There’s a really simple reason why we couldn’t have got Pakistan to arrest UBL. They would have tipped him off, then “raided” and discovered that there were some eccentric families living there but no intel, no UBL, nothing but mere eccentric recluses.

This estimate of what would have happened is grounded in the record of what already happened, time and again, every time we took Pakistan into the loop. Somewhere in the chain of command, some clerk fires off a text message to somewhere, or nods in a particular way to a chai-wallah, and there we are. Beans spilled.

As it is, right now Pakistan is cooperating-without-cooperating. They have scads of intel from that raid that we didn’t have time to pick up. And go figure. They won’t share it.