PAKISTAN AFTER BIN LADEN’S DEATH

QUIET EMBARRASSMENT IN PAKISTAN AFTER KILLING OF BIN LADEN

Zeeshan Haider

Reuters, May 3, 2011

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - There were no protests and no extra security in Pakistan on Tuesday, a day after the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces, just a sense of embarrassment and indifference that the al Qaeda leader had managed to lie low for years in a Pakistan garrison town.

"The failure of Pakistan to detect the presence of the world's most-wanted man here is shocking," The News said in an editorial, reflecting the general tone in the media, where some commentators predicted that Washington would take action to show its displeasure with Islamabad.

Bin Laden was shot dead early on Monday morning by U.S. commandos who dropped by helicopter into the compound where he had lived since 2005.

It had long been thought that he was hiding in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt in the northwest near the border with Afghanistan, so it came as a huge surprise to many that he had been holed up in a town less than two hours' drive from Islamabad and just a stone's throw from a military academy.

President Asif Ali Zardari, writing on Monday in the Washington Post, said Pakistan's security forces were left out of the raid on the hideout in the town of Abbottabad and insisted that the authorities had thought he was somewhere else.

However, Zardari has made no address to the people of a country where anti-American sentiment runs high, prompting one Twitter user to tweet "Most wanted man is killed on Pakistani soil and the Pres doesn't address his people, instead writes an op-ed for USA."

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