Bin Laden: What did Pakistan know?

Anne-Marie Slaughter, who was until recently the State Department’s director of Policy Planning, and Wall Street Journal's foreign affairs columnist Bret Stephens discuss the complexities of U.S.-Pakistani relations following the Osama bin Laden raid. 

BLOG EXTRA: Here's a transcript of the exchange as seen in the video:

SPITZER: It seems to me the question everybody has been asking is, did Pakistan know - the ISI, the head of their intelligence agency? It sweeps a little too broadly. It seems clear some parts of the Pakistan government knew - there are so many parts, so many different agencies and subcultures there.

The hard part for us is knowing who knew, and how do you work with their government without knowing with specificity who the good guys in the government are and who the bad guys are?

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, FORMER DIRECTOR OF POLICY PLANNING, STATE DEPARTMENT: Well, Eliot, I think you're exactly right. You can't talk about whether Pakistan knew or not. There are many different parts of the government. Indeed in our own government many parts of our government didn't know what J. Edgar Hoover did for a long time.

So there are - it's a complex situation, and we have known for a long time that some parts of the Pakistani government may well have known where he was. In fact, Secretary Clinton said that last year.

The issue now is to actually continue working with the civilian government, with Prime Minister Gilani, with President Zardari, with the civilian forces who have every incentive to make sure to the extent they can that the ISI is not supporting either al Qaeda or Taliban groups.

SPITZER: All right, Bret, let me turn to you, then. If you take Anne-Marie saying as gospel - not gospel, you take it as the truth, we want to work with the civilian government, we have common purpose, common cause, first, how do you define quickly that common purpose? What is our objective in building this relationship or rebuilding it with Pakistan?

BRET STEPHENS, WALL STREET JOURNAL: Well, I'm not sure we have a common purpose. I mean this is a government that is sometimes incompetent, sometimes complicit. And - you know whether or not the Pakistanis knew where bin Laden was or the higher echelons knew where he was, there is a reason why we're so suspicious of that government.

Why? Because of its long-standing links to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba which perpetrates terrorist atrocities in India, because of its links to groups like the Haqqani network which is carrying out attacks on the United States.

So it becomes reasonable then to suspect that at least some elements of the ISI, some elements in the military must have wondered what this million-dollar compound was doing next to the gates of their West Point.

SPITZER: Accepting that as a premise, I want to throw to it back to you, Anne-Marie. Persuade Bret that we do have common purpose.

Look, it's always struck me that the purpose was, A, control the nukes, B, making sure that we didn't let al Qaeda and the Taliban get a bigger foothold in Pakistan, and C, keep us in our orbit, not China's.

Anne-Marie, are those the objectives? And if they are, how do we bring them closer to us?

SLAUGHTER: Well, those are three objectives but - the most direct ones is the amount of information we've gotten from those parts of the Pakistani government who are working with us on terrorists and how to block terrorist attacks. And there are plenty of cases in which we have gotten critical information from Pakistan.

And it's worth remembering that 31,000 Pakistanis have been killed by terrorist attacks and insurgent attacks in their own country. So we have a direct incentive to work with the Pakistani government to protect Americans as well as all the other reasons you specified.

SPITZER: Look, Bret, isn't Anne-Marie right about that? I mean you're looking for purity in an area where there simply won't be? We need to understand the subtlety, the duality, the complexity. Don't we need to accept that?

STEPHENS: Anne-Marie is absolutely right. And we need to make it common to this Pakistani government which is a particularly weak government that their interests are better served working with us towards those common purposes, some of which you mentioned, than working at cross-purposes with us.

Now one of the way - they have done some things. They're very helpful when we're going after - the Pakistani Taliban. They're less helpful when they're going after - we're trying to go after the Afghanistan Taliban. Same thing with al Qaeda.

So how do you communicate a message to them that it is not particularly helpful for them to react this way when we get the most wanted terrorist, the perpetrator of September 11th?

That political message has to be communicated both publicly by the president, but also by various government institutions. We can provide them with F-16s. We can strengthen their military. We can provide strategic economic cooperation or we can penalize them if they continue to obstruct basic vital American interests.