The wicked witch is dead

Some first thoughts on the momentous news.

1. Abbottabad? Bin Laden was killed in a compound in a city only 30 miles from Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom that he would be located in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) that line the border with Afghanistan. In fact, Abbottabad is closer to India than to Afghanistan. Bin Laden might have had to rely on a considerably complex network to reach his safe house.

2. The reaction from Pakistan will be interesting. Relations between the ISI and the CIA are at an all-time low as a result of the Davis affair, but it’s not clear what bin Laden’s death will do. Will the ISI demand a reduced CIA presence now that the big kahuna has been caught, or will the action help mend ties? How much of the information that led to bin Laden’s death come from Pakistani sources? How will average Pakistanis react to Navy SEALs and CIA officers swooping in and out, even to kill bin Laden? Time will indeed tell, but the significance of the news in Pakistan was sufficiently large to cause the website main English-language newspaper, Dawn, to crash.

3. On a related note, how seriously can we take Obama’s word that Pakistan wasn’t involved in the mission? Obviously, operational security for this mission was the first priority at every stage. Still, reports are surfacing that Pakistani Army helicopters provided cover during the raid. If this is true, then there must still be a considerable level of trust between enough of the American security community and the Pakistani one to conduct a joint raid on target numero uno — without worrying about whether the Pakistanis would tip OBL off.

4. I very much liked President Obama’s explicit denial that the U.S. was at war with Islam. These kinds of statements are as crucial a part of counterterrorism as any clandestine mission to kill terrorist leaders. And at a time when American actions and words are very closely being monitored around the Middle East, the sole message the U.S. sent tonight should not have been, “Our special forces are very effective.”

EDIT: 5. At what point do people like Pamela Geller start to accept that Obama is not a jihadi Muslim? I’ll settle even for a liberal Muslim at this point.

EDIT 2: 6. A question I’d been asking in my head, but afraid to mention without basis, was the possibility that bin Laden was being protected by the ISI directly. I’ve now learned that Abbottabad is home to the Pakistani military academy. Bin Laden’s compound was an unusually large and protected property. That’s an awfully strange place to hide a high-value target.