U.S. and Pakistan Discuss Release of Doctor Who Helped Find Osama bin Laden
By Saeed Shah
PESHAWAR, Pakistan—The Trump administration spoke with Pakistan about the prospect of freeing a doctor who helped the U.S. mission to find Osama bin Laden, and whose imprisonment in Pakistan has been a thorn in relations between the longtime allies.
In a sign that the climate is shifting in Pakistan, Dr. Shakil Afridi’s lawyers said that they expect to be able to present their case in an appeal hearing scheduled for May 24,
after three years of postponements. His lawyers said he was wrongly convicted, on charges unrelated to the bin Laden raid, and they see a chance of winning his release.
Pakistan, which resisted the Obama administration’s persistent efforts to secure Dr. Afridi’s release, is looking for a better relationship with President Donald Trump after relations soured under his predecessor, said a senior Pakistan official.
Mr. Trump boasted in his campaign that “I would get [Afridi] out in two minutes.”
“We are trying to accelerate the legal processes,” the Pakistan official said. Dr. Afridi’s 23-year sentence could be reduced to the time already served, the official said. Another official suggested a presidential pardon was possible.
When the subject of Dr. Afridi came up at an April 25 meeting in Washington involving H.R. McMaster, the U.S. national security adviser, and Pakistan Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, “we said that we need to find a solution and we need to work together to find a solution,” said Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Aizaz Chaudhry, who attended.
Dr. Afridi was detained by Pakistani authorities in 2011 and has been in prison since May 2012. He is being held in solitary confinement for his own safety, in a facility that also holds jihadists who have threatened to kill him for his role in the bin Laden operation.
He wasn’t convicted by the regular courts, but under the special laws for the country’s remote tribal areas, where the justice system is run by civil servants, not judges. His appeal is before a government-appointed three-member tribunal, not a normal court. The tribunal declined to comment on the case.
The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad declined to comment on the McMaster meeting or the Afridi case. The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In 2011, in the weeks leading up to the bin Laden raid, the Pakistani doctor set up a door-to-door vaccination program in the city of Abbottabad in an attempt to get DNA samples from the occupants of the house where the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency suspected the al Qaeda leader was living, Pakistani and U.S. officials have said.
Leon Panetta, CIA director at the time of the operation, said in 2012 that Dr. Afridi “helped provide intelligence that was very helpful” to the bin Laden mission, though Dr. Afridi’s lawyers maintain that he was just conducting medical research.
Pakistan treated the unilateral U.S. operation that resulted in the killing of bin Laden in May 2011 as a national humiliation. Dr. Afridi’s supporters say that is why he is in prison. “Pakistan had to make someone a scapegoat,” said his brother, Jamil Afridi. “We’re not getting justice.”
Members of Congress, in pressing for Dr. Afridi’s release, have called him an American hero, and U.S. officials have said they want to resettle him in the U.S.
Congress has voted every year for the past several years, including in April, to withhold $33 million of U.S. aid to Pakistan, or $1 million for each year of Dr. Afridi’s original 33-year sentence. U.S. civilian aid to Pakistan was $352 million for the last financial year, according to the Congressional Research Service, and the State Department has requested $423 million for the 2017 financial year.
Some Pakistani officials said they are concerned about possible deeper punitive action by Washington as the Trump administration
considers sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban—an insurgency the U.S. has accused Pakistan of supporting. Islamabad denies backing the Taliban.
“Freeing Afridi or agreeing to his transfer to a third country would be a clever move for Pakistan at the start of the Trump administration, to build goodwill in the U.S. Congress and appeal to Trump the deal-maker,” said Joshua White, a former senior adviser at the National Security Council under former President Barack Obama now with Johns Hopkins University.
Islamabad says the CIA’s use of a doctor
harmed Pakistan’s drive to eradicate polio. Dozens of vaccination workers were subsequently killed by militants, accused of being spies.
“Dr. Afridi is entitled to due process and a fair trial, which he is availing,” said foreign-affairs ministry spokesman Nafees Zakaria. “Dr. Afridi, who is widely seen in the U.S. as a hero for his role in tracking [Osama bin Laden], caused a severe blow to the polio vaccination campaign in Pakistan through his irresponsible behavior.”
Dr. Afridi’s lead counsel, Latif Afridi, said he would argue in the appeal that the conviction of Dr. Afridi for aiding an Islamist warlord was fabricated, with no evidence, and that proper legal procedures weren’t followed in the trial. Dr. Afridi hasn’t been charged with any offense related to bin Laden mission.
Dr. Afridi was picked up by the ISI, the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, three weeks after the bin Laden operation in May 2011, and held for a year at a secret detention site, according to his family and lawyers.
There, his brother said, he was electrocuted, burned, was blindfolded for months and kept with his arms tied behind his back—and made “to eat like a dog” in that position. The military has denied torture allegations and didn’t respond to a request for comment on the brother’s account.
Dr. Afridi, a 53-year-old father of three, was then transferred to civilian custody, convicted and moved to a Peshawar prison in May 2012.
One of his former lawyers was assassinated in 2015 in an attack claimed by militants. His two remaining lawyers said they haven’t been allowed to meet him for nearly five years.
Husain Haqqani, who was Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington at the time of the bin Laden operation and is now a scholar at the Hudson Institute, an independent think tank in Washington, said America “left their man behind.”
That serves as a message to other Pakistanis, he said. “The ISI wants to use Dr. Afridi as an example for Pakistanis who might want to assist an international security agency, even in counterterrorism,” Mr. Haqqani said.
—Safdar Dawar in Peshawar and Carol E. Lee in Washington contributed to this article.
Write to Saeed Shah at
saeed.shah@wsj.com
Appeared in the May. 17, 2017, print edition as 'U.S., Pakistan Discuss Release of Doctor.'
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-an...f-doctor-who-helped-find-bin-laden-1494927000
Wasn't that hard. But you are less active on India's internal matter discussions
