I’m shocked – but not surprised – to hear that Bin Laden was “hiding” in a multi-milion-dollar “hideout” in Abottabad, Pakistan – a good-sized, garrison town; it’s be sort of like finding him in Louisville, Kentucky.
The event was, naturally, twittered:
A man in Abbottabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was killed by the U.S. on Monday, inadvertently live-tweeted the attack as it started.
The man, who uses the Twitter handle “ReallyVirtual”, identifies himself as Sohaib Athar, “an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops.”
Around 11 hours ago, according to the Twitter timeline, Mr. Athar first tweeted about a helicopter hovering above him at 1 a.m., saying it was a “rare event” for Abbottabad. That would have been at about 3.30 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday.
Still, Mr. Athar seems to have thought of it as a mere annoyance, as his next tweet was “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”
Within minutes, he tweeted: “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad”
This is going to make life interesting in Pakistan.
The question is how interesting Obama is willing to make the Pak’s leadership’s life interesting.
Hiding in a outsized compound in a military district favored by Pak generals and near the equivalent of Pakistan’s West Point. In a custom built compound for almost 6 years? Hiding in a multi-million dollar house with no phones or internet?
The odds that the ISI/military were completely in the dark about Osama are low. And one has to wonder if the Davis incident was related to scouting out the compound since reports are that they’ve had suspicions about it for 6 months.
What can we do to make their lives interesting, if indeed the “moderate” leadership so reviled by many Pakistanis has protected Mr. Bin Laden? Invade and install our own puppet government at enormous cost, work with the current government to mitigate the issues as much as possible, or bail on the current government and watch a group more like the Taliban take over would seem to be the main choices.
To a degree, the Muslim world may be telling us to pound sand as we pursue their nastiest outlaws. I hope I’m wrong here, but this is not good news.