Uncomfortable Silence: Pakistan After Bin Laden
Adil writes about the massive frozen silence from the government of Pakistan post Bin Laden’s death. There’s no message, no direction from the government. In the background Arab Spring is still going on.
It’s not likely that the leaders of Pakistan will figure out that it’s also well past time to give up Al Zawahiri and anyone else they might know of. America’s patience with Pakistan is at an end, and how that will play out remains to be seen.
There are as many opinions on what happened in Abbottabad as there are Pakistanis. Maybe more. But there is no sense whatsoever where the government of Pakistan (or any of its major institutions) stand on what happened – or stood when it was happening. For 36 hours now the world has been waiting to see what Pakistan does and says – the silence and incoherence from Islamabad has not just been embarrassing, it has been damning. Finally, key institutions in Pakistan have begun trying to piece a narrative together – unfortunately it is way too late and the narrative itself rather lame.
When I put up a short post on Osama Bin Laden’s death soon after the news broke, I had hoped that in time more details would become available and we would get more clarity on what happened and how. We do now have more detail. But certainly not more clarity. The story about what happened in Abbottabad now lives in Spin-abad. Everyone – from governments, secret agencies, the media, the Twitterati, and your spinster aunt – are taking a spin. Many are taking multiple, sometimes contradictory, spins. Everyone except the Pakistan government.