Allen West: “amateur hour in the White House”

Describing Obama’s foreign policy failures, Rep. Allen West questions whether it’s naivete or just amateur hour.

Tribal court documents show that the Pakistani doctor who was sentenced to 33 years in prison after helping the Central Intelligence Agency track down Osama bin Laden, had not been charged with treason, as some Pakistani officials had initially reported.

The doctor, Shakil Afridi, who was tried under Pakistan’s opaque tribal justice system, was instead convicted of colluding with a local Islamist warlord, to whom he was accused of donating more than $20,000.

The revelation, detailed in a five-page court order that was first reported in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, adds an intriguing twist to a cloudy case that has come to embody the dismal relations between Islamabad and Washington.

News of Mr. Afridi’s conviction a week ago triggered fury in Washington, and lawmakers there voted to cut $33 million in American aid to Pakistan, $1 million for each year of his sentence; some suggested American aid to the country should be entirely severed.

The C.I.A. paid Mr. Afridi to run a vaccination program in Abbottabad in March and April 2011, as cover for an intelligence operation to establish that Bin Laden and his family were living in a large three-story house in the town.

Three weeks after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Bin Laden on May 2, 2011, Mr. Afridi was picked up by Pakistani intelligence, and has not been seen since. Despite intense media speculation that Mr. Afridi would face treason charges in a regular court, his case was moved to Khyber agency in the tribal belt, which operates under the Frontier Crimes Regulations, an arcane, colonial-era legal system.

In a closed-door hearing in early May, the four-man council of tribal elders that heard Mr. Afridi’s case declined to examine the allegations of C.I.A. ties, citing lack of jurisdiction. Instead the court focused on Mr. Afridi’s links to Mangal Bagh, an Islamist warlord whose fighters are currently battling the Pakistan army in Khyber agency. He was convicted on May 23, and ordered to pay $3,500 in fines in addition to his lengthy prison sentence.

But Pakistani analysts say that despite the harsh sentence, the fact that he was convicted under tribal law could ultimately work in Mr. Afridi’s favor, leaving more room for an early release — or perhaps even an exchange deal with the United States, said Asad Durrani, a former head of the main Pakistani military intelligence agency.

“In a context like this, between Pakistan and the U.S., people tend to be bargained for and exchanged,” Mr. Durrani said.

http://www.nyslimes.com/2012/05/31/world/asia/new-details-on-conviction-of-shakil-afridi-pakistani-doctor-who-aided-cia-in-tracking-osama-bin-laden.html