The Abbottabad you don’t get to see - Sohaib Athar (the guy who accidentally live-tweeted the OBL raid)
With their American accents and attitudes, you will not be able to single out these three guys from the rest if they were sitting in a coffee shop in California (an airport queue is a different matter though). They have spent a significant part of their lives in the US or the UK, and probably came back to Pakistan to attend medical school – a cheap and logical option for many.
…They are just three of the many regular patrons of Coffity (or ‘the coffee shop’ as I tend to call it), the small coffee shop that I started in Abbottabad after craving for a few months for real espresso shots. Every few days, I am pleasantly surprised to see the diversity of the people that live in Abbottabad and visit the coffee shop.
Five days after the Operation Geronimo, I had a little chat with these students and asked them about the impact that the OBL incident has had on their lives. The response was the ‘nobody really cares’ that I already expected, but when I asked if any of the dozens of international journalists had approached them and covered their campus life (colleges and universities cover a significant portion of the Abbottabad real estate), the answer was a surprising ‘No’. To loosely quote them, the journalists were more interested in getting to the 600 odd anti-American protestors that gathered after the friday prayers to chant and shout their hearts out against the American invasions, than they were to cover the everyday life that was barely disrupted by this incident. These students also wanted to share their opinion about OBL and how their lives have (not) changed at all, but they were never given a chance to do that, despite being part of an important segment of the Abbottabad population – students. People may not know this, but Abbottabad is more an academic town than it is a military town – even the PMA is an ‘Academy’.
Read the whole article. This guy had not blogged for awhile, but apparently got interested again in his blog after all the attention that’s come his way recently.