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Showing posts from July 11, 2013

Past as prologue: The Bin Laden dossier

Long-suppressed report finds Pakistani government was negligent, inefficient, and incompetent in the bin Laden affair. If there were one, simple conclusion to be drawn from the report of the Pakistani commission established to investigate Operation Neptune Spear - the US raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011 - it would be that there are times when things are precisely as they appear. The long-suppressed Abbottabad Commission report has now emerged to provide a timely reminder of a truism which this author learned long ago through hard experience: When seeking to explain negative events, and given a choice between some grand conspiracy and simple incompetence, bet on incompetence every time. Who would have guessed? Surely, few either in the US or Pakistan were prepared to believe that Osama bin Laden, easily the most wanted man in the world, could have lived for years with multiple wives and many children in the heart of a military town