Pakistani Taliban in August 2011, before being released in March 2016, a month after Taseer's murderer was hanged in February 2016.

In a related development that will be explained later in the article, on March 16, 2011, a CIA’s private contractor Raymond Davis, who had previously worked for Erik Prince’s infamous Blackwater security firm, was released from a prison in Lahore and was secretly flown to the United States.

Weeks after the Taseer murder, on January 27, 2011, Raymond Davis had killed two armed men on a busy street in Lahore in broad daylight, who were reportedly the “assets” of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Minutes after the shooting, four CIA agents rushing to Davis’ aid in an SUV crushed another bystander to death.

In 2018, Raymond Davis published his memoirs titled: “The Contractor: How I landed in a Pakistani prison and ignited a diplomatic crisis,” in which he had narrated all the gory details of the shooting, his time in prison and subsequent release under a settlement with victims’ families, but had painstakingly avoided any mention to his role as the CIA’s acting station chief in Islamabad or to his job of tracking Osama Bin Laden’s couriers.

On the fateful day of January 27, 2011, when Raymond Davis was doing his usual job of tracking Bin Laden’s whereabouts, Pakistan’s intelligence sent two hired muggers to harass him in order to make him desist from unauthorized activities, and in a fit of rage, Raymond Davis, who had been chased and harassed several times before by Pakistan’s intelligence operatives, shot both “muggers” dead.

In the April 2013 article for the New York Times, Mark Mazzetti writes: “By the time Raymond Davis moved into a safe house with a handful of other CIA officers and contractors in late 2010, the bulk of the agency’s officers in Lahore were focused on investigating the growth of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

“Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani had orders from Islamabad to be lenient in approving the visas, because many of the Americans coming to Pakistan were — at least officially — going to be administering millions of dollars in foreign-aid money. By the time of the Lahore killings, in early 2011, so many Americans were operating inside Pakistan under both legitimate and false identities that even the U.S. Embassy didn’t have accurate records of their identities and whereabouts.”

Although Mark Mazzetti also scrupulously avoided mentioning the role played by Raymond Davis and his team in locating the couriers of Bin Laden in the article and he had even tried to distract attention to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the timing of the surge of CIA operatives in Pakistan, “late 2010 and early 2011,” is critical, because those were exactly the months when the CIA was tracking Bin Laden’s whereabouts in Pakistan.

More to the point, in the March 2017 article for the Washington Post, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States at the time of Osama Bin Laden’s execution in May 2011, has confessed to the role played by then-President Asif Zardari government in facilitating the killing of Bin Laden.

Husain Haqqani identified then-President Asif Ali Zardari as his “civilian leader” and revealed in the article: “In November 2011, I was forced to resign as ambassador after Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus gained the upper hand in the country’s perennial power struggle. Among the security establishment’s grievances against me was the charge that I had facilitated the presence of large numbers of CIA operatives who helped track down bin Laden without the knowledge of Pakistan’s army, even though I had acted under the authorization of Pakistan’s elected civilian leaders.”

This confessional statement by Ambassador Haqqani lends further credence to Seymour Hersh’s account of the execution of Bin Laden in his book and article titled: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, which was published in the London Review of Books in May 2015.

According to Hersh, the initial, tentative plan of the Obama administration regarding the disclosure of the execution of Bin Laden to the media was that he had been killed in a drone strike in the Hindu Kush Mountains on the Afghan side of the border, which could also have provided face-saving to Pakistan’s military authorities.

But the operation didn’t go as planned because a Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound and later blown up by the Navy Seals. Consequently, the whole sleepy town now knew that an operation was underway and several social media users based in Abbottabad live-tweeted the whole incident on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

Therefore the initial plan was abandoned and the Obama administration had to go public within hours of the operation with a hurriedly cooked-up story. This fact explains so many contradictions and discrepancies in the official account of the story, the most glaring being that the United States Navy Seals conducted a raid deep inside Pakistan’s territory on a garrison town without the permission of Pakistani military authorities.

According to a May 2015 AFP report, Pakistan’s military sources had confirmed Hersh’s account that there was a Pakistani defector who had met several times with Jonathan Bank, the CIA’s then-station chief in Islamabad, as a consequence of which Pakistan’s intelligence disclosed Bank’s name to local newspapers and he had to leave Pakistan in a hurry in December 2010 because his cover was blown.

In the May 2016 report, Greg Miller of the Washington Post posited that Mark Kelton, the CIA station chief in Islamabad at the time of Bin Laden’s killing in Abbottabad, was poisoned by Pakistan’s military intelligence due to Kelton’s role in the assassination of Bin Laden.

It should be remembered here that Mark Kelton succeeded Jonathan Bank in January 2011, after the latter’s name was made public by Pakistan’s military intelligence due to Bank’s “suspicious activities,” and Raymond Davis worked as CIA’s acting station chief during the interim period.

According to inside sources of Pakistan’s military, after the 9/11 terror attack, the Saudi royal family had asked Pakistan’s military authorities as a favor to keep Bin Laden under protective custody, because he was a scion of a powerful Saudi-Yemeni Bin Laden family and it was simply inconceivable for the Saudis to hand him over to the US. That’s why he was found hiding in a spacious compound right next to the reputed Pakistan Military Academy in Abbottabad.

But once the Pakistani walk-in colonel, as stated in the AFP report and subsequently identified as ISI’s retired Lt Col Saeed Iqbal who was later granted asylum in the United States for services rendered, told then-CIA station chief in Islamabad, Jonathan Bank, that a high-value al-Qaeda leader had been hiding in a safe house in Abbottabad under the protective custody of Pakistan’s intelligence service, and after that when the CIA obtained further proof in the form of Bin Laden’s DNA through the fake vaccination program conducted by Dr. Shakil Afridi, then it was no longer possible for Pakistan’s military authorities to keep denying the whereabouts of Bin Laden.

In the book, Seymour Hersh had already postulated various theories that why it was not possible for Pakistan’s military authorities to simply hand Bin Laden over to the US, one being that the Americans wanted to catch Bin Laden themselves in order to gain maximum political mileage for then-President Obama’s presidential campaign slated for November 2012.

Here let me only add that in May 2011, Pakistan had a pro-America Pakistan People’s Party government led by then-President Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of late Benazir Bhutto, in power. And since Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, then the powerful army chief of Pakistan’s military, and the former head of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lt. Gen. Shuja Pasha, were complicit in harboring Bin Laden, thus it seems plausible that Pakistan’s military authorities might still have had strong objections to the US Navy Seals conducting a raid deep inside Pakistan’s territory on a garrison town.

But Pakistan’s civilian administration under then-President Asif Ali Zardari persuaded the military authorities to order the Pakistan Air Force and air defense systems to stand down during the operation. Even former US President Barack Obama had praised the role played by the Zardari-led government in tracing Bin Laden and facilitating the operation in the memoir titled “A Promised Land” published in November 2020.

But pro-America Pakistan People’s Party government led by then-President Asif Ali Zardari had to pay dearly for the complicity in the execution of Osama bin Laden. As previously mentioned, the governor of Pakistan’s most populous Punjab province Salman Taseer was assassinated on January 4, 2011 in Islamabad by his bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri, who accused the governor of committing blasphemy.

But in fact, Qadri was a pawn of the deep state and had instructions to assassinate Salman Taseer who, as governor, was facilitating CIA agents in tracing Bin Laden. The deep state warned him several times to desist from stirring up the hornet’s nest but, being a progressive to the core, he kept on performing his moral duty, thus leaving no choice to the executioners but to eliminate him.

The influential Taseer family reportedly had good leads on the assassination of Salman Taseer. Therefore eight months after the assassination, in August 2011, Taseer's son, Shahbaz, was kidnapped in broad daylight from the capital city of Punjab, Lahore, allegedly by the Pakistani Taliban in order to force the Taseer family to acquiesce on the murder.

Shahbaz Taseer remained in the captivity of “friendly Taliban” in the lawless tribal areas for four and a half years before being released in March 2016, a month after Taseer's murderer was hanged in February 2016.

The clandestine deal reached between the Taseer family and the deep state clearly stipulated sparing the life of Salman Taseer’s son in return for acquiescing on the murder and hanging the murderer, Mumtaz Qadri, a demand also favored by the deep state lest he spills the secret and implicates his patrons in the assassination.

Moreover, Pakistan’s then-ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani’s role in this saga ruffled the feathers of Pakistan’s military’s top brass to the extent that Husain Haqqani was later implicated in a criminal case regarding his memorandum to Admiral Mike Mullen and eventually Ambassador Haqqani had to resign in November 2011, just six months after the May 2011 raid.

In February 2011, Shah Mahmood Qureshi was sacked as foreign minister following the Raymond Davis saga. In November that year, he quit the Pakistan People’s Party and joined Imran Khan’s Pakistan Movement for Justice, where he again served as foreign minister from August 2018 to April 2022.

In June 2012, Pakistan People’s Party’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani was disqualified by the Supreme Court of Pakistan allegedly on corruption allegations. After the 2013 Pakistani general elections, the Pakistan People’s Party lost the majority and the conservative Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, formed the government.