Ken Berwitz

Do you know who Dr. Shakil Afridi is?

You should.  Because Dr. Afridi - possibly unknowingly - was instrumental in helping the CIA (not Barack Obama personally, the CIA) find osama bin laden.

That would make him a hero, right?  He made the world a better place, didn't he? 

Well, not to Pakistan. He was just sentenced to 33 years in jail for it.  The charge?  Treason.

The good news (not for Shakil Afridi, but for the USA) is that this has spawned a rare show of bipartisanship in the Senate.  By a vote of 30 - 0, the Appropriations Committee has voted to reduce aid to Pakistan by $33,000,000 - one million dollars for each year Dr. Alfridi will be jailed. 

The bad news, however, is that, compared to the billions we give Pakistan each year, that is not even pocket change.  Pakistan's leaders will laugh about it.

Here, courtesy of an excerpt from Rick Moran's article at frontpagemag.com, is Dr. Afridi's involvement in finding bin laden:

Who is Dr. Shakil Afridi and what was his role in the bin Laden raid? The top medic in the Kyber tribal region, Afridi was recruited by the CIA to run a fake Hepatitis-B vaccination program in Abbottabad in order to acquire a DNA sample from one of bin Laden’s children in the compound where he was hiding. An investigation by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, concluded that Afridi probably didn’t know he was helping the CIA find bin Laden specifically. Brig. General Shaukat Qadir, who conducted the investigation, wrote in a report obtained by the BBC that, “He was merely paid to follow instructions.”

The mystery is why Afridi, who was arrested less than 3 weeks after bin Laden was killed, stuck around after the raid. It may be that Afridi believed his assistance to the CIA in killing bin Laden would please the Pakistani government. It is even possible that Afridi didn’t know he was working for the CIA. Regardless, the Obama administration apparently did little to persuade the doctor to leave Pakistan.

Former intelligence analyst Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation told Fox News, “You probably wouldn’t want to have tipped him off ahead of time, but maybe the day right afterward you would have wanted to have helped him leave Pakistan — and the same with anybody else who was working with us.”

But former military intelligence officer Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Fox News, “From what I’m hearing, we did pretty much nothing,” he said. “We did nothing diplomatically at all, didn’t raise a finger. … From what my sources tell me, we did nothing to try and help this guy.”

How in the world could we let Shakil Afridi hang out to dry that way?  What is going on?  Who is responsible?

And where is President Obama in this?  Why has he not issued an angry, blunt statement denouncing the sentence, complete with a threat - either implied or specific - about how we would react to it? 

Is Barack Obama too busy completing his victory dance over osama bin laden's assassination - which would never have happened if he had been President when the information which smoked bin laden out was gathered - to bother with a trifle like protecting Shakil Afridi - without whom it would not have happened?  

The State Department (far from my favorite arm of government) says Mr. Obama has "regularly" brought this up to Pakistan.  Obviously, either that is untrue, or his efforts were so weak that they were ignored.

And is the US Senate so indifferent to Pakistan's vendetta against Dr. Afridi that it ascribes what, in aid terms is a penny-ante punishment for it?

I'll follow this story as best I can, and provide more information if/when it becomes available.