Tara McKelvey in Swat Valley, Pakistan, just northwest of the area in which Osama bin Laden had been hiding.
For her investigation of U.S. special military operations, Medill National Security Journalism Initiative Fellow Tara McKelvey visited Pakistan to explore the role — and risks — of special operators working there. She reported from Swat Valley, northwest of Abbottabad, where Osama bin Laden was killed by special forces troops this week.
“I found that things on the ground, and in the air, were different from what U.S. and Pakistani officials had told me. Officially, Pakistanis were running the campaign against terrorists; in fact, Americans were often leading the charge, tracking fighters in the Haqqani network in Waziristan as well as other terrorists, and collecting intelligence through surveillance devices. They were not supposed to be taking the lead, since they were serving only in advisory roles in Pakistan, but they were,” McKelvey recalled yesterday on the Daily Beast.
“A Pakistani journalist who frequently travels with the military in Waziristan, for example, described how Americans had gone on raids—in many cases, even when the Pakistani soldiers have balked—and said his country’s soldiers just hated their American counterparts,” she wrote, concluding “cooperating with the Pakistani military and intelligence agency has been notoriously difficult, and the Pakistanis did not seem to play much of a role during the raid on Sunday.”
