Pakistan was protecting Osama Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden was killed in his mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Abbottabad is the home of the Pakistani army’s military academy. The town is in effect the Pakistani version of West Point. Just one week ago, Pakistan's Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, spoke to graduating cadets in Abbottabad stating that the "back of terrorism" in Pakistan had been broken. Osama Bin Laden’s mansion was just a few hundred yards away from where Kayani spoke. 

Bin Laden was not in a spartan cave in the mountains as most of the world thought, but in a mansion on the outskirts of the town's center. The villa compound sits on an imposing hilltop and it is surrounded by 12-foot-high concrete walls which are several feet thick. Razor wire tops the walls of the compound.  Local authorities valued the property at $1 million in a nation in which the average home is worth only a few thousand dollars. Fox News reported that intelligence analysts determined the compound "was custom-built to hide someone of significance.”

Given the fact that Bin Laden lived in a mansion near a military academy, are we to believe that Pakistan’s military and intelligence officials knew nothing of the compound and its al-qaeda residents until a Seal team of 40 men flew in and killed the terror mastermind? The facts are undeniable that high officials in Pakistan’s military and intelligence community had to know that this was indeed Bin Laden’s lair.

Pakistani intelligence and military officials have pretended for years to look for Bin Laden while pocketing billions in military and other aid from the United States. Further proof is in the meeting within the last two weeks in which Pakistan encouraged Afghanistan’s President Karzai to dump the United States in favor of a treaty with Pakistan, China and the Taliban. 

The military aid the United States has furnished Pakistan for its conventional forces has freed up  the Muslim nation’s own funds, allowing it to double its nuclear arsenal in the last ten years and to become more of a threat to its democratic Hindu neighbor, India.

Given these facts and the continued persecution of Christians and other minorities in Pakistan, it is clear that United States aid dollars should stop flowing now. The United States borrows 40 cents of every dollar that it currently spends. Borrowing money to fund a state that protects terrorists and persecutes religious minorities with blasphemy and other sharia based laws, is an abomination that must be stopped now.

William J. Murray is the Chairman of the DC based Religious Freedom Coalition