So they found and killed bin Laden in Abbottabad hiding in plain sight!! I must say I’d thought of the idea, but my suggestion that hiding out in New York selling ‘Made in China’ September 2001 ‘memorabilia’ would have been safer for him. After all who would ever think he would be so brazen?

 

Well, he’s dead now anyway. Not that I mourn him in any way. He’s got a huge amount of blood on his hands, and his warped ideas have proved to be catastrophic for far too many. For all the trouble he’s caused he deserves what he’s going to get, and I sincerely doubt it’s where he thought he’d end up. I guess he knows that now, but it’s too late. (So therein lies the lesson: learn your lessons now and do something about it rather than wish you’d done so when it’s too late).

 

I can’t say I agree with him being killed though. Despite apparently not putting up much of a fight (less than his wife supposedly did if we can believe whatever version of events the Americans are peddling now – they’ve had about ten years to get their story straight, and yet we still have multiple competing versions that are only fuelling the conspiracy theories of the hard of thinking), I don’t think he should have been killed. I think perhaps more should have been done to capture him. He should have been captured and tried. The practice of extrajudicial executions is basically the law of the jungle. Aren’t the Americans supposed to be the ‘good guys’? They’re supposed to believe in justice, due process, and all the rest of it. What’s gone ‘wrong’ with them?  They’ve turned bin Laden into a martyr, unarmed and gunned down in the presence of his family, instead of some deranged evil fool who would die in prison, or via lethal injection. On the flip side of course the SEALs would have had to assume that the guy who sent a lot of impressionable people to kill themselves in suicide attacks would do the same. So they shot him outright. Perhaps we shouldn’t pontificate too much therefore, but I’ll never shake the feeling that it was better to try him in a proper court of law.

 

I don’t know what the fallout from that will be, but I guess we’ll find out. This insanity will not end with his death though, that’s for certain.

 

What do we say about Pakistan though? How utterly embarrassing was this!!!!? I’ve been to Abbottabad. I would never have thought he’d be hiding there. I saw a lot of security about the place. It’s a garrison town after all. That was probably one of the factors that made it the best place to be honest. Even though terrorists have been caught there in the past, who would think bin Laden himself would be there? Also, it was relatively close to the Tribal Areas, it had a major regional trunk road running through it, and it had a large transitory population. It was easy enough to hide in plain sight there; except it shouldn’t have been.

 

Kakul was but a stone’s throw away, and there were multiple other military facilities and such all over the place. Security should have been tight and intelligence keeping an eye on everything and everyone. You’d be forgiven therefore for thinking he was being hidden by the intelligence services. What else are you supposed to think? It sounds the most logical explanation; that is except for the fact that the ISI and in fact all the intelligence agencies here have a pretty dismal track record of failure. Some of them are truly spectacular, and the worst one was (in my mind at least), being caught day dreaming whilst uber-traitor/spiv A Q Khan, Pakistan’s favourite metallurgist, was flogging centrifuge technology left right and centre. There’s actually a whole catalogue of failures that people overlook when they describe the ISI as some fearsome organisation so powerful it has a hand in everything and could probably change the rotation of the earth. Sure it has its successes, and some have been notable, but don’t discount its abject failures. It’s an equally likely explanation, (if not being more so) and there are some serious questions that need answers.

 

Coupled to that is the astonishingly lacklustre, but not altogether unexpected, feckless response by the government. More due to this indifferent incompetence than anything else, Pakistan now ranks alongside North Korea in the credibility and trustworthy stakes. What else would anyone expect considering the Prime Minister disappeared to France to no doubt see if he could increase the size of his bank balance, rather than practice a modicum of crisis management?

 

So perhaps we shouldn’t put down to complicity what we can explain by incompetence.

 

(Incidentally if anyone believed that crap about the house being worth a US$1 million they need their head examining, because if that house is worth a million there are a million houses in Pakistan worth a billion. It’s not even a PKR.500,000 house, it’s not exactly special, and is basically the type of house you would expect a Pathan gold merchant to live in).