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Abbottabad is about two hours north of Islamabad. The sleepy little town is surrounded by the Margalla Hills and the Karakoram Highway linking it to China. But contrary to recent media reports, Abbottabad is anything but a hill station resort town and unlike Murree, it is not located at a high altitude and it does not accumulate snow. There is no way Osama chose Abbottabad for its scenic beauty!
The British colonial rulers perhaps loved the town as there are lots of historic churches and Christian graveyards located there. The hallmark of Abbottabad, however, remains the Kakul Military Academy, spread over thousands of acres in a beautiful setting; all the officers to the Pakistan Army graduate from it as it is the sole academy; the one located near Mangla Dam is ranked lower in hierarchy.
There is hardly any security in Abbottabad, unlike in other major cities, which usually have innumerable checkpoints. There is a constant flow of traffic on the main road which is called the Mansehra Road as it leads to Mansehra and then onwards to Gilgit and then China. A road from Mansehra also leads to Balakot which was completely destroyed in the October 2005 earthquake and then to Kashmir.
Osama Bin Laden was living close to the main road and the Military Academy in an under-developed residential area called Tanda Choa and now Bilal Town, with his three wives and 23 children. The media is calling his house a mansion but it appears to be an ugly structure, except that it is located on eight kanals (British India unit of measurement: 1 kanal = 605 sq. yards) of land which is quite big from Pakistani standards and this perhaps explains as to why some are calling the house eight times bigger than the normal ones in the locality.
The house is owned by a person from Swat who must be rich as the land in Abbottabad is expensive and owning eight kanals close to the Military Academy must be expensive. The Swati landlord says that he rented the house to a guy from North Waziristan who apparently acted as Osama’s front man. The house has high walls and barbed wires but many in the Frontier Province (now officially named Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) have similar walls. Some consider it as a sign of status; others justify it as protecting the women from being stared at by non family males. Many NGOs have similar offices and some houses perhaps are also being used as safe houses by the intelligence agencies.
Osama’s neighbors thus cannot be blamed for not finding out about him. However, what is mind boggling is that how the intelligence agencies failed to ever inquire as to what was located inside this fortress like structure. Pakistan is infested with intelligence networks and one can never be sure about the level of their intrusion in our lives. The sleuths periodically visit NGO and other offices and inquire about the nature of operations and the employees. And here was the most sought after guy in the world living next to the Military Academy and nobody bothered to inquire.
It is dangerous if the agencies did not know about it as it shows incompetence and it is worst and even more dodgy if they knew about it. The Government remains silent about the whole issue and the Foreign Office issued a short statement saying that Osama was dead as if the world needed it to confirm this news.
President Zardari instead of taking the nation into confidence or talking to the national media chose to write in the Washington Post confirming that the killing of Osama by U.S. forces was not a joint operation with Pakistan. He refuted the allegations that Pakistan knew the whereabouts of Osama and that his country was failing to take action against militants on its territory.
There is no doubt that Pakistan is suffering immensely at the hands of the terrorists. Pakistan continues to insist that the war on terrorism is as much its war as it is America's. A bomb blast or a suicide bomb attack has become an almost daily occurrence. These attacks mostly take place in small town and in the Frontier Province and thus do not bother the rulers but thousands of civilian deaths have taken place. More of its soldiers have died than all of NATO’s casualties combined. The authorities to an extent have been able to control attacks on important targets but have failed to completely rout terrorism from the country; madressahs continue to operate as before and the military remains reluctant to enter North Waziristan, despite intense American pressure to rein the Haqqani network. Lashkare Jhangvi, a staunch anti Shia outfit, remains active in parts of the Punjab and Karachi.
One intriguing question is that how did the Americans find out about Osama. President Zardari in his Washington Post takes satisfaction that his country’s early assistance in identifying an al-Qaeda courier ultimately led to the elimination of Osama. A little-known spy agency in Washington then started tracking the hour-by-hour movements of the al Qaeda courier.
For eight months, after analysts tentatively identified a spacious walled compound in Abbottabad, as a possible Osama hideout, an array of satellites kept tracking individuals’ movements in and out of the compound. The data was continuously downloaded to an Air Force ground station housed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, where teams of analysts after analyzing it sent it live to intelligence analysis cells at the CIA, the National Security Agency and the National Counter-terrorism Center. These agencies developed information on how life at the compound was carried out. The data enabled JSOC’s commandos to build at the U.S. air base at Bagram, Afghanistan, a full-scale replica of the compound and rehearsals of attacking it started.
The NCTC’s role in the killing of bin Laden is payback of sorts for the U.S. intelligence community, which was criticized for its failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks; when a lack of coordination kept intelligence officers from fitting together known pieces of the plot. After 9/11, a presidential commission recommended the establishment of a new agency to unify strategic intelligence and operational planning against Islamic terrorists. The NCTC became operational by 2004. The question, however, remains as to how Osama had been able to live in relative comfort in Pakistan for so many years. This is a difficult question and so far remains unanswered.
Pakistan is now bearing the brunt from both sides. The Americans are blaming it for not doing enough, if not actually sheltering Osama; the terrorists are blaming the Government of Pakistan and calling for retribution against its leaders. Religious parties have never won an election in Pakistan, except for a brief stint in power in Baluchistan and the Frontier Province from 2002 to 2007. However, the attitude of the people towards acts of terrorism against western targets is disturbing as they equate them with atrocities committed against the people in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan and call it retribution for the western double standards.
Accordingly, while the leaders continue to toe the American line in public and the country receives huge amounts in western aid, the common man on the street remains anti-western in outlook. Despite this, there were no demonstrations after the killing of Osama, except for about 1000 persons coming out on the main Jinnah Road in Quetta, led by a member of parliament belonging to JUI (Jamati Ulema Islam) which remains a staunch supporter of Taliban. Life otherwise remains normal in the country as one would define it here and security remains low-key. One only hopes that it is not a lull before a storm and Osama’s elimination ends a chapter of terrorism in Pakistan. 
Anees Jillani is an advocate of the Supreme Court and a member of the Washington, DC Bar. He has been writing for various publications for more than 20 years and has authored several books.
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