Pakistan declared the killing of Osama bin Laden a “major setback” to global terrorism, but it will inevitably come under pressure to explain how the Al Qaeda leader was holed up in a mansion near a key military facility.
It was not clear if the Pakistan military was invol-ved in the operation and there was no official comment from Islamabad for hours, raising the possibility that Pakistan was taken by surprise.
That Bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was not hiding in mountains along the border but in relative comfort in a town hosting Pakistan’s main military academy, home to scores of retired and serving officers, will bolster those who have long argued that Pakistan is playing a duplicitous hand.
Pakistan’s ISI has long been suspected of links to the Haqqani network, cultivated in the 1980s when Jalaluddin Haqqani was a feared battlefield commander against the Soviets in Afghanistan. —Reuters