Some feel that if the United States continues to provide financial aid to Islamabad, it will be recognized as acceptance of flourishing Islamist extremism in Pakistan.
The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off U.S. Public Enemy Number One. It formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret. It is, in the words of counterinsurgency expert John Nagl, “an astounding change in the nature of warfare.”
The excessive violence with which Ugandan security forces have over the last month cracked down on initially peaceful opposition protests at soaring food and fuel prices, and which last weekovershadowed the inauguration of re-elected President Yoweri Museveni, is almost as puzzling as it is disturbing.
Hardliners, whether Israeli or Palestinian, do not desire a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that ends in a negotiated peace, but an all-or-nothing end that justifies their ideological certainties.
Pakistan seems oblivious to the threat that expanding its nuclear-weapons program poses.
With his severity and grandiosity, bin Laden had outlived his tactical, strategic, and philosophic usefulness to jihadists.
How we define Osama bin Laden’s death matters.
It’s difficult to understand how blowing up Pakistani militaries avenges bin Laden’s killing by U.S. forces.
Barring jihadist infiltration, Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program is reasonably safe.
If the killing of Osama bin Laden were a Hollywood murder mystery, the shootout scene in Abbottabad would be followed by the unveiling of the sponsor who arranged for the al-Qaeda safe house. Is it the Pakistani intelligence officer who appears early in the movie to assure his U.S. counterparts that he is fully committed to bringing bin Laden to justice? Is it the Saudi construction magnate who owes several major favors to the bin Laden family? Or perhaps it’s the U.S. embassy official who, it might turn out, believes that Osama is more useful alive than dead — until finally, he is useful no longer.